If you read The Economist with any regularity, you'll know that we rip off their caption style every day. (Our all-time favorite: a photo of a paralyzed George Wallace in a wheel chair reading a newspaper with an obviously distraught look on his face. The caption: "Too late for some?" The topic: stem cell research that possibly regrew spinal tissue and thus reversed paralysis. The cruelty was positively inspiring...)
Like The Economist, we also sometimes write about Kyrgyzstan and other places of no import to anyone at all simply because we can. In our case, we sometimes mention the Kyrgyzstan of college football, Georgia Tech, where a slow-motion coup against former AD Dave Braine has resulted in the least exciting job hunt ever for a new AD, who according to a lot of sources could be ESPN analyst and former Tech coach and player Bill Curry.
Mark Bradley writes that hiring Curry--who's never actually managed an athletic program before--only sounds good to the ears of "the old guard" at Tech, who ask silly questions like the one booster Taz Johnson asked about ol' 7-5 (Chan Gailey):
"Will people continue to pay for mediocrity?"
Our read as someone who knows this much (holding index finger and thumb apart about an inch) about Tech president Wayne Clough: he doesn't give a disproportionate shit about the football program. Read that carefully, since it doesn't say that Clough's entirely deaf to the demands of alumni screaming for a better team. Clough's clearly done an outstanding job at Tech: record alumni contributions, a campus rapidly metastasizing across the interstate into Midtown, ever-improving academics and high-profile projects. But football's not the priority and won't be as long as he's around, which means more tapioca pudding for all with another few years of Gaileyball on the Flats despite a stadium expansion and high-profile scheduling.
Yet Clough may just cave and hire Curry over more qualified candidates simply to shut up an increasingly vocal segment of alumni, the ones Bradley refers to as "the old guard" in his column. If that happens, you can set the wheels in motion for the end of the Gailey era at Tech, since ADs typically like to bring in their guy as head coach. If not, it's anyone's guess how long the vanilla terror that is Gailey will reign at the North Avenue Trade School; just don't expect Clough, who's too busy doing crazy things like shaking money from alums' pockets and nailing down large government grants and contracts for research, to care all that much about the disgrace of a 7-5 season. This will not happen.
And we promise, that's all the news you'll hear out of Kyrgyzstan for a while.
What Georgia Tech is to college football, Kyrgyzstan is to the world.