Georgia Tech Football Practice Notes and Quotes 10/25

ATLANTA- Georgia Tech interim football coach Brent Key spoke to the media on Tuesday ahead of his team's trip down to Tallahassee to face Florida State which the Jackets hold a regular season win-streak over. The big question of the day is the status of starting Yellow Jackets' quarterback Jeff Sims who left the Virginia game in the second quarter and has been dealing with a foot injury.

"Jeff sprained his foot in the game and it has nothing to do with what kept him out of the last few players of the Duke game, that was something different. He had an MRI and everything checked out fine with it so he is day-to-day moving forward," Key said.

With Sims out, the Jackets turned to Zach Gibson the Akron transfer who had a rough outing being sacked seven times. Key said that he expects Gibson to play but they will also give a look to true freshman Zach Pyron who moved to the third quarterback spot last week over Clemson transfer Taisun Phommachanh. Key was asked about Phommanach and Pyron's status going into the game as well as Gibson's.

"We will put the players that have the best four months I guess now of work and put them into the game. I don't know where Taisun will be, but Zach Pyron is a guy who is on the roster as well and I fully expect both Zachs will play in this football game, both Zach Gibson and Zach Pyron," Key said.

When evaluating Gibson's performance, Key said there are some things he can do when he has time to throw.

On Gibson, "he does have the ability to throw a good football and that was evident in some of the passes he made during the game. We've got to settle things down around him to allow him to be able to use his strengths. He has good football instincts and we've got to get that to show up in the game. You learn 10 times as many lessons in a football game (compared to practice) and that goes back to raising the level of practice to meet the game, but the game is different and that was really his first game to play here. He had a couple of plays the week before.

WIth Pyron, being a freshman and having the four games to play with a redshirt in play gives the Jackets an opportunity to use his skillset as well. Key said the big thing with Pyron is not giving him too much to do when he enters the game as he is still learning the speed of the college game and learning to master the offense.

"When you get into situations like that you can't overload a kid," Key said of Pyron. "You've got to do what their strengths are and what will help you move the football l in the game and that is what we are doing with the offense. We've got to be able to move the ball and put points on the board, bottom line," Key said. "To use both those guys (Gibson and Pyron) to utilize their strength they have within in the game, I think that will help us as an offense."

Key said the goal now is for the team to regroup after a disappointing loss and get ready for Florida State.

"No one is happy when you have a loss like that on Thursday night," Key said. "We talk about the ability to handle success, but the ability to handle failure is just as important. You have to be able to handle those things because you can't change one thing that is in the past, you really can't. We all know that. But you sure can learn from what's in the past and you can learn moving forward to put yourself in a better position to not have those things happen again regardless of who is in the game, and what the game is, it is everyone's job on the football team to step up and rise up and be able to play the best brand of football to put the team in a position to win football games."

Mental discipline is a big talking point for Key and carrying things over from the practice field to the game field and he said that toughness mentally is something that hurt them in the loss to Virginia last week and is something they need to improve upon if they want to win at Florida State this week.

"The big thing we talked about on Sunday was discipline and not necessarily from the standpoint of penalties or things like that but that is included. We talked about the discipline to prepare and practice and how important practice is. You have to have the discipline to carry that stuff over into the game and have confidence in the preparation you had and to have the discipline to play through the ups and downs of a football game," Key said. "So we are going to learn from those things."

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