Harry Lyles Jr., ESPN Staff WriterSep 1, 2023, 08:06 AM ET
ATLANTA — GEORGIA TECH football coach Brent Key’s office looks out onto Bobby Dodd Stadium, with part of the Atlanta skyline in view as well. One of the buildings visible is the old Equitable building, now owned and operated by Georgia’s Own Credit Union, which has a 174-foot long digital sign around the top.
With that as the backdrop, Key was asked recently if the success of two-time defending national champion Georgia gives him extra motivation to right the ship for the Yellow Jackets.
“Kirby [Smart has] done an unbelievable job,” Key said of Georgia’s head coach. “He’s done a great job. I give him all the credit in the world. But we’ve known each other since college. And I respect him as a coach, I respect him as a man, and I respect the job he’s done. For me to worry about what goes on down there, I got way too much to do here to worry about that.”
He continued, “Now, when I walked in this office building [in January] of last year, and it was dark out, Georgia’s Own building right there said, ‘Congrats, Go Dawgs!’ Did that piss me off? Damn right it did.
“Did I call [strength coach] A.J. Artis up on the phone and tell him I want every single kid on our football team, when they’re done with workouts to come outside and do stadiums to the very top of the stadium and stare at it? You damn right I did.
“But to worry about what’s going on over there? I don’t have time to do that.”
THIS IS THE job Key has always wanted. When he was bumped up from offensive line coach to interim head coach after Geoff Collins’ firing four games into last season, Key told ESPN he wasn’t acting like it was a temporary seat at the table. His instincts were correct, and the interim tag was removed after the Yellow Jackets went 4-4 to close the campaign.
While Key, who played at Georgia Tech from 1997 to 2000, might have wanted the job, it clearly has its challenges. Tech hasn’t made a bowl game since 2018, its longest drought since 1992-1996. Collins, who was hired to replace Paul Johnson, never won more than three games during his three-plus-year tenure. In trying to attract talent, the school contends with some potential roadblocks, including higher academic standards than many big-time programs and an urban campus.
Meanwhile, the Yellow Jackets’ in-state rival roughly 80 miles to the east is aiming to become the first team to pull off a national title three-peat in almost 90 years and has won 18 of the past 21 meetings between the teams, including the last three by a combined score of 134-21.
After his playing days, Key was a graduate assistant at Tech for two years before a stop at Western Carolina, then a decade at UCF with his old head coach, George O’Leary. He spent 2016 through 2018 at Alabama before he returned to Atlanta as an assistant in 2019. He’s fully aware of the perceived complications of the job, and said he doesn’t buy into them.
“People say, ‘[The] school is hard, you have to take calculus.’ Look, I graduated but I never took one calc class in my life. So I’m like, what are you talking about? I didn’t take calculus.
“Now, I failed the hell out of chemistry.
“Other people talk about being in Atlanta — look, Atlanta made me who I am. Atlanta is an unbelievable city, the culture, the diversity, the things you learn, it creates a little bit of an edge to you.”
One of Key’s biggest priorities in trying to turn things around is to make sure his team has an identity. He has a spreadsheet mapping out every hour of every day from the start of camp to the Georgia game on Nov. 25 in Atlanta.
For every day through camp, the top of every sheet had a goal of establishing the identity of the team.
“That’s what this camp has been about,” he said. “And people talk about playing to a standard and our standard. We have no standard. There’s none. We have to create it. Nick Saban didn’t have a standard in 2006 at Alabama, he had his personal standard. You have to create those things.
“So what is our identity? We will be disciplined, we’re going to be tough as hell. This team is committed to themselves, number one, and they’re committed to this football team. And then when the number is called, we’ve got to execute.
“You got to expect good things to happen as opposed to bad things. It’s one thing to say, ‘Well, if you believe it, you say it, we’re gonna talk it into reality.’ Yeah, you got to believe, but you got to work your ass off in between. … That’s what I want our team to be. They say that there’s no greater compliment than a football team to take on the identity of the head football coach. That’s what I want.”
KEY ISN’T THE only new coach trying to restore old glory at Georgia Tech. Damon Stoudamire was hired in March to shape the men’s basketball program, and his mission — and approach — is similar to his football counterpart’s.
Stoudamire played at Arizona under the legendary Lute Olson and went on to play 13 seasons in the NBA, most notably with the Portland Trail Blazers. He came to Atlanta after being an assistant coach with the Boston Celtics. This is his second gig as a college head coach, having been at Pacific from 2016 until 2021.
Georgia Tech had a basketball team for many years, but Bobby Cremins turned it into a program in the 1980s and accumulated 354 wins over 19 seasons in Atlanta. The success continued to some degree under Paul Hewitt, who took the Yellow Jackets to a Final Four in 2004.
But since Hewitt’s departure, Tech has made just one NCAA tournament appearance after a surprising ACC tournament championship in 2021.
Like Key, Stoudamire talked about wanting to build a standard, which he said begins with toughness.
“I want to be the physically and mentally tougher team,” Stoudamire said. “I just think that wins games. We could talk about X’s and O’s and all those different things. But those two things there, and then the relationship part of it. I’m big on customer service, that’s what I like to call it. I just think that if you don’t have relationships with your players, you don’t have relationships in the workspace and different things, you can’t win.
“I’ve never really wanted to look at coaching from a coaching standpoint because I’m big on the relationship part of it, and I think if a player feels good, he plays good.
“So what does that mean? If a guy misses three in a row and he looks over, and the bench is like, ‘Keep shooting, keep shooting.’ I don’t react, I try not to at least, because I don’t want anybody to play on how they see me react. I want them to understand that Coach is calm, poised and staying in the moment.”
As far as reenergizing the fan base, Stoudamire believes in the only solution known to work anywhere and everywhere.
“I just think you got to win,” Stoudamire said. “We can get gimmicky, we can do different things, but I think you got to win. And I think people buy in. I just think it’s pretty simple.”
THE CHANGES AT Georgia Tech aren’t limited to the football and men’s basketball coaches. On the south end of Bobby Dodd Stadium is the Wardlaw Center, which itself is representative of the athletic department’s fresh start.
Georgia Tech’s athletic staff is moving into the building, which despite being part of the stadium for decades was occupied by the Institute Development and Institute Communications departments.
Settling into a new office is athletic director J. Batt, himself only about 10 months into the job. He replaced Todd Stansbury, who was AD from 2016 until his firing in 2022.
There are still some frames that need to go up on the walls in Batt’s office, which overlooks the field at Bobby Dodd Stadium. His most prized one, given to him by Homer Rice, lists the original qualifications of the award named for Rice, given annually to an athletic director who has made a significant impact on their profession and intercollegiate athletics.
Batt came to Atlanta from Alabama, where he had been since 2017, establishing himself as one of the country’s top fundraisers as executive deputy director of athletics, chief operating officer and chief revenue officer. But he’s familiar with ACC athletics. He grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia, and was a goalie for the North Carolina soccer team, helping win a national title in 2001. He also worked at Maryland as the school transitioned from the ACC to the Big Ten.
Georgia Tech is Batt’s first swing as an AD, and returning to the ACC was an immediate draw for him. But Batt saw the potential for success because of institutional alignment, the history of Georgia Tech, “and then a group of alums and fans that care.”
“[President Angel Cabrera] stepped forward and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to make athletics as good as the academics of this institution.’ And that was truly a huge part of it for me,” Batt said. “This brand, this program — four national championships, I mean, who else has Coach of the Year Bobby Dodd, Assistant of the Year [Frank] Broyles, AD of the Year [Homer] Rice, Player of the Year [John] Heisman,” referencing the namesakes of national awards who have Georgia Tech ties. “There’s no other program with that incredible tradition.”
But the opportunity boils down to a top-down commitment to athletics, which appears to give Batt — who has seen college programs run at the highest level in Tuscaloosa — a sense that he can be the one to fix Georgia Tech.
“This guy’s walking the walk,” Batt said of Cabrera. “He is literally providing resources, he’s providing access. I mean, look at this building. This is a building that’s been in the football stadium for 30 years, athletics has never occupied it. Truly taking a step forward, and prioritizing athletics. Moving us forward with our $85 million Student-Athlete Performance Center. That project is on a fast track to get done as soon as we possibly can.”
The need for a fresh start, both on his team and in the athletic department as a whole, and the importance of the financial commitment was echoed by Key.
“That’s no different than the offensive line room needing an O-line coach that was completely different than I was,” he said. “So that the line walked in every day and it was new, it was different.
“Because when the interim has become the head coach, I’m sure there’s that fear of, ‘Well, what if some of it is the same? What is going to be different?’ … Thankfully, the alignment with J and Dr. Cabrera has allowed a lot of these things to take place, knowing that those things matter.”
One of those things is the revamped football facility.
“People have a vision of what Georgia Tech is,” Key said. “They think engineers and architects and numbers and all this nerdy stuff, and old, and the industrial age of all those things. I said, ‘Well, guess what?’
“Imagine the old locomotive going through the tunnel and it busts out the other side, and it’s one of those bullet trains coming out going the speed of sound. That’s my vision of what Georgia Tech was and is. People walk in here, I don’t want to think the old things. I want it to look like an Apple store.”
“We’re looking for partners,” he said. “You know, stepping in as the new AD to Georgia Tech, the president stepped forward and linked arms with me and said, ‘Hey, we’re building this back.’ I think it had us looking for people that were going to build it with us.
“Brent and Damon, no strangers to hard work, right? These guys are tremendous competitors with tremendous passion to build it back. And so I was looking for a partner and both of those coaching hires, and certainly found it in both.”
With the new beginnings, there’s a sense around Atlanta that better days are ahead. Rather than worry about what has gone wrong, the focus is on what can be done right given everything Batt, Key and Stoudamire believe Georgia Tech has to offer.
“Since I’ve been here, we talked about alignment,” Stoudamire said. “I’ve always preached that. I think football, basketball, with the president and AD, I think all that aligns. I’ve always had a saying when one thing wins, everybody wins. And I think with football and basketball, what a tremendous opportunity that we all have here.”
Key has a notebook that he started back in 2009 in which he wrote down everything he wanted as a head coach. “One thing I never would have planned on was having a boss like J. Batt,” Key said. “He’s amazing.”
“To have a guy that’s just as driven, to have a guy that does his job like football coaches do their job. It could be 9 or 9:30 at night, and you’re here doing work, and to have an administrator just pop in and say, ‘Hey,’ because they’re working, too.
“To know what that position looks like at the most successful program in the history of college football, and they know what the most successful coach looks like, and how he goes about his business, but also to be able to allow those things to occur, and then give the resources and to help those things. And if the resources aren’t there, he gets out on the street and gets things done.
“A lot of people come up with a lot of ideas and sayings and all this kind of crap. He gets things done. He works. And when your boss is working that hard, it keeps you rolling now.
A civil lawsuit accusing BYU quarterback Jake Retzlaff of rape has been dismissed, according to court records.
The parties jointly agreed to dismiss with prejudice, ending the case which was filed last month. None of the parties was immediately available for comment.
Retzlaff now plans to transfer from BYU as he faces a possible seven-game suspension for violating the school’s honor code by admitting to premarital sex during the legal proceedings, sources told ESPN. He has begun informing staff and teammates of his intention to leave, sources said.
Retzlaff had been working out with the squad and participating in summer workouts and practices. The team is on break until July 7.
The BYU staff has been ramping up the preparation of the three backup quarterbacks — McCae Hillstead, Treyson Bourguet and Bear Bachmeier — in anticipation that Retzlaff might not be available.
The woman alleged Retzlaff raped, strangled and bit her in November 2023. In a response to that lawsuit filed Friday, a lawyer representing Retzlaff denied those allegations but said Retzlaff had consensual sex with the woman.
The response indicated Retzlaff and the woman traded lighthearted text messages for months after the encounter and characterized the lawsuit as an extortion attempt based on the idea that Retzlaff developed into an NFL prospect roughly a year later.
The lawsuit described the encounter much differently.
Both the complaint and the response agree that Retzlaff and the woman connected through social media, which led to her visiting Retzlaff’s apartment to play video games on or around Nov. 22, 2023. The woman arrived with a friend, and friends and teammates of Retzlaff also were present.
Later that evening, the woman’s friend left, after which Retzlaff and the woman started watching a movie and began to kiss, the lawsuit states. While “Retzlaff began escalating the situation,” the suit says, “Jane Doe A.G. tried to de-escalate the situation and attempted to slow things down, trying to pull away, and saying ‘wait.’ She did not want to do anything sexual with him.”
The lawsuit says the woman told Retzlaff “no” and “wait, stop,” but he continued to force himself on her. After she tried to get up out of the bed, the lawsuit alleges, in graphic detail, that Retzlaff put his hands around her neck and proceeded to rape her.
A few days later, the woman visited a hospital, where a rape kit was performed and pictures of her injuries were taken. The lawsuit says she was connected with Provo, Utah, police but did not initially share Retzlaff’s name.
No criminal charges have been filed against Retzlaff.
After the lawsuit was filed, BYU issued a statement, saying: “The university takes any allegation very seriously, following all processes and guidelines mandated by Title IX. Due to federal and university privacy laws and practices for students, the university will not be able to provide additional comment.”
Retzlaff is not the first high-profile BYU athlete who faced a lengthy suspension for an honor code violation related to premarital sex. In 2011, basketball player Brandon Davies was dismissed from the team — which at the time was 27-2 and ranked No. 3 in the country — and suspended from school. He was reinstated that fall. In 1999, running back Reno Mahe was suspended from school and forced to leave the football team. He transferred to a junior college and later reenrolled at BYU.
Retzlaff, who has graduated from BYU, is expected to enter his name in the transfer portal in the coming days. He started 13 games for the Cougars in 2024, his first year as the starter, leading the team to an 11-2 record. He passed for 2,947 yards and 20 touchdowns with 12 interceptions.
Texas State has officially joined the Pac-12, the conference announced Monday, becoming the league’s ninth member ahead of its relaunch in 2026.
“We are extremely excited to welcome Texas State as a foundational member of the new Pac-12,” commissioner Teresa Gould said in a statement. “It is a new day in college sports and the most opportune time to launch a new league that is positioned to succeed in today’s landscape with student-athletes in mind.”
Texas State’s board of regents voted to authorize a $5 million buyout to the Sun Belt Conference early Monday. The Bobcats will remain in the Sun Belt through the 2025-26 season before joining the Pac-12 in all sports for the 2026-27 school year.
The Pac-12 needed to reach eight football-playing schools to meet the NCAA minimum for an FBS conference prior to the 2026 season.
Texas State president Kelly Damphousse called the move “a historic moment” for the university.
“Joining the Pac-12 is more than an athletic move — it is a declaration of our rising national profile, our commitment to excellence, and our readiness to compete and collaborate with some of the most respected institutions in the country,” Damphousse said.
Athletic director Don Coryell echoed that sentiment, calling the opportunity “a new era” for Texas State, which has been in the Sun Belt since 2013 after making its FBS debut with one season in the WAC in 2012.
“This historic moment belongs to our coaches, staff, student-athletes, fans, alumni and students,” Coryell said. “As the Pac-12’s flagship school in Texas, we proudly embrace the opportunity and responsibility that comes with it.”
The long-awaited announcement comes on the heels of the Pac-12’s announcement last week that it had finalized a five-year agreement with CBS for a portion of the conference’s football and men’s basketball media rights, including both sports’ championship game. Additional media partners are expected to be announced in the coming weeks.
Texas State is located in San Marcos, which is only about 35 miles south of the University of Texas in Austin. Texas State has more than 40,000 students, with one of the 25 largest undergraduate enrollments among public universities in the U.S.
Eli Lederman covers college football and recruiting for ESPN.com. He joined ESPN in 2024 after covering the University of Oklahoma for Sellout Crowd and the Tulsa World.
Alabama’s 2026 recruiting class landed another significant late-June recruiting boost Saturday when four-star defender Xavier Griffin, ESPN’s No. 3 outside linebacker, announced his commitment to the Crimson Tide over Florida State, Ohio State and Texas.
Griffin, a versatile, 6-foot-4, 205-pound prospect from Gainesville, Georgia, is the No. 30 overall recruit in the 2026 ESPN 300. A former longtime USC commit, Griffin took official visits with each of his finalists in June. He now stands as the top-ranked prospect among 14 commits in Alabama’s incoming class, joining days after the program secured top 300 pledges from running back Ezavier Crowell (No. 31 overall) and tight end Mack Sutter (No. 138) on Thursday night.
Griffin told ESPN that the Crimson Tide’s pedigree and vision laid out by Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer and outside linebackers coach Christian Robinson were driving factors in his decision.
“Growing up, just seeing them, all the draft picks and stuff that they’ve had — all the guys they’ve put in the league — it speaks for itself,” Griffin said. “They have history and they’re really clear about what they’re trying to build with this new staff.”
A physical defender capable of dropping into coverage, Griffin has cemented his status as one the nation’s top linebackers at Gainesville (Georgia) High School, where he’s recorded 97 total tackles and 21 sacks across his sophomore and junior seasons.
He initially committed to USC last July and remained one of the Trojans’ top prospects over next 10 months before Griffin pulled his pledge from the program on May 14. Sources told ESPN at the time that Griffin’s decommitment stemmed from his intention to schedule official visits with programs this spring, bucking against USC’s policy against committed players taking official trips to other campuses.
Upon reopening his recruitment, Griffin locked in official visits with Alabama, Florida State, Ohio State and Texas for this month, closing with a trip to the Crimson Tide from June 20-22. Despite his lengthy USC pledge, Griffin told ESPN that no program recruited him more actively than Alabama across the past two years, led by Robinson, the program’s second-year assistant.
“He’s been one of the most consistent with me throughout my whole process,” Griffin said. “He’s just a really, really good guy.”
The highest-ranked of seven ESPN 300 pledges bound for Alabama in 2026, Griffin now leads an increasingly talented Crimson Tide defensive class forming in the current cycle.
Alongside Griffin, Alabama holds commitments from top-10 cornerbacks Jorden Edmonds (No. 38 overall) and Zyan Gibson (No. 65) in 2026. Defensive end Jamarion Matthews, Griffin’s teammate at Gainesville High School and ESPN’s No. 92 overall recruit, has been pledged to the Crimson Tide since February, and Alabama’s latest defensive class could get even deeper over the next month as priority targets including top-60 prospects Jireh Edwards, Anthony Jones and Nolan Wilson approach the final stages of their recruiting processes.