Where Does Brent Key Land In The New CBS Sports ACC Coaching Rankings?

We are now 50 days until Georgia Tech takes on Florida State in Dublin, Ireland to start the 2024 college football season. It is going to be a showdown between the defending ACC Champions and one of the ACC’s surprise teams from a year ago who will bring back a lot of returning starters from last year’s team.

It was a great debut season for Brent Key as the head coach of his alma mater. The Yellow Jackets did not have high expectations coming into the season, but they navigated a tough schedule to finish 7-6 and getting Georgia Tech to its first bowl game since 2018 and winning their first bowl game since 2016. There were some bumps in the road, but it was a fantastic debut for Key.

CBS Sports releases their coaching ranks for each conference at this time of the year and just put out their ACC Coaching Rankings for the 2024 season. Of the 17 coaches in the ACC, Key was ranked as the 13th best coach in the ACC, ahead of Justin Wilcox (Cal), Troy Taylor (Stanford), Tony Elliott (UVA), and Fran Brown (Syracuse).

Dabo Swinney took the top spot in the ACC Coaching Rankings this year with Mike Norvell, Dave Doeren, Jeff Brohm, and Dave Clawson rounding out the top five.

The ACC has a lot of good coaches and I don’t like to debate these kinds of rankings endlessly, but the two points of contention I have is that I don’t think Bill O’Brien (12th) or Manny Diaz (10th) should be above Key. O’Brien did well during his brief time at Penn State, especially considering the circumstances, but that was over a decade ago and he has not been a college head coach since. Diaz has been a head coach before while he was at Miami and he was mediocre during his time there and even lost to a terrible FIU team in his first season at Miami in 2019.

I would think that Key can shoot up these rankings if he manages to get back to a bowl game against this schedule. This is by far the toughest schedule in the ACC and one of the toughest in the country. Key has made big changes to the defensive coaching staff and brought in new defensive players through the transfer portal in hopes of turning around the Yellow Jackets biggest weakness from last season.

I fully expect to see Key climb these rankings and be in a higher position at this time next year.