RTI)
Next season, Tennessee football travels to Atlanta to play Georgia Tech at Bobby Dodd Stadium. The following year, the Yellow Jackets will return the trip to Knoxville to play the Vols inside Neyland Stadium. This has the makings of a pair of classics with Josh Heupel providing long-awaited stability to UT and Brent Key helping bring Georgia Tech back to relevance.
Well, with the job Key has done in recent years, his name is starting to pop up on any hotboard you find. Whether it’s the opening up north at Penn State or an SEC job such as Auburn, LSU or Florida, there seems to be interest in bringing him to a more traditional contender.
Despite this, Key shut down these rumors. According to Kelly Quinlan of Rivals/On3, he had this to say on the subject:
“Since I came back here, since I was named the head coach here, outside of the time with my family, every waking second of my life has gone towards building this program to get to the point that it is right now,” Key said. “So that in turn, we can continue three years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, continue to elevate this place to be in that conversation. Not to be in there for two or three weeks, but to be a consistent team, not when you lose one game, have people say the story book is over. Nah, it is just the beginning. Slice me open and see what colors I bleed.”
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Key has deep ties to the Georgia Tech program prior to his time as head coach. From 1997-2000, he was a right guard for the Yellow Jackets. From 2001-02, he served as a graduate assistant.
He would spend one year as an assistant at Western Carolina before a decade at Central Florida. By the end of that tenure with UCF, he was as high as a combination of associate head coach, offensive coordinator, offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator all at once.
In 2016, he took a job at Alabama as an offensive line coach, where he won a national title. In 2019, he left to return to Georgia Tech in the same role, plus responsibilities as the associate head coach under Geoff Collins. When Collins was fired, Key was named interim coach and went 4-4 in that span.
After that stretch, he was named the full-time head coach of his alma mater. He went 7-6 in both 2023 and 2024, but has the Yellow Jackets at 8-1 (5-1 ACC) in his third full year on the job. His three remaining games are ACC bouts with Boston College and Pitt before a possible win-and-in game against Georgia in Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
