Brett Davis-Imagn Images
The football team at Georgia Tech has been trending in the right direction over the past couple of seasons, but the Yellow Jackets still have plenty of room for improvement. However, that didn’t prevent them from making the bold decision to commission rings in celebration of a 2024 campaign where they finished with a 7-6 record.
The ACC is home to a number of teams that have historically been an afterthought when it comes to their ability to hang on the gridiron, and Georgia Tech certainly falls under that umbrella.
The Yellow Jackets have had a handful of impressive seasons over the past few decades, but they’ve been a largely mediocre program that’s struggled to consistently string together notably successful campaigns despite making a bowl more often than not since the start of the new millennium.
Georgia Tech has managed to right the ship a bit since Brent Key took over as their head coach after Geoff Collins was fired midway through his fourth season. In 2023, they snapped a five-year bowl drought after going 7-6 during his first full year at the helm and posted the same record last season while losing to Vanderbilt in the Birmingham Bowl.
There were more than a few bright spots, including a 5-0 record at home, a victory over a Miami team that was ranked #4 at the time, and the marathon showdown with #7 Georgia where the Bulldogs had to stage a fourth-quarter rally before warding off the upset in a contest that needed eight overtime periods to be decided.
With that said, it’s not really the kind of season you’d think a team would go out of its way to commemorate with a ring, but on Tuesday, we learned Georgia Tech decided to do exactly that by commissioning some bling to commemorate their berth in the bowl they weren’t even able to win.
Summer Ice 🥶 #StingEm🐝 pic.twitter.com/vxYsEOnQ4G
— Georgia Tech Football (@GeorgiaTechFB) May 27, 2025
Now, it’s obviously worth noting Georgia Tech isn’t the first school to go this route after losing a bowl game. For example, Kentucky did the same in 2016 and Virginia Tech followed suit in 2018.
However, the development has still been greeted with plenty of mockery from college football fans thanks in no small part to a fairly egregious detail commemorating their win over Florida State in Dublin to open the season; the Seminoles may have been #10 at the time, but they were quickly exposed as historic frauds who finished a 2-10.
At the end of the day, I can’t necessarily fault the Yellow Jackets for wanting to give their players a keepsake, but this is one of those college football traditions that probably deserves some reconsideration.