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If you asked the average college football fan to name the first team they associate with the ACC, it’s hard to imagine many people would end up going with Georgia Tech. However, it would appear the program is making strides based on its fairly surprising status as the conference’s most-watched team this season.
The football team at Georgia Tech has a history stretching all the way back to the end of the 19th century, but it’s historically played second fiddle to another team in the Peach State that calls Athens home and has never come close to being the kind of perennial contenders the Bulldogs have been for a solid chunk of their existence.
Georgia Tech was a founding member of the SEC but opted to go independent in 1964 due to issues with the conference’s recruiting rules. It retained that status for close to 20 years before linking up with the ACC in 1983 and has maintained that affiliation ever since.
Since then, the Yellow Jackets have been able to win a handful of conference championships as well as the national title they split with Colorado in 1990, but they’ve been an afterthought more often than not in a conference where the likes of Florida State and Clemson have had a decisive edge on the rest of the competition over the past few decades.
In 2023, Georgia Tech took a step in the right direction by snapping a five-year bowl drought en route to finishing at 7-6 for its first winning season since 2018. They were once again left out of the ACC title conversation during the most recent campaign, but the team still went 7-6 for the second year in a row following a 35-27 loss to Vanderbilt in a Birmingham Bowl showdown that featured some very questionable calls that went against the Yellow Jackets.
That game was watched by 4.1 million people, and according to a tweet the school sent out on New Year’s Day, that led to Georgia Tech averaging 3.1 million viewers when its contest were televised nationally to earn the title of the ACC’s “most-watched team in 2024.”
An average of 4.1 million viewers watched the Birmingham Bowl on @espn, which pushed our average viewership for nationally televised games this season over 3 million.
With an average of 3.1 million viewers, we are the ACC’s most-watched team in 2024. #StingEm 🐝 pic.twitter.com/NQGBtYtMGG
— Georgia Tech Football (@GeorgiaTechFB) January 1, 2025
I wasn’t able to find the data the school used to come to that conclusion to see how other programs fared in comparison (although they were all well behind the country’s Top 10 and presumably didn’t post the same numbers in ACC Network showdowns), and it’s obviously worth noting Georgia Tech got some help from a few high-profile opponents.
They opened up the season with what at the time was a shocking upset against Florida State in Ireland during a Week 0 window that didn’t feature any other games, and they certainly benefitted from having Notre Dame, Miami, and Georgia on the schedule.
With that said, the fact that they were able to give the last two teams on that list a run for their money in showdowns that were much closer than virtually anyone anticipated certainly contributed to the ratings Georgia Tech was able to generate. You could dismiss the achievement as a statistical anomaly that hinges on somewhat cherry-picked data, but I think they deserve some credit.