Where does Brent Key land in the new CBS Sports ACC Coaches Rankings?

There are now 50 days until Georgia Tech takes on Florida State in Dublin, Ireland to kick off the 2024 college football season. It will be a matchup between the defending ACC champions and one of the ACC’s surprise teams from a year ago, which will bring back many 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 didn’t have high expectations coming into the season, but they navigated a tough schedule to finish 7-6 and bring Georgia Tech to its first bowl game of 2018 and win their first bowl game since 2016. There were some bumps in the game. road, but it was a fantastic debut for Key.

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

Dabo Swinney topped 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 are that I don’t think Bill O’Brien (12th) or Manny Diaz ( 10th) should be above the Key. O’Brien did well during his short time at Penn State, especially considering the circumstances, but that was over a decade ago and he hasn’t been a college head coach since. Diaz was a head coach before while at Miami and 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 Key can increase those rankings if he can get back to a bowl game with this program. This is by far the toughest schedule in the ACC and one of the toughest in the country. Key has made major changes to the defensive coaching staff and brought in new defensive players through the transfer window in hopes of fixing the yellow shirts’ biggest weakness from last season.

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