Georgia Tech's football team plays at Bobby
Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field, the oldest on campus stadium among
Division I-A teams. Georgia Tech claims 4 national championships in
football: 1917 under the legendary coach John Heisman; 1928 under
William Alexander; 1952 under the famous Bobby Dodd; and, 1990 as
national co-champions with Colorado under Bobby Ross. The team is
currently coached by Chan Gailey, who is best known for his stints with
the Dallas Cowboys and the Pittsburgh Steelers. As of the end of the
2005 season, Tech is one of only six Div. I-A teams to have played in a
bowl game in each of the past nine years. Only 5 schools have longer
bowl streaks. Georgia Tech's winning percentage of .647 in bowl games is
the second best in college football among teams with 20 bowl
appearances. The Yellow Jackets are 23-13 in bowl games as of 2006.
During the Dodd glory years of the early 50s, Tech won six bowls in six
years, back when there were few bowls. In 1955, it was the first school
to win what were then considered the four major bowls: Rose, Orange,
Sugar, and Cotton. In 2005 Georgia Tech's football program was cited for
NCAA violations stemming from the participation of academically
ineligible players between the 1998-1999 and 2004-2005 academic years.
The program was put on NCAA probation, scholarship availabilities were
limited, and all victories and records were vacated for the time
ineligible players participated. In May 2006 the vacated records and
victories were restored following an appeal by the institute.
Tech's fight song "I'm a Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech" is known
worldwide. It was adapted from an old drinking song ("Son of a Gambolier"),
and embellished with trumpet flourishes by Frank Roman. In 1959, then VP
Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev sang it together when they had their
famous cold war confrontation in Moscow, to reduce the tension. Nixon
didn't know any Russian songs, but Khrushchev knew that one American
one. It was sung on the Ed Sullivan show. It was played in space.
Gregory Peck sang it while strumming a ukulele in The Man in the Gray
Flannel Suit. John Wayne whistled it in The High and the Mighty. It is
played after every GT score in a football game. The Edwin H. Morris &
Company (later acquired by Paul McCartney's company, MPL) obtained a
copyright in 1931.
There are multiple explanations for where how the term "Ramblin' Wrecks"
became associated with Georgia Tech. The most plausible is that many GT
engineering grads found jobs in the jungles of South America in the
early 1900s, where they concocted mechanical contraptions to tame the
jungle and get around. The first Ramblin' Wreck of record was a 1914
Ford Model T owned by Floyd Field, Tech's first dean of men. In 1961, a
gold and white Model A, known as the Ramblin' Wreck, led the team onto
the field for the first time, and it has done so at home games ever
since.[4] The annual "Ramblin' Wreck" parade at Homecoming displays some
really strange contraptions, judged for ingenuity.
Tech has seventeen varsity sports. In men's sports, in addition to
football, basketball, and baseball, there's golf, tennis, swimming &
diving, track & field, and cross country. For women, there's basketball,
softball, volleyball, tennis, swimming & diving, track & field, and
cross-country. Fourteen of these sports finished in the top 25 during
the 2004-5 school year.
