TCU did beat Clemson at Clemson, which is something for Tech fans to consider.

And now we come to the great riddle of college football: How to determine by looking — and not always by looking — whether one good team is better than another good team. Only in this silly sport is appearance an issue: All the others sort things out with a tournament. Only big-time college football is a beauty pageant.

According to both the Associated Press and the USA Today polls, Georgia Tech is the best one-loss team in the land. It’s ranked No. 7, behind only six unbeatens. At least one of the remaining undefeateds — Florida or Alabama — will lose before Dec. 6, the day spots in the BCS bowls are (mis)allocated. Cincinnati probably will lose to West Virginia or Pittsburgh. TCU and Boise State probably won’t lose. Texas probably won’t, either.

But let’s say Texas does. Then voters in the pertinent polls — the AP version doesn’t factor into the BCS — will have to decide if an unbeaten TCU or …

Josh Nesbitt after scoring the game-winner in overtime. (AJC photo by Johnny Crawford)

The surprise wasn’t that Paul Johnson went for it on fourth-and-inches with Tampa on the line. The surprise was that, for half a minute, it seemed Paul Johnson wasn’t going for it on fourth-and-1 with Tampa on the line.

Down three points in overtime, ball nuzzling the 5:  What else would PJ do? “If we can’t get half a yard,” he said, “we don’t deserve to win.”

First Georgia Tech faked everyone out. The Jackets lined up as if to run a play but did the ol’ draw-’em-offside bit to no avail. They called timeout and trotted to the sideline, and your first thought was, “PJ just chickened out.” But PJ doesn’t chicken out. He talks the talk and goes on fourth down.

“If you ask the kids to play to win,” he said, “you’ve got to play to win.”

He’d asked his quarterback what he thought, and Josh Nesbitt, who’s as bold as his coach, said: “I can make it.” And PJ said: “I know you can.” And then Nesbitt …

Watching the Deacs celebrate felt awful at the time, but that was then. And now is better.

Seven days after Reggie Ball called a loss (his fourth) to Georgia “just another game, dog,” he played a dog of a game in Jacksonville. He threw 29 passes. He completed nine. He threw two interceptions. His team didn’t score a touchdown and lost the ACC championship game to Wake Forest 9-6.

We mention because Georgia Tech again plays Wake Forest today, and pretty much everything has changed. Ball is gone. (Indeed, he didn’t play another game for Tech after the Wake loss.) Chan Gailey, who arrived in Jacksonville calling it “a business trip,” was given the sack not quite a year later. And the Jackets are again poised to return to the ACC title game. And this time they’ll win.

In the cold light of hindsight, those two egregegious losses were the best thing that ever happened to Tech. There was a ceiling on Gailey’s achievements, and even if the Jackets had won the 2006 conference …

Here's D-Hall, trying not to call attention to himself.

He was overrated and overstated, but he still made the Pro Bowl and made some plays. Which leads us to today’s fanciful question, directed toward Falcons fans:

Were DeAngelo Hall available, would you take him back?

I ask because the Falcons, as you’ve observed, aren’t aswarm  in cornerbacks. Brian Williams is out and Tye Hill didn’t last long in his delayed debut, leaving with cramps, and Chris Houston has this thing about not turning to play the ball and Brent Grimes is 5-foot-3. (OK, I exaggerate about that last part. Grimes is taller than 5-3. And he can, as we saw in the Superdome, really jump.)

D-Hall comes to the Dome for Sunday’s game as a Redskin, having worked his way out of Oakland in record time last season. (And if you can’t stick with the Raiders, that’s about as bad a sign as there is.) And he popped up in the pregame blather, as D-Hall was wont to do, by saying Falcons GM Thomas Dimitroff “lied to me …

He started as a starter. Then he became a championship closer.

I’m just throwing it out there, OK? So don’t all scream at once. (If you do choose to scream, please take turns.) So here goes:

With the re-signing of Tim Hudson, the Braves have six starting pitchers under contract for 2010. The baseball truism holds that a team can never have too much pitching, but this one just might. The obvious solution would be to make Kenshin Kawakami a reliever, except for a couple of things: He makes too much money (around $8 million) to slot into middle relief and he generates too many baserunners to close. So …. what about this?

Tommy Hanson as closer.

I know, I know. Would any organization in its right mind redeploy its best pitching prospect in a generation so soon? And the answer would ordinarily be a resounding “Heck, no!’ Except that one organization has done pretty well with a redeployed starter as its closer.

The organization: The Boston Red Sox. The starter-turned-closer: …

PJ's adjustments haven't included sending this guy in motion -- yet. (Brant Sanderlin, AJC)

It was the night of Oct. 3. Georgia Tech was playing Mississippi State in Starkville. With 9:21 remaining in the fourth quarter, the Jackets punted.

I mention this for a reason. That was more than a calendar month ago, and the Jackets haven’t punted in a second half since. Not at Florida State. Not against Virginia Tech. Not at Virginia. Not at Vandy.

Eight quarters of football. Not one second-half punt. And you know what this says?

Paul Johnson is the archduke of adjustments.

We hear announcers talking about them all the time. We hear Erin Andrews and her sideline-reporting ilk ask, “Coach, what adjustments will you make at halftime?” Ninety-five percent of the time coaches wind up doing the same thing in the second half as they did in the first.

Not PJ. He tweaks. He brings a guy in motion from a different angle. He splits a guy a tad wider. He runs the same stuff, only slightly …

"Ball's in your court, Coach." (AJC photo by Brant Sanderlin)

Damon Evans keeps saying he has the utmost confidence in Mark Richt. “Our head coach is very good at what he does,” Evans told esteemed colleague Tim Tucker on Wednesday. But Richt’s boss also keeps saying, in a subtle yet unmistakable way, that he and Georgia fans are right to expect better.

Which would not seem to indicate that the AD has the utmost confidence in, say, Willie Martinez.

Twice now Evans has hit the proper notes. (He did it first in an e-mail to this correspondent last month, when he wrote he had “some concerns about where we are at this point of the season.”) Twice he has expressed full support for Richt, and twice he has said he expects the coach to take corrective measures.

Translation: I’m with you, Coach, but I also want action.

Without saying exactly what Georgia fans want to hear, Evans has nonetheless made it clear he feels their pain. (Evans to Tucker: “They are passionate about the …

Matty Ice on a night that turned out not so nice. (Michael DeMocker/Times-Picayune)

We begin by stipulating that Matt Ryan established a ridiculously high standard in a ridiculously short time. He was the greatest rookie quarterback the NFL has seen — better than Marino, better than Big Ben — and there seems no reason he won’t develop into a truly great quarterback soon. But here I borrow a favorite Ryan expression: “That said … ”

That said, he hasn’t been quite as good in Year 2 as in Year 1. Perhaps it’s because the Falcons have played a wicked schedule — the first soft game comes Sunday against Washington — but his numbers are down in virtually every category. And it isn’t just the numbers. For reasons unclear, Matty Ice doesn’t seem as cool.

After the Falcons lost in New Orleans, I asked Thomas Dimitroff, whose drafting of Ryan in 2008 changed the course of this franchise, if he’s concerned. “Absolutely not,” the GM said. “Defenses have been giving him different looks. But …

Could a proud Georgia program wind up playing in the booby prize of bowls?

The scariest word in college football has been pinned to the Georgia Bulldogs. That word: Shreveport.

To play in the Independence Bowl is the worst of all fates, worse even than playing in no bowl at all. Because a team has to pretend to be excited about a trip to Shreveport, whereas a bowl-less team can just slink off under cover of winter. And now we turn to ESPN’s bowl projections and we see Bruce Feldman’s chilling forecast:

AdvoCare V100 Independence Bowl: Georgia vs. Missouri. Yikes.

(Then again, Georgia could wear its black helmets, which would make things confusing. Because Missouri also wears black helmets.)

(Oh, and for those among us who have never heard of AdvoCare — I hadn’t — here’s its Web site.)

Serving as the Shana Alexander to Feldman’s James Kilpatrick, esteemed former colleague Mark Schlabach sees the Bulldogs as bound for Nashville and the Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl against …

The Saints' Jabari Greer takes the first of Matt Ryan's INTs to the house. (AP photo)

New Orleans – They showed us something. They showed the Saints something. They showed the nation something. But in the end they showed us both what they are and what they are not.

The Falcons are a pretty good football team. But they aren’t so good that they can throw two egregious interceptions on the road against the NFL’s best team and hope to win. They proved Monday night they can still run the ball and actually play a little defense, but they fell short of a famous upset because the famous Matt Ryan twice threw the ball to the wrong team at the absolute wrong moment.

And now, for all the skill and heart on display here, a sobering notion rears its head: What if Matty Ice isn’t quite as good as we thought he was? What if he’s a good NFL quarterback but not a great in the making? Will that be enough to lift this franchise on high? It wasn’t enough in this wild and careening game.

The first …