Will it work?

The question is an endless source of both amusement and irritation for Paul Johnson. In the soundtrack of the new Georgia Tech football coach's life, it is the refrain that simply won't stop playing in his head.

Will it work? The not-so-subtle implication from critics is that his offensive system isn't major college conference-worthy. Sure, his triple-option worked fine at Division I-AA Georgia Southern and a military school such as Navy, but can it work in the Atlantic Coast Conference?

"I get a kick out of when people ask, 'Will this work on this level?' " Johnson said. "Are we playing in the NFC East? Last time I looked, the last six years at Navy we were playing Division I teams. We played five or six teams from the ACC and we played Notre Dame every year; we played Rutgers. So I don't think it's a question of fundamentally will it work."

Yet still the question persists. When the Yellow Jackets take the field at Bobby Dodd Stadium on Thursday night in their season opener against Jacksonville State, the doubters will be ready to pounce if it falls flat or argue that it still hasn't faced a true major test if it excels.

Johnson has heard it all for so long he has lost interest in arguing the merits of a system that earned him four national championship rings at Georgia Southern and five consecutive bowl appearances at previously woeful Navy.

"It's been pretty good for a lot of years," Johnson said of the offense he first introduced when he was the offensive coordinator in Statesboro in 1985. "That's why I laugh when I hear people say, 'Can it work?' It ain't like we've been doing something that's never been done. We've been doing it for 20 years, and it's worked for three different schools pretty good.

"There are some people that any time you do anything that's just a little bit different they say it's not gonna work. I'm fully prepared for the first time we go out there and score 10 points, there'll be a headline that says 'System won't work.' "

Rest assured, that is a phrase that will not come out of the mouths of the coaches now faced with dealing with it on an annual basis in the ACC.

"I wish he weren't there," Clemson coach Tommy Bowden said of Johnson coming to Georgia Tech. "I wish he had chosen someone else. I really do. Georgia Tech has me scared because they're really, really different to anything we have in this conference or the SEC."

Wake Forest's Jim Grobe agrees: "I think he'll be great, and I think he'll drive people crazy. He'll certainly keep some defensive coordinators up at night."

His rival coaches respect the ability of Johnson's offense and the skill with which his teams run it. Now it's up to Johnson and Georgia Tech to prove what he now dubs his "option-based spread" offense can add BCS-caliber to its history of accomplishments and prove the skeptics wrong.

"Maybe they're right, and maybe I'm wrong," he said. "We'll see. That's why they play the games."

Johnson didn't play college football when he attended Western Carolina University. After he graduated with a degree in physical education in 1979, he went back to his high school in Avery County, N.C., looking for a job. His former prep coach, Elmer Aldridge, hired him to be offensive coordinator.

"Evidently he thought I could do it and I said OK," Johnson said. "We ran the same system (wishbone) as when I played, so I just kind of got plugged into it."

After a couple of years doing that and two more serving in the same capacity at Lees-McRae Junior College, Johnson was hired in 1983 by Erk Russell to coach the defensive line for the second-year program at Georgia Southern. Two years later, Russell asked him to fill the vacancy at offensive coordinator.

Russell also mandated that Johnson run an I-formation offense.

"We tried that for two games and we weren't very successful," Johnson said. "So I told him I wanted to go back in the double slot."

"I don't know if I want to do that," Russell told him before going to lunch. Fifteen minutes later, he had a change of heart.

"Do what you have to do," Russell conceded.

"So that's what we did," Johnson said.

The move immediately paid dividends thanks to a uniquely gifted quarterback named Tracy Ham. The key to the offense is giving the quarterback a number of options and the freedom to make split-second decisions. He can hand off to the single set back, keep it and follow the back's block, pitch it to one of the trailing backs that flank each side of the offensive line, or pass the ball to one of the wide receivers.

With Ham at Georgia Southern, the offense proved unstoppable. The Eagles won their first Division I-AA national championship that season and won their second the next, and Johnson was hired away to bring his offense to Hawaii.

"Through the years it evolved, and it's kind of a combination of run-and-shoot and play-action passing and option component," Johnson said.

What helps make it so successful in places such as Georgia Southern and Navy is that it can generate significant yards and eat up the clock with athletes who don't necessarily fit the prototype molds the other big-time colleges are looking for. Johnson wants players who can move and fight and keep people off-balance.

"I don't think that our system is such that it has to have a specific type of player," he said. "Good players are going to be good no matter what system you run."

Some people wondered when several players quit the team after Johnson was hired, including the starting quarterback and tight end. Johnson said it was only natural considering his offense doesn't employ a tight end and it doesn't suit a traditional drop-back quarterback such as Taylor Bennett.

"We want people who want to buy in and want to be here," Johnson said. "We don't want guys around who don't want to be here. I've learned in life that there are some guys who don't buy into anything."

Senior offensive lineman Andrew Gardner is one of those who bought in.

"He has his offense, he believes in it and has made believers out of us," Gardner said. "He's a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy, so you either buy in or hit the road."

But Johnson doesn't believe what he was selling is so different from what Georgia Tech was already doing. The Yellow Jackets under Chan Gailey were a run-oriented program. And with a lot of new faces moving up the depth chart, ingrained habits weren't overly threatened.

"It's not like we've got nine starters coming back on offense who were used to a system and we're coming in and destroying it," Johnson said.

Johnson plans to throw the ball as well. Being overly grounded is a bad rap that his triple-option gets saddled with. At Georgia Southern, the Eagles were so frequently winning by wide margins at halftime that throwing the ball in the second half was counterproductive. At Hawaii, Johnson had a quarterback throw for 28 touchdowns one season.

"We'll probably throw the ball more than we did at Navy just because of who we've got to play with," Johnson said of the higher caliber of athletes he has at Georgia Tech. "Contrary to popular opinion, I'm not diametrically opposed to the forward pass."

While it will certainly take time for the intricacies of the system to settle into the players' instincts, the benefits should be noticeable soon.

"I think this offense has a lot of potential, and I can't wait to start running it," Gardner said. "It's the kind of thing that if everybody buys in and executes properly, then we will be able to rack up a lot of yards and score a lot of points."

What has fans intrigued -- and other coaches nervous -- is just how different Georgia Tech's offense is from anything else they have to contend with. Preparing for something so radically unconventional in short order is one of the toughest tests in football.

"Right now he's about the only guy doing this," Bowden said. "It's unusual enough that I think he'll have success."

That's what happened at Wake Forest when Grobe took over and employed his own unique option-style offense that caught established programs off-balance and helped generate an ACC title in a Demon Deacons program that had experienced little success through the years. What Johnson does makes Wake Forest's option look conventional.

"There is a huge difference," Bowden said. "Wake Forest would be a 3 on the scale of this option stuff. Georgia Tech would be a 10-and-a-half."

Avoiding the cookie-cutter mentality is what gives Johnson so much confidence. Why would he want to be the same as everybody else?

"There's something I've never understood," he said. "If everybody does the same thing, then don't it just come down to who recruits the best? It makes sense to me that the schools who are gonna get the best recruits are gonna win every year. So I think it's good that there's differences."

The men on the opposite sideline will have the hardest task trying to prepare players to deal with something unfamiliar.

"It's difficult because you only get basically three days to prepare," said N.C. State coach Tom O'Brien. "It's tough to get a scout team to simulate the precision."

Georgia Tech believes that will set it apart in the standings as well. The players will be the best athletes ever to operate Johnson's offense.

"I think if you look at a team like Navy, they don't have a lot of ACC-caliber athletes, but they were still able to score a ridiculous amount of points," Gardner said. "This kind of option attack hasn't really been seen recently in the ACC, so unless they played Navy in past years, it is going to be new. It will be tough to prepare for with a lot of misdirection, so teams that play us will really never know what's coming at them."

It was not a case of ego that brought Johnson to Atlanta. He didn't feel any compulsion to prove that his system can succeed at the highest collegiate level. He never fretted that his system would hold him back.

"I never worried about the next job or moving up. I never did," he said. " I just always felt like if you did a good job of where you're at, it will take care of itself.

"I mean, I was as happy as a pig in slop at Georgia Southern. I could have stayed there for whatever. I loved living there and we had a good time. Then the people at Navy convinced me there was something I needed to take a look at. Then when I got there I would have been happy coaching there till I quit. But when I had the opportunity at Tech I thought, 'OK, that seems like a good opportunity,' and I came."

In Statesboro, Ga., Johnson's teams dominated the Southern Conference. At Navy his program owned the other service academies. Now at Georgia Tech, the addendum to the question he hears on a daily basis is will his system work against Georgia? A winless streak against the in-state rival is a big part of the reason Johnson's predecessor was fired.

Again, Johnson isn't concerned despite the hype surrounding the Bulldogs being ranked No. 1 in the preseason.

"They've won several games in a row, and I can look at the tape and make a case for how the games could have gone the other way," Johnson said of the series. "And a couple of times they beat Tech up. So it's up to us to change it. It doesn't do any good to cry about it. You've got to go out there and change it."

There are plenty of doubters on that front, too, but Johnson senses that Georgia Tech fans are optimistic about the program's change of course.

"I think there's some excitement, and I think there's a buzz in our fan base," he said. "I'm looking forward to getting started and going out there and seeing what happens."

So are his skeptics.

"The only way you're ever going to go silence the critics is to go do it on the field," Johnson said.

Will it work? Everyone is about to find out.