As the picture of who will and won't be contributing to Tech's 2016 football season continues gaining clarity, we can now make some educated guesses as to which players will have some surprising impacts starting as soon as this weekend. On the offensive side of the ball, the name to watch is unquestionably that of B-Back Dedrick Mills. Paul Johnson named him the starter at his position during the season's first radio show yesterday afternoon, meaning that the staff has even more faith in him than last year's true freshman phenom (Marcus Marshall). It's an impressive statement for Mills, a member of the 2016 recruiting class with no in-game experience under his belt. Congratulations to him for proving himself so quickly.
Georgia Tech made the top nine for four-star power forward Rayshaun Hammonds yesterday, the latest in an ever-growing list of top-10 selections for Josh Pastner's team.
Final 9 pic.twitter.com/XeaU4Nx2Dh
— shaundon (@shaun_coolin) August 29, 2016
A top-11 power forward in the country and a top-60 overall player, Hammonds would be the biggest Tech commitment in years. His other eight finalists are all solid schools, but none are the typical basketball powerhouses that you tend to see among the finalists for players of his caliber. That alone is interesting, and it very well could mean that Tech has a better shot with him than others. The local connection surely couldn't hurt for the Norcross native.
When it comes to second chances, it's hard to fail more spectacularly than former Georgia Tech defensive lineman Darius Commissiong. The issue is not even that Commissiong failed as a football player, but rather that he proved himself to be nothing short of a despicable person during his brief tenure at East Carolina; he ended his football career by being arrested for felony animal cruelty after beating a one-year-old Shih Tzu to death. Commissiong, who was dismissed from Tech's football team prior to the 2014 season for an undisclosed violation of team rules, took that rare second chance and blew it after just one season. He was effectively given an opportunity to get a free education from not one but two of the top universities in the world, an opportunity that billions of people would die for, and lost it because he couldn't resist beating a puppy to death. What else is there to say? Some people are just disgusting idiots. It's embarrassing that he was ever a part of this program.