I've decided to change the name of this series of posts from "Class of 2010:____" to "2010 Football Recruits:___" just because it seemed like the right thing to do. Continuing our tour through the 2010 recruiting class we will focus our attention on Fred Holton. Before getting to him, I wanted to give you a link to an interview with Charles Perkins done by the AJC just after his commitment to Tech in case you've never seen it. I forgot to put it in my previous post and I think it gives you a good perspective into just how solid a commitment to Paul Johnson really is. CPJ makes these kids think long and hard before they give him their verbal commitment. Just another thing that makes me love CPJ.
Now on to Fred Holton. Fred is a safety from Thomasville High School in Thomasville, GA. He's listed at 6'1" and weighs about 200 lbs. When he gets to Tech he will play Morgan Burnett's position, the Rover or strong safety in conventional terms. Fred was the second player to give a verbal to CPJ after Charles Perkins, back in late march. At the time of his commitment to Tech, Holton had offers from several schools including "Kansas State, Central Florida, and Ole Miss."
Check out this video highlight of Fred from his Junior campaign at Thomasville. You can see that he also plays running back for his high school team. The video does not contain any highlights of him in pass defense so it is difficult to tell how he will fair in that area. But it is clear from the video that he is an extremely physical player with pretty good speed. His forty time is listed at 4.55 on Rivals.com. I really like the way he flies to the football on defense. I can see a little of "Uno" in his playing style. But he'll have a long way to go before he's on Burnett's level at the ROV.
Going back to the subject of the speed of recruits, one thing Coach Johnson and Coach Wommack have talked about in the past is a desire for their recruits to possess "football speed", not just track speed. In other words, they are looking for guys who play fast with the pads on, not just guys who can run in shorts and running shoes. There is a definite difference between the two. Watching the tape it would seem that Fred Holton fits the model of someone who plays fast in pads. I'll talk more about this when discussing Jemea Thomas (member of the 2009 class) as he's another great example of this characteristic.
And that's just about all I have for you Fred Holton right now... I was going to combine this post along with one about Denzel McCoy (a defensive tackle commit) but I didn't want it to seem like I was slighting any of our recruits by not giving each one of them their own post. I'll have the feature on Denzel up in the very near future.
So in the interest of wasting more time, here are two videos that crack me up every time... they have nothing to do with Georgia Tech sports but you should watch them anyway because I think they're good.
That's all...
THWG