Football: Georgia Tech OL Trey Klock will Transfer

For a team coming off of a 9-4 season and with a ton of hope for the 2017 season, Georgia Tech has seen an awful lot of transfers in the not-quite 8 weeks following the end of the regular season — seven, as of last week.

That number has now been pushed to eight, following the announcement on Tuesday from rising junior OT Trey Klock on his Twitter:

Until now, most of the players who had elected to transfer were seeing little-to-no playing time, and didn’t have great prospects of that changing over the next year or two. The exception so far was Marcus Marshall, who was the team’s leading rusher in 2015 and again in 2016 (at the time of his transfer). Klock now makes for a second significant contributor to depart the team whose loss will be felt at times in 2017.

The reasons for Klock’s departure are unclear, but there are two factors that could be at play:

• After starting the season in the starting lineup, Klock was passed on the depth chart by junior Andrew Marshall (who had recently moved to OT after spending multiple seasons backing up Freddie Burden at center) and true freshman Jahaziel Lee. Klock was passed up largely due to injuries he was battling for much of the season.
• Klock is from the area near Hershey, Pennsylvania. In Atlanta, he was a long way from home. It’s understandable that distance like that from his home and his family would make a situation like his tougher.

Klock’s departure doesn’t leave Georgia Tech with a totally bare cupboard at OT, but basically removes any depth that would have been had at the position entering 2017 when combined with Eason Fromayan’s departure. Rising senior Andrew Marshall and rising sophomore Jahaziel Lee figure to be the starters when the season kicks off in September, and would have been competing with Klock over those starting spots anyways.

The issue, now, becomes who backs up Marshall and Lee when they need a rest or suffer an injury. The only other OT remaining on the roster from 2016 is Jake Stickler, who will be a redshirt junior but played sparingly behind the primary rotation of Lee, Marshall, Klock, and Fromayan. The Jackets also add Charlie Clark and Zach Quinney, both of whom are currently committed and seem to fit the mold at OT size-wise. At this point, at least one of them will be forced into action in all likelihood. There’s also a chance that Georgia Tech could add another recruit in the current class to help fill the void.

Here’s to hoping that this is the last we hear of players transferring out of Georgia Tech for a while.