Well, this is disappointing, rather like the sudden loss of so many OLs last year. But …
Custis never played a down for Tech. As it sits, we don't know if he would have been an instant hit or Hobbie Holiday the second. His leaving – and I agree that he probably won't come back – simply means that Leggett gets a new position (the one he should have been groomed for anyhow, imho) and Connors/Wilson get a few more snaps. Too bad, but we'll never know what we missed. I predict he'll never start for any team now; generally when you get in this sort of trouble and transfer you get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps this will be brought up to him and he'll come back.
With Hunt-Days, it's a loss, unless Harrell can come back. Personally, I never thought H-D would start at DE in the long run; I thought he'd end up back at LB next year. If Harrell recovers enough to play, I wouldn't be surprised to see another experiment next fall: Nealy to DE, if it turns out to be necessary. If not, we'll have depth problems unless Whitehead or Freeman turn out to be the players we anticipate. As for all this being H-D's fault: let's hold off on that. I nearly flunked out in my sophomore year in college because of a combination of the slump and a series of tough classes. It wouldn't surprise me to find that the young man simply found he'd bitten off more then he could chew. It happens and it isn't the end of the world for either him or his Tech football career.
Finally, I just finished watching the HBO Sports segment on the way the factories are playing fast and loose with the NCAA graduation requirements. My son insisted. Finding that Memphis let an illiterate into college to play football (I might add that none of the young men in the segment appeared stupid; just poorly educated) and that UNC has mercilessly sacrificed half or better of their "student/athletes" to courses of "study" that have prepared them for … well, nothing … was eyeopening. That Tech at least tries to prepare its players for a decent life after college is something we need to be proud of. I'd feel like a hypocrite and a fraud if I was cheering for the teams at UNC. And no wonder. I would be a hypocrite and a fraud.
(Btw, both of the former UNC athletes took Swahili as their foreign language. Anyone who know anything about that part of the world knows that Swahili is hellishly difficult for foreigners to learn, being an artificial lingua franca made up of Bantu languages and Arabic. No wonder neither of them could recall a single word of the language!)
