Happy NFL Draft season to all who celebrate.

The first round of the 2024 NFL Draft is going to commence tonight and while there are not going to be any Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets selected tonight, some of the best NFL players of the last 15-20 years have come from Atlanta and were selected in the first round. Whether it was Calvin Johnson (one of the greatest receivers of all time), Demaryius Thomas, or Derrick Morgan, the Yellow Jackets have had several impact players go in the first round and turn out to be good NFL players. That is something that current head coach Brent Key is working to get back toward.

Lets take a look back at the first round picks that Georgia Tech has produced.

Eddie Prokop– No. 4 Overall, 1945 (Boston Yanks)

In the 1944 Sugar Bowl Prokop led his #13 Yellow Jackets to 20–18 victory over #15 ranked Tulsa. In that game, he rushed for 199 yards, threw a touchdown, and kicked two extra points.[3] The Sugar Bowl did not award a game MVP until 1948. (Per Wikipedia)

Larry Morris– No. 7 Overall, 1955 (LA Rams)

Morris was a four-year starter and a two-way player at center and linebacker positions for the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. Morris was also selected as three times first-team All-SEC and a team captain as a senior. He played during coach Bobby Dodd’s most successful seasons at Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets had a 40-5-2 record over Morris’ four seasons, won two SEC titles, four bowl games, and a share of the 1952 national championship with a 12–0 record. In his final game as a Yellow Jacket against rival Georgia in Athens on November 27, 1954, he played the entire game and was credited with 24 tackles as his team won 7–3. He was later named to the All-SEC 25-year team spanning 1950–1974 and in 1992 was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame, one of 12 Tech players there (per Wikipedia)

Rufus Gutherie– No. 10 Overall, 1963 (LA Rams)

Eddie Lee Ivery- No. 17 overall, 1979 (Green Bay Packers)

He played at Georgia Tech from 1975-78 and remains the Yellow Jackets’ all-time leader in single-game (356 vs. Air Force – Nov. 11, 1998) and single-season (1,562 – 1978) rushing yards. He also finished his career as the Jackets’ all-time leading rusher with 3,517 career yards and still ranks third in Tech history in career rushing yardage. He went on to be selected No. 17 overall by the Green Bay Packers in the 1979 NFL Draft and rushed for 2,933 yards and 23 touchdowns in eight seasons with the Packers (1979-86). He was inducted into the Georgia Tech Sports Hall of Fame in 1982 and graduated from Georgia Tech in 1992.

Kent Hill- No. 26 Overall, 1979 (Los Angeles Rams)

Hill had a super successful NFL Career as an offensive lineman from 1979-1987, becoming a second team All-Pro twice (1980, 1985) and was a five-time pro bowler (1980, 1982-1985). After he retired, Hill was the director of student athlete development from 1989-1998.

Marco Coleman- No. 12 Overall , 1992 (Miami Dolphins)

From Georgia Tech Athletics:

Coleman played 14 seasons in the National Football League (1992-2005) after his hall-of-fame career at Georgia Tech (1989-91)

Coleman racked up 27.5 sacks and 50 tackles for loss in just three seasons as an outside linebacker for the Yellow Jackets, which were both school records at the end of his playing career and remain ranked fourth in the program’s all-time annals despite the fact that he played in only 34 collegiate games. He was named first-team all-America and all-Atlantic Coast Conference as a sophomore (1990) and junior (1991). As a sophomore in 1990, he led the ACC with 13 sacks and helped Georgia Tech claim its fourth national championship with an 11-0-1 campaign and a convincing 45-21 win over Nebraska in the Florida Citrus Bowl.

He went on to play 14 seasons in the NFL with the Dolphins (1992-95), San Diego Chargers (1996-98), Washington Redskins (1999-2001), Jacksonville Jaguars (2002), Philadelphia Eagles (2003) and Denver Broncos (2004-05). He was named Sports Illustrated’s 1992 NFL Rookie of the Year after tallying 84 tackles and six sacks and went on to record 610 tackles, 65.5 sacks and 18 forced fumbles in 14 pro seasons. He earned a spot in the Pro Bowl after registering a career-high 12 sacks for the Redskins in 2000.

He retired after the 2005 season.

Keith Brooking, No. 12 Overall- 1998 (Atlanta Falcons)

From Evan Birchfield at the Falcaholic:

“At Georgia Tech, Brooking became the all-time leading tackler in Georgia Tech history with 467 tackles. He was voted a team captain by his teammates and was a finalist for the prestigious Dick Butkus Award. Brooking averaged 13.3 tackles per game in 1995 and in 1996 he had the second-most tackles per game in the ACC with 13.4 per game. His collegiate career ended with a victory over West Virginia in the Carquest Bowl, where he recorded an interception and 15 tackles.”

Brooking is one of the best players in Georgia Tech history and went on to have a fantastic career for the Atlanta Falcons.

Calvin Johnson, No. 2 overall- 2007 (Detroit Lions)

From ProFootballHOF:

“Johnson was an immediate contributor to Chan Gailey’s offense, recording 48 catches, 837 receiving yards and seven touchdowns in his first season in Atlanta. He was named ACC Rookie of the Week four times as a freshman and immediately garnered national attention. The week-by-week accolades helped Johnson earn first-team All-ACC honors as a freshman, a rare accomplishment.

This momentum carried into Johnson’s sophomore season. He caught 54 passes for 888 yards and six touchdowns in 12 games, again earning a spot on the All-ACC first team.

Johnson entered his junior season with a lot of hype, appearing on almost every preseason list for the Biletnikoff Award and Heisman Trophy. He lived up to the expectations and produced his best season, becoming one of the greatest Yellow Jackets of all time. Johnson recorded 76 catches for 1,202 yards and 15 touchdowns, production that earned him a third consecutive first-team All-ACC bid.

He was named the ACC Player of the Year and won the Biletnikoff Award, with most knowing that his junior season would be his final at Georgia Tech. Johnson was one of the most popular wide receiver prospects in over a decade, and the NFL was calling his name.

Georgia Tech Records

• Career Receiving Yards — 2,927
• Receiving Yards in a Season — 1,202
• Career Receiving Touchdowns — 28
• Receiving Touchdowns in a Season — 15
• Career 100-Yard Games — 13
• 100-Yard Games in a Season — 7

Awards

• 2006 Biletnikoff Award
• 2006 ACC Player of the Year
• Two-time first-team All-American
• Three-time first-team All-ACC
• 2004 ACC Rookie of the Year
• Four-time ACC Rookie of the Week

Derrick Morgan, No. 16 Overall- 2010 (Tennessee Titans)

From Georgia Tech Athletics:

“A defensive end from Coatesville, Pa., Morgan recorded 19.5 sacks and 29.5 tackles for loss in three seasons for the Yellow Jackets (2007-09) and helped lead Georgia Tech to back-to-back ACC Coastal Division titles in 2008 and 2009.

He had a breakout campaign as a junior in ’09 when he amassed 12.5 sacks and 18.5 tackles for loss, totals which still rank fourth and seventh, respectively, in Georgia Tech history. In addition to being the 2009 ACC Defensive Player of the Year, he was a consensus first-team All-American. He remains the only Yellow Jacket to ever be named ACC Defensive Player of the Year.

Morgan entered the NFL Draft following his junior campaign and was selected No. 16 overall by the Tennessee Titans, making him the ninth-highest selection in Tech history. He went on to register 44.5 sacks and 306 tackles in nine NFL seasons (2010-19), all with the Titans. He retired from professional football prior to the 2019 season.”

Demaryius Thomas, No. 22 Overall- 2010 (Denver Broncos)

Thomas ranks among the Yellow Jackets’ all-time leaders in career receptions (113* – 10th), career receiving yards (2,135* – sixth), single-season receiving yards (950, 2009* – seventh), career yards per reception (18.9* – tied for sixth), single-season yards per reception (25.1* – second), career touchdown receptions (13* – tied for seventh), career 100-yard receiving games (6 – seventh) and consecutive games with a reception (29* – tied for fourth) (Per Georgia Tech PR). 

The Montrose, Ga., native owns two of Georgia Tech’s top 20 single-game receiving yardage totals – 230 vs. Duke in 2008 (second) and 174 vs. Mississippi State in 2009 (16th). Selected No. 22 overall in the 2010 NFL Draft by the Denver Broncos (10th-highest NFL Draft pick in Georgia Tech history), Thomas amassed 724 receptions for 9,763 yards and 63 touchdowns in 10 NFL seasons with the Broncos (2010-18), Houston Texans (2018) and New York Jets (2019). He was a five-time Pro Bowl selection and won Super Bowl 50 as a member of the Broncos.

Quarterback Jaden Rashada is committing to play for Georgia after spending one season at Arizona State, according to his agent Henry Organ of Disruptive Sports.

Rashada will join the Bulldogs after appearing in three games for the Sun Devils last season, passing for 485 yards with four touchdowns and three interceptions.

ESPN’s No. 31 overall recruit in the 2023 class initially signed with Florida but was released from his national letter of intent after a $13 million name, image and likeness agreement fell through with the school’s Gator Collective. The Pittsburg, California, native eventually signed with Arizona State, where his father, Harlen, played defensive back from 1992 to 1994.

Rashada, who has four years of eligibility left, opened the 2023 season as Arizona State’s starter but missed most of the year with a knee injury. The 6-foot-4, 185-pound Rashada missed spring practice with the Sun Devils following offseason thumb surgery.

Georgia is returning 2023 starter Carson Beck, who led the Bulldogs to a 12-1 record in his first season as their No. 1 quarterback. Redshirt freshman Gunner Stockton, who attempted nine passes in 2023, is also among the quarterbacks on the roster.

Information from ESPN’s Pete Thamel and Adam Rittenberg was used in this report.

Glenn Cook’s blog is a little different.

Every three or four days, the Republican candidate for Georgia House District 180’s blog is updated with a new essay on topics of interest to voters like public safety, education and the environment.

A recent post advocates for community-based policing. It’s short on specifics to the coastal Georgia district he wants to represent but long on broad platitudes and noncontroversial solutions:

“Did you know that communities with strong social ties and trust in law enforcement tend to have lower crime rates? It’s true! Working hand in hand and nurturing good vibes among us is our secret to crafting spaces where safety shines for all,” the April 22 post reads.

Looking closer at some of the images within the posts reveals more oddities, including police officers with badges containing words in unknown concocted languages.

Cook’s podcast, the Coastal Georgia Listener, is also a bit uncanny. There’s no opening song, no guests, just Cook’s voice reading a script similar to the blog posts.

Early Adopter

Cook’s campaign is an early adopter of artificial intelligence. His blog posts are generated with the help of AI, says Robert Lee, founder of Lesix Media and advisor to Cook’s campaign, and the podcast is created with an AI-powered service allowing users to clone their voices.

“We have an editorial and a content creation process, where we provide parameters to our AI platform, which is called Content at Scale, and we put those parameters in, and it produces the content, it essentially drafts the content for us,” he said. “And then we have an editorial process internally with my staff, and then ultimately with Glenn as our client and the candidate, to review that content, make changes, make sure our voice is added to it.”

“We have an ethical responsibility to make sure that we help our clients build deeper human relationships with voters,” he added. “Because at the end of the day, the most important person in any election is the voter. It is their community, it is their government. So following that ethical principle, that responsibility we have, our goal is to make sure that our clients are willing to sign off on anything that truly reflects their view, their voice, and gives them a better ability to build a deeper relationship with voters. So we don’t just create things and say, ‘Hey, here it is, take it or leave it.’ It’s very much ‘All right, we’ve drafted this, now let’s put our human touch on it.’”

AI has been embraced in the business, computing and marketing worlds, but this year’s election is the first to see campaigns latching on to the new technology, Lee said.

“This is the first cycle where you’re finding people specifically apply it to political campaigns, but it’s still not widely adopted,” he said. “People are still a little afraid of what they don’t understand. And so you have agencies like us that are just full on using it in every way we possibly can following that principle we talked about. And I think in two years time, you will find these technologies being not just a valuable part of a campaign, but an integral and very necessary part of a political campaign, because campaigns will just have to use it to be able to keep up with the demands of news cycles and growing neighborhoods and changing communities.”

Lee said there is a risk of alienating voters with an approach that could be seen as impersonal, but using AI to create an online presence can free up time for talking to voters in the real world.

“There’s always that risk. I mean, I think there’s that risk with using mail over door knocking. There’s that risk with using more television over phone calls,” Lee said. “At the end of the day, you have to be able to use this technology to help you build deeper relationships with voters. I keep coming back to that, but that is the core of what it is that we do on political campaigns, is connect with people in their lives. And what we have seen is that our clients are knocking on more doors. They are making more phone calls. They are visiting with more people because they are not having to spend time replacing interns that just simply don’t exist.”

A bipartisan tool

Lesix’ website advertises that it will allow candidates to “dominate your political opponents with AI-powered Republican strategies,” but Democrats are hoping to capitalize on the fancy new tech as well.

Last week, Arena, a group that trains Democratic-aligned campaign staff, held a summit in Atlanta offering training ahead of the November election, and one of the first events was a panel on the use of AI.

Betsy Hoover, founder and managing partner at California-based Higher Ground Labs, which invests in political tech projects and supports Democratic causes, said AI could have a more immediate impact on state and local races rather than federal.

“When you think about content generation for a presidential campaign, you have a team of 40 people producing content,” she said.

“When you’re talking about a campaign that has three or four staffers on a local level, the option is not, like, staffer or AI, it’s like, AI or don’t have a digital plan,” she added. “Like, don’t have a digital program or have a very, very scaled-back digital program. And as we enter a cycle where our voters and our volunteers are communicating more online and more used to digital environments, everything’s happening on their phones even more than the last cycle, that’s where we have to reach them. And so how do we make that as efficient and accessible as possible for the candidates that can’t afford a big staff, maybe are challenging an incumbent in a much better, funded campaign environment and actually can play because they have these efficiencies at work?”

The panelists were less bullish than Lee in their opinion of AI’s importance in the next election, but they predicted it will have a greater impact in years to come and touted examples of ways it can already ease some of the more tedious political grunt work.

“As many of you are probably very familiar with, a great deal of work on entry-level comms stuff is just pulling press clips,” said Ben Resnik with Pittsburgh-based Zinc Labs. “You get up really early, you find the headlines, you format them, you send them into an email inbox, and the senior leadership reads it. There’s a tool right now within the Higher Ground Labs’ portfolio called Chorus, which, among other things, promises to automate press clips. It can find, not just based on the keyword, but in terms of subject, what are things that your campaign is interested in, and automatically put that together and send it out.”

Resnik said campaigns can also use AI to take complicated legislation and put it into plain English and even pull out bullet points that could be of particular importance to different demographics, but he said it’s not yet time to let the robots off their leashes.

“Especially this cycle, and really for the foreseeable future, there is no application of generative AI where you can take a human fully out of the loop,” he said. “There needs to be a person editing, improving, quality checking every piece of content. There needs to be a person validating that the analysis that it’s doing, the things that it’s pulling out of that piece of legislation, is actually real, by, for example, asking for quotes, and then validate that those quotes actually exist.”

Limitations

Resnik was describing a phenomenon known as hallucinations, in which AI can reach into its algorithm and present as truth information that is misleading or outright fake.

Arun Rai, a professor at Georgia State University, expert on generative AI and member of Georgia’s AI Advisory Council, said he is optimistic about AI’s potential for campaigns when it comes to tasks like collecting and analyzing data.

“For example, you could have alerts on events that are of interest to voters, that are of interest to communities that may not be on the radar otherwise, so the whole just information sourcing aspect, and you can think about opinion polls, the way they’re trending, issues that might have happened, or events that are happening in communities that candidates might want to be present at to understand how voters are feeling.”

But he said early adopters should beware of hallucinations and other potential drawbacks.

A big drawback could be data privacy. AI products, especially free ones, often train on previous conversations, so whatever you type into it may come back as the answer to another user’s question. That could be a problem if you typed in sensitive information like donors’ phone numbers and home addresses.

Users could also wind up publishing material that is copyright protected or that is based on bigoted precepts or language if an AI was exposed to that kind of data in its training.

“And therefore, all of this is leading to one key point: it’s important that humans don’t fall asleep at the wheel,” Rai said.

Some companies offer either free or paid tools that purport to detect AI-generated text. Some of these are better than others, and some appear to create false positives to advertise further products that claim to make AI text undetectable. ElevenLabs, the company that produces the voice cloning service used by Cook, also offers a free AI speech classifier that says it can detect whether an audio clip was created using ElevenLabs.

“While these tools are there, there are no perfect tools,” Rai said. “Policies and regulation tend to be a catch-up game because the technology is moving so fast, and you don’t want to over-regulate to a point where the technology cannot be used constructively. Because some of these technologies, as we talked about, can also have a very productive value, so regulations are not going to be a complete solution, and it’s also going to be a slow solution. The platforms are going to do what they can. But I think it’s both on the disclosure and the detection side.”

The Georgia Legislature considered a bill that would have banned AI-generated deepfakes of candidates intended to deceive voters within 90 days of an election, but the measure did not pass the Senate.

Despite the challenges, Rai said he’s hopeful people will use AI to increase human potential rather than diminish it.

“I’m not going to try to project what’s going to happen in 10 to 20 years other than say I don’t know,” Rai said. “Right now, I can tell you whatever I envision is going to be vastly different than what’s likely going to happen. But I do see this technology with unbelievable potential because of what it does to realizing human and organizational potential. The reason I see it most powerful is that it can help individuals realize their potential in ways that we haven’t been able to because of socioeconomic inequality, because of other constraints, I’m not good at X and therefore I’m held back on doing something. It can become a real partner and push us to be the best versions of ourselves constantly, as organizations and individuals.”