Seven years ago, Georgia’s Andrew Thomas sat down with Kevin Johnson, his position coach at Pace Academy, and wrote out a list of goals for his just-beginning football career. Neither he nor Johnson will share all the items that are on that list — “that’s our stuff we share with each other,” Johnson said — but they acknowledged that at least one more of those objectives would get checked off Thursday night.
In a bit of a shocker, Thomas was selected with the No. 4 pick by the New York Giants in the first round of the NFL draft. The Bulldogs' junior left tackle was expected to go in the first round, but few projections had him going as early as he did.
“Yes, sir!,” Thomas yelled along with his friends when he learned the Giants had chosen him. That was a shout-out to Sam Pittman, his position coach at Georgia the last three years, who’s now the head coach at Arkansas.
Thomas' early selection represented an answered prayer for his high school coach, too. Johnson is a lifelong Giants fan and he had hinted that this might happen. The Thomas family and agent John Thornton at Roc Nation were gathering at Johnson’s Fayetteville home Thursday night to see it all unfold.
“This is something that we talked about for years,” Johnson said. “This is one of the goals we wrote down from the beginning. So to see it come to fruition is exciting, emotional, a bunch of things. I’m just happy for the young man and thankful that he stuck to the blueprint we came up with.”
The pick also marked the third consecutive draft in which at least one UGA player was chosen in the first round. Thomas is the second offensive tackle in the past three years to get his NFL call on the draft’s first day. Isaiah Wynn was selected by the New England Patriots in the first round in 2018.
About all this, nobody seems less surprised than Thomas. As he has maintained since the NFL combine in February, “I feel like I’m the best tackle in this class,” Thomas said.
To date, Thomas has achieved every goal on their list except one, according to Thomas. The one that went unchecked -- to win the Outland Trophy. Thomas was a semifinalist for that award, which goes annually to college football’s top lineman. Oregon tackle Penei Sewell won it instead.
But Thomas claimed plenty of awards during his three seasons at Georgia, including the SEC’s Jacobs Blocking Trophy and first-team All-American and All-SEC honors this past season.
To say that’s coming a long way from where Thomas was when he showed up at Pace Academy as a ninth grader would be an understatement. While he arrived with great talent in music and academics, at 6-foot, 235 pounds, he still had some work to do to distinguish himself as a football player.
“He couldn’t bench over 125 pounds; that’s what I remember,” Johnson said with a hearty laugh. “Our strength coach did one helluva job. The bench press was one of the biggest things we always worried about.”
At the NFL combine, Thomas weighed in at 6-5, 315 and benched 225 pounds 21 times. While it didn’t register among the top performances for offensive linemen, it represented another incredible growth rung on Thomas’ goal-oriented tree.
“It never was his strong suit,” Johnson said of Thomas and the bench press. “But his strong suit was his ability to understand the game.”
Clearly, NFL teams have recognized that.
Meanwhile, Johnson did reveal one other item that remains on Thomas’ list of goals -- Pro Football Hall of Fame inductee.
On that one, we will all have a while to wait to see.
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