Justice Haynes

The Michigan year was a tease. In seven games before the injury, Haynes ran for 857 yards and 10 touchdowns at 7.1 yards a carry -- a per-touch rate that, by our play-by-play, no other Power Four running back in the modern era has matched over a real workload. Then the season ended, and so did his time in Ann Arbor: by reporting, the split came down to NIL money and a desire for a change, and he was in the portal by January.

Georgia Tech is the homecoming. Buford is barely thirty minutes from campus, and Brent Key's program landed him to be the unquestioned featured back -- the centerpiece of a run-first offense that should finally hand him the volume Michigan's committee never did. The Doak Walker buzz is already there; Georgia Tech fans had him tagged a 'Doak Walker RB of the year candidate' before he'd taken a single handoff in white and gold.

The forward question isn't the talent. Our perception-versus-production model has fans rating him in the 98th percentile and his actual production in the 100th -- a rare case where the hype is fully earned, not inflated. It's durability and volume: can a back who has never carried a full healthy season as the clear lead, at his third school, turn elite-per-carry efficiency into the counting stats a Doak Walker actually requires? Get there, and the journeyman label flips to the best back in the country.