No one should have been surprised when four members of the defensive front seven on the Texas Tech football team went in the top three rounds of the NFL draft.
One of the lingering questions going into day 3 was this: Did Skyler Gill-Howard do enough before a season-ending injury in the sixth game last year to be a draftee, too? The Detroit Lions thought so.
The Lions took the undersized Tech defensive tackle in the sixth round on Saturday, April 25. That meant the original front four on the Red Raiders’ 12-win Big 12 championship team all got picked: David Bailey by the New York Jets in the first round, Lee Hunter by the Carolina Panthers in the second round, Romello Height by the San Francisco 49ers in the third and Gill-Howard by the Lions.
He even managed to come up with a Lions cap on the spot.
“So this is funny: I didn’t have time to go grab a hat, and nobody else did,” Gill-Howard said of his draft party. “So my grandfather, big Detroit fan, he walked up to me and said, ‘Look at my hat.’ Only (Lions) hat in the room. It’s meant to be.
“So my grandfather gave me his hat. I told him to get a new one. When I get up there, I’m going to send him one, but I’ve got to keep this one.”
Gill-Howard suffered a season-ending ankle injury in the Oct. 11 Kansas game, underwent surgery and didn’t play again. He remained an emotional leader, though, and this month won the E.J. Holub Double Tough Award, one of the annual team honors.
Draft week was one of mixed emotions for Gill-Howard, the oldest sibling in a large family. Prestin Gill-Pate, a half-brother of Gill-Howard’s, was killed at age 17 in September 2022. The shooting death in their hometown of Milwaukee remains unsolved.
Because the brothers lived with separate parents, Gill-Howard said last summer he carried guilt for a time because he was “growing up playing football in the suburbs” of Milwaukee and Gill-Pate was in a part of town with “the gangster stuff, all that horrible stuff.”
Gill-Howard had a photo of Gill-Pate beside him on Saturday.
“It meant everything,” he said. “Thursday before the draft started I went out there to his grave, and I just sat with him for a while, talked to him. It just means everything, because I told him whenever my time was to go to the league, he’d come with me to get him out of the situation he was in.
“He’s still going to come with me, obviously not physically, but it meant everything to me. Especially my siblings, too, because that hit them hard as well.”
Being drafted marked an unlikely milestone for Gill-Howard, whose career included stops at Division II Upper Iowa in 2021 and Northern Illinois from 2022-24. He began as a walk-on at both schools and put on 50 pounds to switch from linebacker at Upper Iowa to defensive line at NIU.
Because he was non-scholarship his first two semesters at NIU and not in the picture for playing time, Gill-Howard made 118-mile drives back home to a FedEx job on weekends.
But he established himself at NIU, became a coveted player in the transfer portal and started the first six games last season on one of the most talented defensive lines in college football. Bailey, Hunter and Height were drafted with picks No. 2, 49 and 70, Gill-Howard at No. 205.
The surrounding talent motivated him.
“When you have David going out there and leading the FBS in sacks,” Gill-Howard said, ” ‘you’re like, ‘Man, I’m tired of him getting all the sacks. I want to get one.’ Then Mello’s rushing harder. Lee’s rushing harder. I’m rushing harder.
“Our whole front four got drafted. … It’s just awesome. We all built each other and we all became great players from it.”
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Lions’ call caps NFL draft week full of emotion for Skyler Gill-Howard
Reporting by Don Williams, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
