Sure you can. People do it every day. 
A friend with a studio uses this, but I have no idea if they make this anymore, or something similar:
http://www.endlessanalog.com/products-page/analog-hybrid/clasp-24
This is basically a clever solution to record to tape, read from the repro head and record to your DAW with a negative offset to correct the delay in one go. Simplified a bunch of relays and a lot of wiring, apart from having to handle the offset. Sounds like a good diy project?
I haven't used tape for a long time, though I'd love to. There are two basic priciples of synchronisation, have the tape machine follow the daw or have the daw follow the tape. The first reqires a tape synchronizer. That means complicated, outdated (pre Atari ST) and therefore unsupported digital hardware. I remember there were books with extremely detailed machine specific cable descriptions for the Adams / Smith synchronizers we used back in the day - which had to be programmed in hex code. Seems rather complex and nothing I'd want to dive into any more.
Having the daw follow the tape is a little more modern and easier, there were synchronizers which read the smpte from tape and controlled the positioning and the wordclock for the daw - but it was quite difficult to achieve a high timing accuracy with most synchronizers. Plus controlling the wordclock can introduce jitter - another can of worms.
So the clasp approach would be my first choice. Probably the best synchronization is no synchronization. Plus you'd only have to spool the tape back every once in a while - when it is at the end. That is a big gain in convenience.
I don't use protools, so I don't know how to handle the offset problem. The audio hardware might be pretty straight forward to design and not terribly expensive. You'd also need an interface to pass the transport commands from the daw to the tape machine. There should be something adoptable from the arduino world I guess. Like I said, an interesting diy project?
Maybe this sparks some ideas,
Michael