When Ohio State hosts Penn State on Saturday, it will be eight days shy of the three year anniversary that Buckeye quarterback Justin Fields committed to the Nittany Lions.
Yes, before he was at the helm of the best offense in college football and producing 41 touchdowns to just one interception this season, and before he spent a year at the University of Georgia getting spot duty behind sophomore starter Jake Fromm, Justin Fields was committed to head coach James Franklin and Penn State.
Franklin and assistants Joe Moorehead — now the head coach at Mississippi State, and Josh Gattis — now the offensive coordinator at Michigan, worked hard to land Fields’ commitment, which they held for a little over seven months.
Now just three days from seeing him on the field in somebody else’s colors, Franklin knows the Penn State defense has his hands full.
“Obviously, we were involved with him early, had a significant relationship for a long time,” the Nittany Lions’ head coach said this week.
“Very talented guy. You come up with your list of things that you’re looking for in terms of characteristics, height, weight, speed, intelligence, release, accuracy, touchdown-to-interception ratio, win/loss percentage, all the things we look at when we’re evaluating and studying quarterbacks. Watching him in games, watching him in practice, throwing live. He checked a lot of boxes. Based on what I’m seeing on film right now, I think we were right. He’s pretty good.”
Fields, still just a sophomore, currently leads the Big Ten in pass efficiency and has produced 41 touchdowns to just one interception this season. (The 41 touchdowns are three more than Georgia has produced this season.)
Even though Fields ultimately ended up at in-state Georgia, he was originally all set to leave home and become a Nittany Lion.
“I thought I had a great relationship with all the coaches there,” Fields said this week. “The offensive coordinator at the time, Coach Moorehead, he’s a great coach, great offensive-minded coach. So I just thought, my ability to play and then my relationship with the coaches and all the other commits would eventually help me become a better player. Just with all those players that we had committed there at the time. I just had a great relationship with the coaches and players there.”
At the time of his commitment, Fields was one of the top dual-threat quarterbacks in the 2018 recruiting class. Then he hit the camp circuit in 2017 and went from one of the better guys at his position to the top guy in the entire class.
Try as he might, Franklin couldn’t hold to Fields, but he certainly held on to the loss.
“The losses on the field are hard to shake. The losses in recruiting are hard to shake,” he said. “You put so much into them. There’s no doubt about it. That’s where my conversations with the administration about competing for everything, because when you lose a recruit, you want to know why. When you find out what those “why’s” are, you want to try to eliminate them as much as you possibly can.”
In all walks of life, the ones that get away are hard to accept. But then when you have to see them again, the wounds can reopen. That’s one of the reasons Woody Hayes used to speak highly of Notre Dame when recruiting players he knew were slipping away. If they went to Notre Dame instead of a Michigan or Purdue, he knew he likely wouldn’t have to coach against them some day.
Franklin possibly saw himself playing against Fields one day in the postseason, but to do have to do it in the regular season the next couple of years against the team standing in the way of so many things for Penn State could be seen as a bit of an annoyance.
“Yeah, it definitely bothers you,” he said. “It’s magnified when you lose someone, they go to somewhere else in the conference, and now you have to compete against that guy for three or four years. It’s in your face, it’s more obvious.”
Fields has certainly taken the long road to Ohio State and seen most of the top programs in the nation.
After thinking he would be a Nittany Lion, and then eventually spending a year as a Bulldog, Fields has finally found himself at home as a Buckeye.
“I mean, there were little times and places where I thought I made the right decision [coming to Ohio State],” he said. “So it wasn’t really one set time where I completely knew. It was just a feeling, just the the family atmosphere here and the brotherhood we have here. I kind of just realized that this was the place.”