For the first time in a while, Julian Fleming actually has to look up to see everybody else.
As a freshman at Ohio State, he begins his career like everybody else: At the bottom of the depth chart. Ryan Day, last fall, chuckled as he told the story of whenever highly regarded first-year players get introduced in front of the team, the upperclassmen ask how many recruiting stars they had, and then the veterans yell, “We don’t care.”
Fleming surely got that treatment when he enrolled in January. As a recruit, almost everybody was below him.
Talent evaluators ranked him as the No.