The words that tumbled out of Nicholas Petit-Frere’s mouth nearly two years ago caused tremors in Columbus.
To those who follow Ohio State, his commitment announcement on ESPN – which got Ryan Day’s son, RJ, to lose his mind with excitement – was a rebalancing of sorts to the landscape of college football recruiting. Two months prior, the Buckeyes had lost out on five-star offensive tackle Jackson Carman, a native of Fairfield who left his home state to blaze his own path at Clemson. In response to what was the biggest in-state recruiting miss of the decade, Urban Meyer and his coaching staff spent the following weeks putting in a monumental effort to chase the only offensive tackle in the nation with a higher recruiting ranking than Carman.