Remember this?
Course you do, it's hard to forget.
J.T. Barrett — Ohio State's redshirt freshman quarterback who was rushed into operations by his coaches less than two weeks before the season opener following Braxton Miller's second shoulder injury in eight months — breaking his ankle again Michigan. The guy who slumped along with the rest of his teammates in a Week 2 loss to Virginia Tech, yet revitalized the Buckeyes and morphed into a Heisman Trophy contender before suffering the season-ending injury in his team's 42-28 victory against its archrival.
The injury was brutal to watch, yes, one that couldn't have been helped. It just happened.
And yet, Barrett didn't scream in pain. He even said after having surgery on that ankle that his first thought was to get up and return to the huddle. Until he saw his foot turned out the wrong way.
"I tried getting up, but then when I looked at my ankle I thought, 'It's probably best if you stay down,'" Barrett said Dec. 3. "I didn't really think about it."
Even then, the young kid from Wichita Falls, Texas, didn't writhe in agony, didn't thrash out from the discomfort he was feeling on the turf.
He was cool. He was collected. He breathed. He let whatever was going to happen, happen.
"Actually, I didn't try to think of it as much," Barrett said. "Like I said, just trying to take it for what it is."
Ever since Barrett was thrust into the starting job last August, he's impressed with an even-keeled, positive, yet demanding attitude even through bumps in the road like a double overtime victory at Penn State. He just never appears to get rattled.
We all have fathers in this world. Some serve as heroes, some as mentors. Others aren't there for their children for various reasons, while others still fall by the wayside later in life.
For Barrett, his father blazed the trail for the quarterback's simple, but fearless manner way of operating. Barrett laid out the relationship he holds with his father, Joe, in a blog post on the Football Parents At Ohio State (FPAOS) website on Sunday, Father's Day:
My dad, I appreciate what he does for my family. I think I am like him in many ways. One way that comes to mind is his quality of being calm. People ask me all the time, “When I see you on TV, why don’t you ever look excited?” I really don’t have an answer for them because that’s just the way am. I feel like I got that quality from my dad. I honestly believe that my dad doesn’t have bad days. What I mean by that is often times we as people think negatively and then that consumes us and that negative way of thinking goes throughout our daily activities, but not my dad. My dad is constantly smiling and always talking. I try to have that same mentality about life.
J.T. Barrett does that almost flawlessly, hardly ever looking rattled despite getting pushed into tight situations all of last season and leading the Buckeyes to 11 wins (we're counting the Michigan game).
In his blog post, the quarterback shared some more memories he had with his dad growing up, but also mentioned his father's military service:
My dad was away doing his army reserve military duties on the weekends, but sometimes he would take off to come back in town on Saturday to watch me play. I’ll be looking out for him trying to see when he came in or if he was there, and when I found him, he would give me thumbs up which was basically letting me know that everything was okay, and then from there, I’d just relax and play my game.
We all have things we do or think about to calm us down. For J.T. Barrett — who's first name is Joe, after his dad — is his father, which he laid out in the brief piece.
The entire post is worth the read and it is easy to see why Urban Meyer and the coaching staff raves about his attitude and poise whenever given the opportunity.
