The Hurry-Up is your nightly dose of updates from the Ohio State football recruiting trail, keeping tabs on the latest from commits and targets from around the country.
Hancock, Carter a possible pair wherever they go
Jordan Hancock, a four-star cornerback out of Georgia’s North Gwinnett High School, takes 20 minutes out of his day during lunch periods throughout the week to get some voluntary tutoring in algebra. Hancock’s teacher held the junior’s phone as the two worked on an equation together while looking at the phone, but the teacher had a problem.
Hancock’s phone wouldn’t stop buzzing from a 23-man Twitter group chat that Hancock is a part of.
“The group chat kept on going off, and I had to turn (Twitter notifications) off real quick,” Hancock told Eleven Warriors. “That kind of gives you an idea of how much we text in the group chat.”
The group chat features nearly all of the Buckeyes’ nine commitments in the 2021 recruiting class, a few players who have committed to other Division I programs and more than a dozen other top prospects, some who have Ohio State higher on their lists of schools they are interested than others.
It’s a pretty heavily trafficked chat with light-hearted trash talking, congratulatory messages to those who have committed to colleges and discussions about who will be next to commit to the Buckeyes.
One player who is not part of that Twitter chat is Barrett Carter, Hancock’s teammate at North Gwinnett. But that doesn’t mean Carter isn’t one of the highest priorities for the Buckeyes in the junior class. Far from it.
Even though Ohio State does not have its eyes on a plethora of linebackers in the 2021 class, it is looking at quality over quantity at the position, and Carter would be a great one to pair with four-star commit Reid Carrico of Ironton High School in southeast Ohio.
Carter, a 6-foot-1, 210-pounder, is ranked as the No. 6 outside linebacker, No. 9 player in the state of Georgia and the No. 100 overall player in the 2021 class. Looking at him in pads and watching him on tape, it’s clear to see he’s already a pretty polished player. His measurables, via 247Sports, are also incredible for a player his age: 4.59 (40), 4.22 (shuttle), 35.6 inches (vertical), 315 pounds (bench press), 400 pounds (squat) and 275 pounds (power clean).
Those numbers indicate the same thing that his film does: he’s explosive, athletic, fast and laterally quick.
Just like Hancock, Carter has almost every program under the sun seeking his services, as Ohio State, Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Georgia, LSU, Oklahoma, Oregon and Stanford have all offered the linebacker (Hancock has offers from six of those nine programs).
For North Gwinnett’s 2019 squad, Carter finished second on the team with 76 total tackles and 49 solo stops, and he collected nine tackles-for-loss and nine sacks. Hancock had a team-best 12 passes defended, and he finished with two interceptions and a forced fumble. The two defensive standouts helped lead North Gwinnett to a 12-2 record, including 12 consecutive wins before a loss in the 7A Georgia state semifinals (the largest division in the state), behind a defense that allowed just 10.8 points per game in its victories.
Carter and Hancock, who is on the rise and will start seeing even more offers begin to flow in over the next several weeks, have talked at length before about joining up with the same program at the next level. In fact, Hancock says it’s a goal for the two.
“Our families are really close,” Hancock told Eleven Warriors. “He’s like my best friend. Brother from another mother. We really talk about playing together all the time. We really wanna go to the same college as each other. That’s the plan. We don’t know if it’s gonna go through 100 percent, but we plan on doing that. But we don’t really know yet (where we’re going).”
Hancock and Carter both took an unofficial visit to Georgia this weekend.
University of Georgia This Weekend .. #GoDawgs
— jordan hancock (@jordanhancock_7) January 15, 2020
i will be at The University Of Georgia this weekend ...
— barrett carter (@bcsznn) January 16, 2020
#GoDawgs #CommitToTheG
Pairing with Carrico
Carrico is ranked as the No. 4 inside linebacker in America in the 2021 class.
When we talked with Carrico during his junior season, he said he had played all over the field during his career, but he had not yet settled into the Mike linebacker role he was being asked to play.
“I played a little bit of everything, man,” Carrico told Eleven Warriors at the time. “I played mostly outside linebacker, played safety, inside linebacker, defensive end. It depended what the depth chart looked like that week, who was banged up. I could move to the inside, but I wasn’t really built last year to play inside linebacker. I was only about 200 pounds last year. I was pretty skinny.”
Things changed for Carrico, who tacked on more than 15 pounds between his sophomore and junior seasons, and he’s added to that since then, coming in at 6-foot-3 and 223 pounds. And as for his lack of experience at middle linebacker? Check out his film, and it’s clear to see he got into a rhythm quite nicely. He earned Ohio’s Division V Defensive Player of the Year award, USA Today All-American honors and a state runner-up finish to boot.
If the Buckeyes Get Carter, they would have a dynamic one-two punch at a position of lesser need – but it would be hard to argue against nabbing two players ranked in the top six at their position. We’ll see if Washington and Carter’s relationship continues to build over the next several months.
Other potential linebackers for the 2021 class include outside linebackers Jonathan Flowe (the younger brother of Oregon signee Justin Flowe) and Yanni Karlaftis and inside linebacker Greg Penn III.
