Ask people who have gotten to know Parker Fleming so far in his coaching career, and you’ll hear a lot of the same compliments about Ohio State's new special teams coordinator.
He’s intelligent. He’s detail-oriented. Perhaps most importantly, he’s gained the trust of both the coaches he’s worked with and the players he’s had the opportunity to coach, leading to the 32-year-old’s promotion to Ohio State’s full-time coaching staff this offseason.
“He’s very bright. He’s really sharp,” Ryan Day said on the day he announced Fleming’s promotion. “I think he’s done a good job of connecting with the players, not being able to be on the field, but just being in the building has been excellent.
“I think that Parker’s background, he’s been here several years, he’s been in several big games, understands game planning and those types of things, he’s gonna be really good for us.”
Fleming’s start in college football came at Presbyterian College, where he played from 2006-09. Primarily a backup quarterback for the Blue Hose, Fleming also saw playing time at wide receiver and on special teams, which former Presbyterian coach Harold Nichols credited to Fleming’s football IQ and willingness to do anything for his team.
“He was always a bright, bright kid,” said Nichols, who coached Presbyterian from 2009-16. “You can always tell sometimes when you’re coaching young people and the ones that really get a good grasp of the game, not just maybe what their particular position is doing or maybe what their responsibility or assignment is, but kind of what everybody else is doing too. So he was just one of those kids that understood the scheme and was very bright. You would talk about a concept with him, and he would almost finish your sentence for you.”
Nichols isn’t surprised by Fleming’s rise in the coaching industry.
“I kind of always had a feeling that that’s the direction that he would head,” Nichols told Eleven Warriors. “Some kids just have a gift for being able to build a consensus among people. He was always popular with his teammates, and a great locker room guy, and usually those kind of guys, guys that are good teammates, that are unselfish players, usually those are the kind of guys that make the best coaches that I’ve come across.”
“You would talk about a concept with him, and he would almost finish your sentence for you.”– Presbyterian coach Harold Nichols on Parker Fleming
After one year coaching high school football at his alma mater in Decatur, Georgia, and one year coaching at Capital University, Fleming got his first big break in coaching when Urban Meyer hired him as a graduate assistant in his first year at Ohio State in 2012.
Even in his first stint with the program, which lasted two seasons, Fleming played a significant role in the Buckeyes’ special teams efforts and became a trusted resource for coaches and players alike.
“2012 was my freshman year, so I was mostly on special teams, and he was the special teams assistant and I worked with him a ton,” said former Ohio State linebacker Joshua Perry. “He was a guy who you felt like almost knew the special teams playbook better than Kerry Coombs who was heavily involved or Zach Smith who was heavily involved or even Urban, who was the guy who was in charge of installing the special teams. Everything he did, you felt like he was on top of it.
“I’ll put it like this: You felt like if you had a question, you almost wanted to go to Parker rather than anybody else, because you knew that he could give you an answer. It wasn’t just that he knew it, it was the way that he could convey it, it was the way that anybody could pick it up.”
After Fleming’s promotion was announced last week, Perry relayed a story on Twitter about Fleming critiquing his technique on a punt play during the 2014 season when Perry ran into Fleming at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center five years ago – a moment that impressed Perry even more when he realized that Fleming wasn’t even on staff in 2014.
“He was diving into all of that tape to make sure that the special teams were prepared for a game five years later. That’s a difference-maker, and that’s how you end getting hired from within like that,” Perry said. “So I’m expecting really big things from him. I’ve got a ton of respect for him. I love the way that he operates and handles business, and I think that he’s totally cut out for the job.”
Last time I saw him at the Woody, he was grilling me over a play on punt team from the 2014 season, as he was doing 2019 game prep. Detailed and smart as hell.
— Joshua E Perry (@RIP_JEP) February 3, 2021
Fleming left Ohio State in 2014 to become the wide receivers coach at James Madison, his first opportunity to be a full-time on-field coach at the Division I level, which came about when Everett Withers became the head coach of the Dukes.
Withers, who was co-defensive coordinator and safeties coach at Ohio State in 2012 and 2013, brought Fleming with him to James Madison – and later to Texas State – because he thought Fleming – who he described as Meyer’s “right-hand man” on special teams – was a “great teacher of fundamentals.”
“I always thought Parker was very detail-oriented. I thought he did a great job as a teacher,” Withers told Eleven Warriors. “His intelligence level is high. And I think one of the things is not necessarily your intelligence level but your ability to think out of the box and come up with new ways of teaching or executing a technique, a fundamental, and I think Parker’s on the cutting edge of a lot of that.”
After holding a variety of different roles on Withers’ staffs, including special teams coach duties at Texas State in 2016 before becoming the Bobcats’ passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach in 2017, Fleming returned to Ohio State in 2018, serving as a quality control coach for special teams for the past three years.
Several former Buckeyes who were coached by Fleming over the past three years, including punters Drue Chrisman and Zach Hoover and long snapper Liam McCullough, said Fleming played a key role in helping them break down film and develop their practice routines.
“His expertise is the scheme,” McCullough told Eleven Warriors. “Just a schematic genius in terms of the perspective that he brought to the film room and how he’s helped the specialist group visualize kind of our assignments and put us into different scenarios.
“Especially with things like any time that we had any sort of trick play whether it be a fake punt, a punt block, a surprise onside kickoff, things like that, Coach Fleming always was a big reason that not only that those got dreamt up but also that they got implemented.”
Hoover said Fleming’s “mind is always going,” and he means that in a good way.
“He was always on us about doing our things on the side, getting better, not wasting time, not wasting reps,” Hoover said. “He’s always thinking about different scenarios, about what can happen and what could go wrong and how we’re gonna fix it and all that kind of stuff.
“He’s someone that can definitely answer any question you got about the game of football. And he’s very valuable in life as well. He’s been to a few different places, seen a lot of things, and he’s one of the smartest X’s and O’s football coaches I’ve ever been around.”
“I’ll put it like this: You felt like if you had a question, you almost wanted to go to Parker rather than anybody else, because you knew that he could give you an answer.”– Former Ohio State linebacker Joshua Perry on Parker Fleming
While Matt Barnes was the primary special teams coach for the last two years, Fleming was a constant presence in special teams meetings too, and even temporarily filled in as the special teams coordinator after Barnes tested positive for COVID-19 last season. So the Buckeyes’ recent specialists expect Fleming’s transition into a full-time role to be a smooth one.
“I think he’s gonna fit like a glove,” Chrisman said. “He’s been in all those meetings that I can remember, even when Coach Meyer was here still running special teams meetings, he’d give Parker shoutouts all the time during meetings, just because of how smart he was and just his football IQ.
“So I think that’s gonna help him a lot in terms of the schemes going forward, and he’s already kind of proven too at Ohio State his worth. He’s been here for awhile, so he knows the system, he knows the players, he knows the schemes, and I think him kind of taking charge of it too, I think that’s gonna help improve things he’s already done.”
Even though there were limitations in what he was allowed to do on the field as a quality control coach, Fleming still built strong relationships with the players and became a trusted resource for the Buckeyes in that role, which will now be vitally important to his role as a full-time on-field coach.
“He’s easy to get along with, kind of like a bigger brother when I was there,” former Ohio State wide receiver Johnnie Dixon told Eleven Warriors. “He knows what he’s doing as a coach, so he’s easy to listen to.”
McCullough said Fleming “does a really good job of balancing the seriousness and the fun.”
“He can sit back and have fun and joke around with the guys, but he knows when to flip that switch and say, ‘OK, it’s game time now. Now we gotta lock in and get to work,’” McCullough said. “And I think guys really respect that about him. He’s a younger guy, he’s relatable, but he’s also respected as like I said, a schematic mastermind.”
Beyond now being responsible for leading the Buckeyes’ on-field special teams efforts, Fleming will also now be responsible for recruiting players, an area in which he’s unproven at Ohio State. He does have experience recruiting from his time at James Madison and Texas State, though, and while he wasn’t recruiting the same caliber of players there that he will be at Ohio State, Withers expects him to be successful on the trail.
“Parker’s got a very dry and funny temperament about him, and I think he had to come out and be who he is, and I think he did that the more he got the opportunity to recruit,” Withers said. “I think Parker on the road recruiting will continue to grow and get better the more he’s out there.”
Promoting Fleming from within to be the new special teams coordinator while moving Barnes to secondary coach might not have been the flashy defensive coaching hire that many Ohio State fans wanted to see following Mattison’s retirement, but there’s reason to feel good about what Fleming will bring to the Buckeyes in his new role based on the impressions he’s made on players and other coaches over the past decade.
The players who have been in the program believe Day’s decision to maintain continuity by promoting him will be a positive for the Buckeyes, too.
“They already know what they’re gonna get,” Chrisman said. “We promote from within, because we already know the culture, they already know the standard so he just kind of has to take that to the next level and improve what Coach Barnes already did very successfully.”
