Imagine the pressure you have to endure as a marquee player on one of the nation’s most visible and most talented teams. Imagine the pressure of knowing the hopes and dreams of hundreds of thousands depend on whether you can catch a ball that’s coming your way. Now imagine the pressure of doing all that while carrying the name of your father … who just happened to be better than almost anyone ever in what you’re trying to do.
Some people would crumble under the pressure. Some would avoid it entirely. And some, like Ohio State’s Marvin Harrison Jr., would embrace it, wrestle it to the ground, conquer it.
“I think it’s easy for us to look at and just say, ‘Well, his dad played in the NFL and then became a Hall of Famer,’” Ohio State head coach Ryan Day said earlier this year. “There’s a lot that comes with that, a lot of expectations, especially when you share the same name as your dad. And I just think that Marvin has done a great job of kind of blazing his own way, but I think the expectations have always been there for him and not easy. But his work ethic, his approach, his attitude, who he is as a person, his parents raised a really great young man.”
“He has the name, but hasn’t lived on that,” says Adam Gorney, national recruiting director for Rivals. “He’s arguably the best wide receiver in [college] football.”
Yahoo Sports NFL draft analyst Charles McDonald calls Harrison “one of the best wide receiver prospects that has come out in this era of football. He has it all. Size, speed, contested catch ability, route running.”
Harrison has spent the past year or so compiling the kind of statistics that light up Twitter, torment Big Ten defensive coordinators and make NFL teams start plotting how to jump up in the draft. He and the resurrected Buckeyes will face their greatest challenge — and greatest opportunity — in just a couple weeks, traveling to enemy territory to face Georgia in the College Football Playoff semifinal.
Harrison is the tip of the spear for Ohio State, the Buckeyes’ best realistic chance against Georgia.
‘Y’all might have just made a monster’
As starting debuts go, it would be tough to top Harrison’s at Ohio State. At last season’s Rose Bowl, elevated into a starting role after teammates opted out, Harrison caught three touchdowns in Ohio State’s 48-45 victory over Utah. The fact that Ohio State wasn’t in that season’s playoff — and also the fact that teammate Jaxon Smith-Njigba also caught three TDs and had 347 yards receiving — overshadowed Harrison’s achievement a touch. Still, not bad for a guy who had caught all of five passes on the season prior to that evening in the Rose Bowl.
Harrison earned the nickname “Route Man Marv” from quarterback C.J. Stroud for his precision in running routes as a freshman, which is the kind of attribute that gives your quarterback confidence in you but doesn’t exactly light up the crowd. Nobody cheers for good route runners, after all.
Harrison learned the nuances of receiving from one of the best to ever do it. Marvin Harrison Sr. played in the NFL for 13 seasons, all for Indianapolis, along the way winning a Super Bowl and amassing dozens of NFL records for longevity and consistency. Marvin Jr. was born in August 2002, just weeks before the elder Harrison began the season where he set career highs for receptions and yardage, leading the NFL in both categories and winning First Team All-Pro honors.
The younger Harrison had his first Power Five offer in hand — from Syracuse, his father’s alma mater — when he was a freshman in high school. After that year, he transferred to St. Joseph’s Prep, a Philadelphia-area private school known for its state championship-level talent. He drew interest from Florida, LSU, Michigan, Penn State and Texas A&M, but ultimately decided to head to Columbus.
He was part of Ohio State’s second-ranked 2021 recruiting class, and after a quiet rookie regular season, he exploded in the Rose Bowl. He then put a charge into Buckeye Nation during the offseason when video of him surfaced racing a Monarc ball-throwing machine:
“He’s blessed with a tremendous amount of talent,” Day said. “But really, skill and discipline are off the charts, too — and that’s hard to find, because some guys are just blessed with great talent but they have a harder time finding that skill and that discipline. He has it both.”
After an entire season spent behind Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson — two Buckeyes now racking up yards in the NFL — Harrison stepped up into the spotlight, and when Smith-Njigba went down in the first game of the season with a hamstring injury, Harrison became WR1 and capitalized on every inch of the promise shown in that three-TD Rose Bowl.
Harrison combines the route-running precision of Jerry Rice with the rangy reach of Julio Jones, then adds a layer of Randy Moss showmanship atop it all. Check out, for instance, this Mossing of a Michigan State defender:
Or this one-armed grab against Michigan:
Or this one-armed, toe-tap sideline snag against Indiana:
Any one of those would be on a school’s highlight reel for a generation. Together, they’re proof that Harrison is one of the best in the game right now. He ranks fourth in the country in touchdowns, ninth in receiving yards per game. He’s second in the Big Ten in yards per reception. He has scored three touchdowns in a game three separate times — the Rose Bowl last January, and in wins over Arkansas State and Michigan State this year.
“As you watch week in and week out, and his determination to play and get better, it’s like he’s doing everything he needs to do as long as he stays focused and keeps his head level,” the senior Harrison told Fox’s “Big Noon Kickoff” in October. “Week in and week out, just forget about last week and focus on this week.”
His body of work — 72 receptions, 1,157 yards, 12 touchdowns — won him the Big Ten’s Richter-Howard Receiver of the Year honors and a Consensus All-American award, and also put him in the running for the Biletnikoff Award honoring the top FBS receiver. Harrison didn’t win that one — the Biletnikoff went to Tennessee’s Jalin Hyatt — but he’s using the results as fuel.
“I did feel as though I deserved to win. Congrats to Jalin, he had an unbelievable year, really. But I think I deserved to win,” Harrison said last week. “I just can’t dwell on it, I gotta move on. I got bigger and more important things to worry about right now.”
Later that night, Harrison spent time alone catching passes at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center with the caption, “Y’all might have just made a monster.”
He later insisted it was his normal workout. Believe that if you want.
Georgia’s weakness could benefit Marvin Harrison Jr.
Harrison has at least one more year of causing havoc for Ohio State, but this season isn’t quite done. There’s still the matter of the Georgia Bulldogs on New Year’s Eve.
Conveniently enough for Harrison, the secondary is the one true weakness on the Bulldogs’ defense, which ranks 51st in the nation in surrendering 215.1 passing yards per game. The key for Ohio State will be for the offensive line to protect Stroud long enough for Harrison and Emeka Egbuka to exploit the holes in Georgia’s defense. It’s doable as LSU put Georgia’s secondary on roller skates in the SEC championship game, running up 502 yards, and not all of that was garbage yardage.
However this season ends, Harrison will begin next season with All-American, and potentially even Heisman, speculation. He’s on a trajectory that will make him a cornerstone receiver in the 2024 NFL draft.
“He’s exactly what the NFL is looking for in a wide receiver,” Gorney says. “Big body, super competitive, major dog factor, and catches everything. … NFL guys are going to look at their draft boards and say, ‘This guy can’t get too far.’”
The monster, it seems, is just getting started.
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Contact Jay Busbee at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or on Twitter at @jaybusbee.