Hartline Gives The Buckeyes His Verbal
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Chris Nida
BuckeyeSports.com Staff Writer
It took Brian Hartline just about 24 hours to decide that he wanted to be a Buckeye.
Hartline, a 6-2, 174-pound wide receiver from Canton GlenOak, was at Ohio State’s football camp with his younger brother, GlenOak quarterback Mike, from Tuesday through Friday, and then Brian stayed around for the senior advanced camp on Saturday.
Rivals.com
With his verbal commitment to Ohio State Monday night, wide receiver Brian Hartline becomes the sixth member of Ohio State's recruiting class of 2005.
His performance there, combined with what the OSU coaches knew about him already, led the coaching staff to extend Hartline a scholarship offer. He accepted it Monday night, becoming the sixth member of the Buckeyes’ recruiting class of 2005.
“The offer is coming FedEx tomorrow,” Hartline told BuckeyeSports.com moments ago. “I talked to Coach Bollman Sunday night and he told me I had the offer. He told me that night I could verbal whenever. He said I could call back and verbal (then). I was like, ‘OK, coach.’ He said, ‘Really, you can.’ So I just decided to do it in the next couple days.”
Iowa, Michigan State, Stanford and Vanderbilt had already offered Hartline, but Purdue and Florida were the teams talking with him the most before OSU offered and he decided to end the process.
Hartline and his brother, who figures to be among Ohio’s top prospects in the class of 2006, stayed with fellow GlenOak product Dustin Fox throughout their stay in Columbus, which only helped the Buckeyes’ cause.
“At the very beginning of this process I was thinking, I’m Ohio State,” Brian Hartline said. “Then the process started going a little bit more and I started to think maybe it wasn’t the place for me. But I went down to camp this week and stayed with Dustin Fox and I camped there and I got to work out in the facility for five days, and I just decided that it was the place to be. The coaches are awesome and I fit in really well there.”
As a junior, Hartline caught around 40 passes for 300 yards and 6 touchdowns. He has been timed in the 40-yard dash at 4.59 seconds and has a grade point average of 3.8.