“THE BEST QUALITY CONTROL COACH IN THE COUNTRY”
As Matt Barnes shifts his focus to working extensively with the secondary rather than coordinating the special teams, one can safely assume Barnes endorsed the decision to make Fleming the new special teams coordinator. And not just because he’s being promoted in the process.
Having worked closely with Fleming for both of the past two years, Barnes has consistently praised Fleming as an up-and-coming coach who has been an invaluable resource to Barnes as his right-hand man on special teams.
“I’ve got the best quality control coach in the country in Parker Fleming, and he’s been a major, major help to me, and helped me bridge the gap in where there were maybe some differences in the terminology from things that I was used to to what had been done here,” Barnes said of Fleming in 2019. “He’s been integral in that meshing.”
The Ohio State specialists who have worked with Fleming for the past three years have been highly complimentary of him, too.
“The guy’s an absolute genius,” former Ohio State long snapper Liam McCullough said in 2019. “He knows our program, our schemes and our culture inside and out, and he weaves it together in a way that really, sometimes I’ll get in there and I’ll meet with him and he’ll say something or he’ll make me think about things or reflect on things where I’m like, ‘Damn, there’s no way. Nah, I think I got it. I think I know what I’m doing.’ And then I’ll walk out of the room and I’ll be like, ‘Damn, he’s really right.’”
HE HELPED DESIGN OLAVE’S PUNT BLOCK
In his first year as Ohio State’s quality control coach for special teams, Fleming helped create the Buckeyes’ most iconic play of the 2018 season.
Along with then-defensive coordinator Greg Schiano, Fleming designed the play that led to Chris Olave’s punt block that Sevyn Banks returned for a touchdown in the third quarter of Ohio State’s 2018 win over Michigan.
Urban Meyer gave Fleming credit for his part in that play after the game, admitting he did not want Schiano to call it but also acknowledging he was wrong.
“To tell you the truth, I didn't think we could do it,” Meyer said. “I saw it on Wednesday practice. And I grabbed Parker and I said, you can't, you only have 2.1 seconds to get there. And he's not that fast. And Schiano kept saying, we can do it, we can do it … Not the first time I've been wrong.”
