The Ohio football team received two oral commitments from Georgia High School student-athletes leading up to next week’s National Signing Day.
Offensive tackle Nick Gibbons and wide receiver Jordan Reid will aid the Bobcats in replacing roster spots vacated by some of Ohio’s top seniors.
Gibbons is a 6-foot-4-inch, 295-pound product from Stephenson High School in Stone Mountain, Ga. He has offers from Boston College, Illinois, Wake Forest, Memphis and Marshall. Gibbons originally made an oral commitment to play for Memphis before changing his mind.
Despite the long distance between Stone Mountain and Athens, Gibbons has family near Columbus and said it is a quick flight home. He said the exposure on ESPN gave him a good idea of how the Bobcats play.
Ohio will be young in the offensive tackle position, with senior starters A.J. Strum and Joe Flading no longer with the team. Gibbons took his official visit to campus last weekend and was in attendance for Ohio’s basketball game against Miami Saturday. While in Athens, he received positive messages from the team.
“All the players I met over the weekend all had a lot of good stuff to say about the program and Coach Solich,” Gibbons said.
One of the reason Gibbons said he chose Ohio was because he wanted to play for a winning program.
“They all say they practice hard and work hard. That’s why they win, and that’s what I want,” he said. “I want to be on a winning program, and I want to be on a team that’s going to play hard.”
Gibbons said he played against fellow Ohio recruit and Georgia native Jordan Reid this season and met Reid at the Miami game.
Reid is a 6-foot-3-inch, 195-pound wide receiver who had 41 catches for 549 yards and three touchdowns last season.
Reid said having another player from Georgia in his class will help his transition to Ohio.
“It’s good because I have someone I know, someone to help me out a little bit so we can go through the same thing,” Reid said.
Reid only played football his freshman and senior years, having chosen to play basketball in-between. He said that makes him an under-the-radar player.
“Most definitely, my coaches tell me all the time if I would have played in the past, my sophomore and junior years, it would have made a major difference,” Reid said.
He said the program is on the rise, especially after Ohio won the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl, its first bowl-game win in school history. He also had an offer from South Dakota State.
“This program in a few years is going to be pretty good, so I wanted to be a part of that,” Reid said.
mk277809@ohiou.edu
