Well before Cardale Jones became a household name for leading the Buckeyes to a Big Ten championship over Wisconsin, a national semifinal win over Alabama, and a national championship over Oregon, the massive quarterback was throwing touchdowns for Cleveland’s Glenville High School. He could toss the hell out of a football back then, too.
He graduated from Glenville in 2011, spent a year at Fork Union Military, and wound up at Ohio State in 2012 as a 3-star recruit, ranked by Rivals.com as 12th best prospect coming out of prep school. The Cleveland-connection for the redshirt sophomore has been all over the news recently (like in this long Dec. 31 feature by the New York Times, and this retrospective piece on cleveland.com about his high school days among the countless others), so we’ll spare you even more of that and just show you some of his highlight videos from back in the day.
Here are some highlights from 2009, his junior season, showing the quarterback could sling it far even then:
And here’s 10 minutes from his senior season, played over songs that were somehow popular at the time, where he just lets loose on the long balls:
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2015.
