FIESTA BOWL
Ohio State vs. Notre Dame, 1 p.m. Friday, ESPN, 1410
Taylor Decker’s phone rang midway through his senior year at Vandalia Butler High School on a day he stayed home sick. It was an unknown number, one easy to ignore. He didn’t know the area code.
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Then Decker listened to the voicemail and went upstairs to his mom’s room.
“Hey, mom, Urban Meyer just called me,” Decker said.
“Did you call him back?” Sheila Decker asked.
“Not yet,” Decker said.
Minutes later, Decker talked to his future coach for the first time. Ohio State hired Meyer in November 2011. The left tackle Decker had verbally committed to Notre Dame in March 2011 as a junior in high school. Ohio State hadn’t recruited Decker, and that was a tough pill to swallow, he said.
“I just had to move on to my next choice, and that was Notre Dame,” Decker said. “A great place. I still love it. A beautiful campus. Great people around there. But when the opportunity came to play at my No. 1 dream school, that’s just something I couldn’t pass up.”
In their first conversation, Meyer told Decker that Ohio State wanted to keep him in the Buckeye State. The new coach was scrambling to find recruits for the 2012 season.
“You’re on our board,” Meyer told Decker.
Meyer hired Notre Dame assistant coaches Tim Hinton and Ed Warinner, who are still on his staff. That helped make Decker’s transition from a Notre Dame recruit to an Ohio State recruit easier, but it was difficult at first.
“I was pumped, but at the same time, I’ve always been a pretty loyal person,” Decker said. “I was kind of put in an awkward situation. I was resistant at first, thinking, ‘I don’t know if I should come visit. I’ve been committed here for so long. I told people that’s where I was going to go.’ ”
In the end, Decker had to do what’s best for him. He switched to Ohio State in January 2012. Now his career comes full circle at 1 p.m. Friday when No. 7 Ohio State (11-1) plays No. 8 Notre Dame (10-2) in the Fiesta Bowl at University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. He will play the program he originally committed to in his final game at Ohio State.
The NFL awaits Decker, and that means this is a good week to look back. The 6-foot-8, 315-pound Decker has two older twin sisters and two older brothers, who were hard on him when he was little.
“I was kind of picked on when I was really little,” Decker said. “Obviously, now that doesn’t happen. My brother Justin was the one who got me playing football. I didn’t want to play football in first grade. He did. He basically told me, ‘You’re a girl if you don’t play football.’ Once I started practicing and playing, I loved it.”
Decker’s parents, Ron and Sheila, also laid the foundation for him to succeed. Making them proud is his biggest motivation.
“I’m really fortunate to have the support system I do,” Decker said. “A lot of my teammates don’t have that. They come from broken homes and bad family situations. I know I’m fortunate. All I can do to give back to them.”
Decker and the rest of the seniors can give back to the entire Ohio State fan base with a victory Friday. It would be the 50th in the last four years. No class in Ohio State history has won 50 games.
“I do think that’s going to be huge for us,” Decker said. “I know that I want that 50th win because that’s just kind of a microcosm — that one word, that one number — of what we’ve done in our time here. The program was kind of down when we got here and what we’ve done, what we’ve sacrificed, what we’ve put into it as players and coaches to get it back to where it is now, that’s huge.”
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