Ohio State Football: The unfortunate case of Marcus Hooker

The Ohio State football program has a long history of recruiting excellent defensive backs. Malik Hooker was one of those backs. He had one of the best single-year runs in Ohio State football history back in 2016, snagging 7 interceptions and returning 3 for touchdowns.

That led to him being a first-round pick. His brother, Marcus Hooker, came into the program a couple of years later hoping to have the same sort of success. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Now, Hooker has decided to enter the transfer portal and leave Ohio State.

Hooker’s career started out promising. He started the 2019 season as the starting free safety when he was a redshirt freshman. He recorded 15 tackles and 1 interception that year but was pulled from his starting duties midway through the season.

That was the start of a downhill slide for Hooker. His play was bad enough on the field to get him benched, but his behavior off the field is what kept him from getting another chance to earn any time on the field. Quite frankly, he’s lucky he wasn’t kicked off the team.

That’s because Hooker had two separate DUI incidents. He was suspended for both of them indefinitely, which ended up not being very long in either case. Even so, the writing was on the wall. Hooker was never going to be a part of the program’s success.

It’s a shame that it ended this way because I do think Hooker had some talent. He just needed to make some better decisions off the field and work a little harder to fix the issues that had him get pulled in 2019. I think he could have worked himself back on the field.

As it is now, Hooker will try to revive his college football career somewhere else. It’ll be interesting to see where he goes next.