WVU Football: JT Daniels and what a long, strange road it’s been

JT Daniels’ long and winding trip through the college football landscape has landed him in Morgantown for one last shot at redemption with WVU football.

From the sideline of Lucas Oil Stadium, JT Daniels watched his Georgia Bulldogs beat The Alabama Crimson Tide 33-18 for its first national championship since 1980. It was an immediate celebration for a program that was finally able to beat their big brother.

But Daniels didn’t play. He began the 2021 season as Georgia’s starting quarterback, but Stetson Bennett became the starter after Daniels suffered an oblique injury. And the rest, they say, is history.

Unfortunate as it is, this has been the theme of Daniels’ college career so far. He has somehow found a way to become one of the NFL’s most interesting phenomena in college: a journeyman. He’s joined the folklore status of Ryan Fitzpatrick, Josh McCown, and Nick Foles, albeit less extensively. Though how many teams can a guy really go to in a college career?

After the national championship win and with Bennett returning to Georgia for his final year, Daniels decided he wanted to spend his last year of eligibility actually playing football and not as a backup, so he entered the transfer portal.

Daniels instantly became the most notable player in the transfer portal. He went 7-0 in his two seasons at Georgia and is coming from a program that just won the whole thing. Not to mention he was the number one high school recruit in the nation at one point, so the guy has something. It’s not like he has conned his way to USC and Georgia.

So who wouldn’t want to give him a shot? Soon teams came calling, and he started taking his visits. Daniels started his third recruitment in his many years by visiting Missouri and Oregon State. Then he announced that his third visit would be to West Virginia University.

After he visited WVU and coach Neal Brown, Daniels announced that he would be transferring to play for the Mountaineers. So, the college journeyman is taking one last trip down a country road to Almost Heaven, West Virginia.

His story is unique, with many ups and downs and trials and tribulations. Will his long journey pay off, or is he just meant to be a bridge guy? So, how did he get here?

It all started, like most stories, at the beginning.

What seems like ages ago now, JT Daniels was a quarterback prodigy at the High School powerhouse Mater Dei. As a freshman, he became a starter, tore it up, and went on to only play three years of high school football because he was so good that he left early to begin his college career. During his time at Mater Dei, Daniels threw for a cool 12,000 yards, 152 touchdowns to 14 interceptions with a QBR of 138.7. He even took home numerous individual awards in his final season at Mater Dei, including the Gatorade Football Player of the Year. I’d say that’s a pretty, pretty good career.

With a high school career like his, Daniels received a five-star grade and became the nation’s number one recruit. With that, he would soon follow the Mater Dei quarterback tradition and commit to quarterback for the USC Trojans.

In 2018 Daniels began USC’s fall camp as part of a three-way QB competition before officially winning the job, making him only the second true freshman in school history to start a season opener. His first season at the helm of the Trojan offense went completely fine. USC went 5-7, and Daniels started 11 of the 12 games, missing the one due to a concussion. And with how Daniels’s career has gone so far, it’s hard not to point at the concussion as the moment where things might’ve changed.

After a shaky spring, Daniels was again named the Trojan’s starter for the 2019 season and landed himself on the preseason watch list for the Davey O’Brien Award. An accolade given to the best QB for the season. That’s a ton of hype coming into the season.

Daniels, though, did not make it through a full game in the 2019 season.

In the second quarter of the Trojan’s season opener against Fresno State, Daniels tore his ACL after being sacked. What came next was obvious, and Daniels was ruled out for the remainder of the season. But what happened, in his relief, was not as obvious. Daniels’ backup Kedon Slovis absolutely balled out, led the team to an 8-4 record, and won PAC-12 Freshman of the Year.

With the explosion of Slovis into the world of college football, Daniels made a business decision to pack up his SPF 100 and special Hollywood autograph pen for peaches and a Quality Control chain. Daniels transferred away from the PAC-12 into the heart of college football, left beaches for peanut fields, and became a Georgia Bulldog in 2020. The NCAA even granted Daniels immediate eligibility because they just do whatever they want for no reason.

Did anything else notable happen in 2020?

Ah yes, Jamie Newman, a stud graduate transfer, came to Athens to battle Daniels and others to try and be the Bulldogs’ quarterback. Instead of that happening, though, a once-in-the-history-of-humanity pandemic began, and with the rise of COVID-19, Newman decided to opt out of the 2020 season over health concerns. Eventually, D’Wan Mathis would start the first game until getting replaced by Stetson Bennett.

As it would happen, Bennett would get injured in the middle of the season, giving Daniels his first taste of playing college football in over a year. In November against Mississippi State, Daniels would play the best game of his college career as he passed for 401 yards and four touchdowns that led Georgia to a win. After his excellent performance, Daniels was named the Bulldogs starter for the rest of the season and ended up helping the Bulldogs win all four of his starts and even the Peach Bowl.

We finally ended up at the beginning. Daniels entered the 2021 season as a Heisman favorite and a top-ranked NFL draft prospect. But, well, that didn’t happen. Again.

We all know what happened at the end of Daniels’s Georgia career. It was unfortunate, unlucky, and kind of just downright sad. I mean, what happened to him at USC basically happened to him at Georgia, except the backup went on to win the whole damn thing. Maybe Daniels should talk to Carson Wentz and see how he feels.

Please, God, don’t let Daniels end up like Carson Wentz. As a Mountaineer fan, I couldn’t take it.

Now that we went through Daniels’ unorthodox, cursed journey to West Virginia University, we can focus on the future — full of optimism and good times. Daniels was at one time the nation’s number one recruit and a five-star prospect. The mountaineers can celebrate that in my eyes because they hadn’t had a recruit that high since before Obama became president.

This is Daniels’s final year to be the guy he’s meant to be since leaving high school early. And there seems to be no on-the-field reason in his play or skill set that would lead me to believe he can’t. He’s been through the ringer, he’s been in injury hell, and he’s gotten unlucky in the guy behind him stepping up enough to take his job. With all this being said it’s not like his play has been that bad. The guy went 7-0 in the SEC with Georgia and won a bowl game. That’s better than any quarterback at WVU since Will Grier. And Daniels is stepping into an amazing position with WVU.

Neal Brown will be fielding the best offensive team in his tenure at WVU, which was enticing to Daniels. One of the unsung units of our team that will drastically help Daniels reach his full potential is that our offensive line will be really good. Daniels, who I expect to start, will get to line up behind an O-line that has 107 combined starts under their belts. Staying upright and hopefully not injured will make a big impact in Daniels’ game which will make a big impact on our offense.

Aside from the skill players surrounding Daniels, who all should be very solid from top to bottom, Daniels will get to reunite with WVU’s new offensive coordinator, Graham Harrell. Harrell was the offensive coordinator at USC when Daniels tore his ACL, and Kedon Slovis lit up the Pac-12, so Daniels has first-hand experience of the air raid offense Harrell will bring to WVU. He had to sit and watch how well Slovis played in it, and hopefully, he masters it even better than the guy who took his job.

Daniels has a lot to prove in 2022. Not only does he have to prove that he can still play at an elite Heisman trophy candidate and NFL prospect level, but he has to show that he isn’t snakebit by injuries after missing 35 games in three years.

The type of journey that Daniels has had will either flame the fire in him or put it out. The only way to tell is when the season is all said and done. But that’s life, the journey is never over, another one just happens to start. Daniels comes to Morgantown with by far the most experience and maybe the best skill out of everyone in the quarterback room and will hopefully make a lasting impact on the program by helping Brown turn the corner on this ugly mess.

If Daniels journey has shown anything it’s the complete unpredictability of sports and how your moment on top is not only not promised but always a hair away from being taken away from you. There’s chaos to it all, an ugly beauty that shows just how fleeting it all is. It may sound like a hyperbole, but in the microcosm of sports, it isn’t.

It’ll be exciting to see how Daniels career arc ends because his past is behind him. All he went through is behind him. He has a chance to show how special he is and join the ranks of other late blooming quarterbacks who went through a gauntlet like a Joe Burrow or Kenny Pickett. Who knows, sports are strange. But hopefully his best is before him when he puts on the blue and gold.

The opening game will be the perfect test for Daniels and WVU to turn it around. The Mountaineers play their long-time rival Pittsburgh in the Backyard Brawl, which is always a fierce game with a lot on the line. For Daniels, though, it can be a revenge game because he gets a chance to face up against the first guy to take his job, Kedon Slovis. Here’s to Daniels putting his long, strange trip behind him and looking to what’s ahead: the best football he’s ever played.