BlinkDash

NAPERVILLE, Ill. — Two thousand miles from home and one thousand miles from his son, three schools removed from where he first committed and two from where he first played, former five-star prodigy Blake Barnett steps into a hotel conference room the night before his third game as a starter at South Florida and recounts his hectic past.

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Barnett is relaxed now, at peace with the decisions he has made and comfortable with the idea that many folks still have questions. This was the first thing he laid bare upon choosing another school, arriving at USF this summer to greet another group of college teammates (his third) and learn another offense (his fourth).

“Coming here, one of the biggest things that I was trying to do was prove myself,” Barnett tells The Athletic. “Not only to the coaches, but to the team. Because for every reason possible they should be skeptical of me and my past and everything that’s happened, and I completely understand that.”

Others may view that past as baggage, and Barnett understands that, too. It is a negative thing in some people’s minds, he says. But to look back and have any second thoughts would be akin to rewriting history. It would mean finding a way onto the field, something he did not see happening in his first two stops at Alabama or Arizona State. All of that has led him to an upper-tier Group of 5 program in a city, Tampa, he and his wife like raising their son in, while having the opportunity to take the field for two seasons.

Early returns have been positive: Barnett won the starting job in camp and has led the Bulls to a 3-0 record, with two wins against Power 5 teams. He ranks No. 8 nationally in total offense (352.3 yards per game) and 11th in total passing yards (918), nearly half of which (411) came in Saturday’s game in Chicago, where he led a fourth-quarter comeback from down 12 points against Illinois capped by a 50-yard touchdown pass with less than three minutes remaining.

“Coming in, he was just trying to really figure out our personnel, really where guys like the ball, their route running, who likes what, and he can sling it,” tight end Mitchell Wilcox says. “If you have all the tools like he does, it’s not that difficult for him.”

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Barnett’s first three years at this level left him with no choice but to have the humility to overcome the narrative of his college career.

“It’s tough in the moments to think that things aren’t hard, especially when you’re in the midst of transferring and the outside drama that kind of goes in that,” Barnett says. “But looking back now, there’s absolutely nothing that I regret. I’m happy to have been at those places. Each place I went, I was extremely happy, and it wasn’t a matter of me being happy or me being sad. The simple reason was just me wanting to play, and me not playing was altering my happiness, and I just wanted to get back to the football that I had in high school where it was just fun, it was being able to play and compete and be out there with your team.

“And is it selfish? Yeah, it is, honestly. A lot of it was selfish decisions, but at the end of the day I have to do things in order to reach the goals that I want for myself and now for my family. So, if anything, it just made me learn, made me grow, gave me more motivation through all this time, and now I’m happier than ever and I’m with a team that I really, really enjoy and I still have relationships that I made at those other places.”

There was a time, before he became a husband and before he became a father, that Barnett was vulnerable to the kind of outside criticism most high-profile recruits cannot avoid. There was plenty of it when he first decided to transfer from Alabama a month into his redshirt freshman season.

“You know where it was coming from,” Barnett says when asked for the source of his online trolls, a reference to fans of the Alabama program that he still holds a national championship ring from as a reserve in 2015.

Barnett started the 2016 opener for Alabama but soon gave way to Jalen Hurts. He left the team by the end of September, prompting a one-way ticket home to Corona, Calif., to enroll in online community college courses and accelerate his eligibility for his next stop.

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An only child — he has a 31-year-old stepsister — Barnett lived with his parents for four months, often alone in his own thoughts. He passed the time by training for five or six hours a day, regularly visiting local private quarterback coach Jordan Campbell or driving an hour south to work with George Whitfield.

“I went through a long period of time where I got rid of every social media, and I just couldn’t do it because it was just, it was rough, it was like really bad,” Barnett says. “And I’ve always been someone that stays pretty calm and mellow, and it was tough. But I think that really allowed me to mature and have self-confidence in myself, no matter what other people say or what they do. And not that that should even be an issue in the first place, but when I was at home alone and I was by myself, there were times where it sucked.”

The worst of it? Barnett will only go so far, laughing at the absurdity of it all now and preferring to let outsiders’ imaginations run wild.

“I’ll just put it this way,” he says. “You know what’s funny — and I’m trying to put this in the most like normal way possible — but one of the things, the funniest things on Twitter is when you see celebrities read mean tweets. If I read some of the worst ones, it would be like, some people would probably be a little surprised.

“But I laugh at it now. It’s pretty funny. I mean, I still to this day get crap on Twitter. … It’s hard not to laugh at it now, but I think about it all the time. I was like, Man, if I put a video together, if I put a Pic Stitch or whatever of all these tweets, some people would laugh. Some of the things that people have to say are pretty amazing, especially when I was 19 years old, but whatever.”

It did not help that the game’s greatest coach publicly said at the time that Barnett was nervous in his first start with the Crimson Tide. Nick Saban essentially called Barnett a quitter after he left, too. Barnett has said all he will say on Saban, citing his quotes from a 2017 ESPN.com article that came back to bite him.

Alabama was two schools ago, anyway. He ended up at Arizona State after ’Bama thanks in large part to the recruitment of coordinator Chip Lindsey, who ended up leaving for Auburn a month after Barnett committed to the Sun Devils. Barnett was granted an NCAA waiver to be immediately eligible last season, but incumbent Manny Wilkins started all 13 games under head coach Todd Graham, who was let go at the end of the year.

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Barnett had planned to give it another shot with the new regime led by Herm Edwards. He cites new Sun Devils offensive coordinator Rob Likens — a holdover from the previous staff — publicly saying early in the spring that Barnett was competing for a backup spot behind Wilkins as a cue that things were not going to change in Tempe.

“I was like: All right, at this point you just like sealed the fate of that,” Barnett says.

Barnett added three junior college classes on top of a five-class course load at Arizona State so he could graduate and be eligible elsewhere for the 2018 season. There was a lot of cramming — on top of becoming a father in March — and he makes no bones about the calculated nature of his major.

“So it was communications and sports broadcasting at Alabama, and then because of all that craziness, I needed the fastest track to graduate,” he says. “So yeah, liberal studies with an emphasis on business and communication.”

He has one degree and no complaints, especially with two years left to earn a master’s in entrepreneurship at USF’s business school.

Sterlin Gilbert laughs when asked if he has ever hosted a baby as part of a recruiting visit. Of course he hasn’t. The fact that 6-week-old Brooks Barnett slept the whole way on his parents’ flight to Tampa had to be a good omen, though.

Blake and Maddie Barnett brought Brooks everywhere when they toured USF’s campus in the spring. They were not sure of what they were looking for, but the chance for Blake to compete for a starting job, the opportunity for Brooks to be raised in a city his parents like and the convenience of Maddie having a sister three hours away in Jacksonville all added up to the ideal situation.

“(Brooks) hasn’t shown up at a meeting yet,” says Gilbert, USF’s offensive coordinator. “But when he does, we’re gonna get him coached up.”

Brooks would have a faster start than his dad, that’s for sure. Blake Barnett actually grew up wanting to be like his own father, who was into motocross as a teenager. From ages 6 to 12, Barnett gave it a shot, too, going through $3,000 bike after $3,000 bike — five in all — while racing other kids his age. It’s expensive, and it becomes apparent early which youngsters have what it takes to make some money in it when they grow older.

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Barnett was not one of those prodigies. So he began to play football. Even then, he did not start until his junior year at Santiago High School, and everything hit him really fast from that point on: a UCLA offer after his fourth game, the 2014 Elite 11 MVP award, a top-two position ranking from all the major recruiting services and a premature verbal commitment to Notre Dame before he signed with Alabama and enrolled early in January 2015.

All of that talent is still there, packed in his 6-foot-5, 217-pound frame. Maturity is the buzzword most often used by Barnett and those around the USF program to describe his growth, both on and off the field.

“He’s athletic; he can touch any part of the field with his arm,” Gilbert says. “The development part is probably understanding the knowledge of the offense. I think that’s where the growth comes from, because he’s still really young in this offense, and that’s where he’s got so much room to grow from a quarterback standpoint. Just continue to be tight with his mechanics, understand where to take the football and then take the football in the right places.”

Barnett does not speak ill of all the old hoopla, instead crediting that whirlwind for bringing him into contact with many of his best friends in football today.

It brought him much more than that, too.

Blake Barnett and Maddie Peterson actually met in the Tampa area in 2015, when he visited St. Petersburg for the Under Armour All-America Game. He had connected earlier on social media with Maddie, a pro surfer and model who was sponsored by Under Armour, and the two got together at Tropicana Field. He proposed 18 months later on a beach in her hometown of Wildwood Crest, N.J. — “It was a little cliché,” he says — and the couple married Aug. 24, 2017.

Barnett mostly wears rubber rings that he orders from Amazon, replacing them in practice and games with tape. The actual wedding ring? That was about $9, purchased at Walmart, and the candid Barnett says he does not even know where it is anymore, though he was savvy enough to make sure the ring he gave Maddie was of finer taste.

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The family of three now resides in an apartment nine minutes from the USF campus, and Blake Barnett calls his wife a miracle worker for the way she manages their daily routine with their son.

“She’s there with him every day,” he says. “I feel bad because it drives her nuts sometimes, because she gets stuck in the house. We only have one car, so I have to drive to practice, so being able to spend as much time as I can with her and still being able to manage to go to class — I have class three nights a week — going to practice, lifting. I’d say it’s tough on me, but it’s equally as tough on her just in a different way, because she’s at home with him more than I am. I’m just running around all the time, so being able to make time for him and for her, just being controlled chaos all the time.”

Barnett says he never voluntarily held a baby until Brooks was born. They were too delicate, he says, and he had no interest. His perspective is different now. Life is precious, and there is nothing like a newly born 9-pound bundle of joy to drive that point home.

“It made me a lot more mature in the sense of, What do I want my son to look up to as a baby and growing up as an infant?” Barnett says.

The next day, he throws for the second-most yards in a game in school history. For the first time since his father arrived at USF, Brooks is not there to witness the action. The 6-month-old is back in Tampa with his mom, sticking to home games for now, still knowing only of a world with calm flights, rubber rings and a perfect record.

(Top photo: Robin Alam / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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