EDITOR’S NOTE: Months of research led to a series, “Year of the Quarterback,” being presented in three waves. The first wave — 10 articles covering the volatile new world of the transfer portal — was published recently. This is the ninth story in the second wave, which tracks then-and-now journeys of 10 Stark County quarterbacks.
“Hang in there,” Jim Tressel told Hunter Wells, who had been bent on getting out of there.
Wells left Fairless as Stark County high school football’s all-time leader in passing yards.
He was about to leave his college team under less agreeable circumstances.
Three years in at Youngstown State, he was kicked out of the script written by a head coach, Bo Pelini, who didn’t recruit him. He’d started as a freshman for head coach Eric Wolford.
Wells was going to be Wolford’s next Kurt Hess, YSU’s starting QB from 2010-13 (and already in the athletic hall of fame).
The 6-foot-5 freshman began 2014 behind Pennsylvanian Dante Nania, a third-year Penguin. Wells was much taller than Nania, and, having thrown for 8,344 yards at Fairless, mirrored the 8,925 yards Hess gave the university.
Something about the kid spoke football, echoing from his Massillon-bred grandfather, Gary Wells.
Hunter’s favorite Christmas present as a tyke was a book titled “The Boy Who Wanted to Be a Quarterback.”
The chronicles of Nania became a short story. Nania played the opener at Illinois, a 28-17 loss, but he finished the home opener, a 31-7 win over Duquesne, with an ice bag on a sprained ankle.
Wells played Game 3 and fired four touchdown passes in a 44-13 rout of Butler.
“It should have been five,” Wolford said. “There was one we didn’t catch. For his first time out, he played pretty smooth.”
Nania returned for two starts before Wolford brought back Wells, saying, “Nothing seems to faze him.”
The rookie finished the year as the starter, through the finale against a North Dakota State team quarterbacked by Carson Wentz.
Wentz had quite a future, becoming the No. 2 overall pick in the 2016 NFL draft. Wolford didn’t, at least not in Youngstown, getting fired two days after a 35-14 loss. Coming off a 7-5 year, Athletic Director Ron Strollo was tired of not making the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) playoffs.
The Penguins were on a slippery slope, with attendance sinking as they drifted further from Tressel’s 1990s dynasty.
Tressel had gone full circle, jumping from YSU to Ohio State in 2001, resigning at Ohio State in 2011, taking over as YSU president in 2013.
Pelini, one of the loudest names in football, arrived in December of 2014. Youngstown Vindicator Sports Editor Ed Puskas opined:
“Tressel’s teams of the 1990s won four Division I-AA national championships and played for two others. They set a near-impossible standard and made the program the blueprint for what became the FCS.
“They needed Bo Pelini. And they got him.”
Pelini’s 67-27 record at Nebraska can be appreciated by the fact the Cornhuskers are 43-63 in their nine full seasons since he left. His temper got him in trouble, though, and his act eventually got old in Youngstown.
Pelini stuck with Wells for a year while giving some time to the more mobile Ricky Davis.
The opener, a 45-37 loss at Pitt, was anybody’s game when Wells threw a late 77-yard touchdown pass.
Close losses became the story of a 5-6 season. Identifying the next quarterback was the story of the offseason.
“I had started as a freshman in high school and in college,” Wells said. “It was a really humbling experience.”
Davis, who played high school ball at Cincinnati Moeller and Middletown Fenwick, opened 2016 as the starter.
The new No. 2 was a hot transfer, Trent Hosick, a finalist for the 2012 Wendy’s High School Heisman Award before signing with Missouri.
“I was with the team, but I was definitely on the way out,” Wells said. “I went to practice every day, but they had no intentions of playing me, and I had no intentions of playing.
“We kind of had a mutual agreement. I’ll give you good looks in practice on my way out.’”
He had his next school picked out. The plan changed.
Davis struggled. Hosick went down with an injury. A 24-10 loss at South Dakota State dropped the Penguins to 5-2.
Wells explained what happened next:
“They said, ‘Hey, we made a mistake. Is there any chance you would want to consider coming back? We’ll have a really good team around you. We’d like to have you come back and play.’
“I couldn’t say no, because I needed to play football,” he said. “It was a need and a want to prove everybody wrong.”
There were four games left in the regular season. Wells was rusty in a 13-10 win over Indiana State and shaky in a 24-3 loss at North Dakota State, at which point the fan mood was reflected by a post from “Penguin Nation” on YoungstownPenguins.com:
“(Hosick’s) injury made a bad situation worse. Wells is not the solution. It was outrageous to believe he was.
“If Wells had legit D2 prospects, and he sacrificed a year of eligibility to start a few games, and then gets benched again, then he got (misused) royal.
“If a promise was made to start Wells for the remainder of the season, then the coaches doomed our season.”
The post proved outrageous.
His mojo returned. After a 65-20 rout of Missouri State, Pelini said, “We threw very efficiently. I like what we’re doing.”
So did the FCS playoff selection committee, but a run to the finals seemed as likely as Youngstown getting picked to host an Olympics.
The Penguins beat an Alabama team, Samford, 38-24 in the first round.
Another Alabama team, Jacksonville State, filled its stadium for a second-round game, but the second play was a 70-yard bomb from Wells to Damoun Patterson. The Penquins won 40-24.
Game 3 brought a 30-23 overtime win against Wofford (South Carolina).
Then came the national semifinals at Eastern Washington. Brutal cold didn’t cool off the home team’s Cooper Kupp, or the reborn Wells. YSU rallied from down 31-20 in the fourth quarter to winning on Wells’ 5-yard touchdown pass to Kevin Rader with one second left. The final was 40-38
“We planned on double covering Kupp just about every play,” Wells recalls. “He still went for almost 200 yards.
“It felt like negative 20 degrees. Every hit hurt, but in the big picture it was worth anything you had to go through.”
During the week of the championship game − against James Madison in Frisco, Texas − President Tressel thought back 25 years to YSU’s first title, a wild comeback against Marshall. Back in Ohio, an estimated 10,000 greeted the Penguins at the airport.
“I never saw anything like it before,” Tressel told The Vindicator. “And I never saw anything like it after.”
The title game on Jan. 7, 2017, brought a comparatively anticlimactic 28-14 loss. Wells milked 244 yards out of 47 throws; James Madison ran all day and passed only 12 times.
A few days later, in the FBS finals, Alabama won 45-40 despite 405 passing yards by Clemson’s Deshaun Watson.
After the Browns passed on Mahomes, Watson and Kupp in the 2017 draft, Wells returned to Youngstown State as Pelini’s unquestioned starter.
Wells never warmed up to Pelini. He says he’d “go to war” for his first head coach, Wolford, whereas his relationship with Pelini was “strictly business.”
Yet, he says his latter days in Youngstown were “some of the best times of my life … I still had my friends … I still have a ton of respect for my offensive coordinator, Shane Montgomery.”
In the 2017 opener at Pitt, the Penguins trailed 21-7 before Wells threw late touchdown passes of 25 and 42 yards to Christian Turner.
His still kicks himself for an overtime interception that allowed Pitt to win.
He imagined joining Ron Jaworski and Cliff Stoudt as Penguin quarterbacks making it to the NFL. He took the Pitt game as evidence he could hang with the big boys.
“The next week, I separated my throwing shoulder,” he said. “Two weeks later I tried to rush back and re-separated it.
“I went pretty quickly from being on top of the world to …
“I don’t want to say I was mad at football, but I was ready to move on. I couldn’t keep trying to make the football thing work out and bet on being someone I’m not, maybe.”
The four straight 2016 playoff wins were real … and surreal.
A perspective: In the first 16 seasons after Tressel left YSU for Ohio State (2000-15), the Penguins won two playoff games. They have one playoff win since 2016.
For what it’s worth, Wolford’s record at YSU was 31-26. Pelini’s was 33-28, through his final season of 2019.
In high school, Wells led Fairless to its first playoff win. As in college, it took a while to break through.
Grandpa Gary Wells played on an unbeaten 1950s Massillon team that had a big-name quarterback, Joe Sparma. Hunter’s dad, Mark, also played for the Tigers.
As to possibly playing at Massillon, Hunter says, “There was always talk inside my family, but I was through and through a Fairless kid.”
Fairless was no gridiron dynamo.
“When I played, it was ‘beat Tuslaw, and that’s your season,’” Wells said. “There was never talk about the playoffs.”
The varsity was 3-7 when Hunter was a Brewster Elementary first-grader, and after that 0-10, 4-6, 5-5, 1-9, 2-8, 4-6 and 1-9.
That took him to his freshman year, when he became the varsity QB midway through a 1-9 year. He started as a sophomore on a 2-8 team and as a junior on a 3-7 team.
He was en route to a county record for passing yards (now held by 2023 Canton South graduate Jack “Poochie” Snyder now), without fanfare.
The Falcons took off in his senior year, making the playoffs at 7-3.
“It was a huge team effort,” Wells said. “It was the community coming together.
“It was the locker room group believing in each other, guys who had been together since we were kids.”
Fairless lost just 25-20 to unbeatable rival Manchester in Wells’ junior year. The previous four meetings were losses of 50-28, 68-0, 53-7 and 57-15.
Both teams were 3-0 when they met in Wells’ senior year.
“We felt we got wronged at Manchester the year before,” Wells said. “There was an extra level of concentration.
“We were down 14 with eight minutes left. They ran the ball. We couldn’t stop ‘em.
“We finally got a quick stop and a quick score. We got another stop and another score that forced overtime.
“We were up by seven in the third overtime. They scored and went for two. They’d been killing us up the middle. For whatever reason, they ran a toss and we shut ‘em down.”
Wells came away from the 49-48 win in a good place but with “a really bad sprained ankle.”
“After that I didn’t get to do much of anything but throw the ball around from inside the pocket,” he said.
He still helped the Falcons beat Tusky Valley 56-33, beat Tuslaw 63-20 in the regular-season finale, and beat Black River 51-42 in the school’s first playoff win.
Manchester routed the Falcons 35-7 in the second round.
“Give Coach (Jim) France credit,” Wells said. “He had a hell of a run at Manchester. We went 1-4 against him when I played, but it was a great feeling to be the team to knock ‘em off.”
Wells set a single-season Stark County record of 3,558 passing yards (surpassing ex-Massillon QB Justin Zwick’s 3,281) and made first-team Division V All-Ohio.
His head coach at Fairless, Don Wilson, said Wells put in the work to maximize his talent.
“The physical things he could do, a lot of high school kids just can’t do,” Wilson said.
Wells thought hard about going to the Falcons from Bowling Green, but he wasn’t a first choice there and redirected to Youngstown. He has a different view of how he made it:
“I tried to pride myself on the mental side,” he said. “I bet every quarterback I played with or against was physically more gifted than me.”
He was a senior when Fairless won a 42-31 shootout in Sugarcreek. A Garaway sophomore named Izzy Meese attended.
Izzy was a freshman on the Youngstown State women’s basketball team the year Wells went to the national finals.
“We were just friends in college,” he said. “She transferred to Ohio State, and we reconnected after college.”
They are married now, living in the Hills and Dales area near Canton. He is an inventory sales manager for Snyder Manufacturing in Dover.
Fairless’ 2021 team, like the 2013 team, got off to a 4-0 start. Game 4 was a 28-14 win over Northwest in which his brother, sophomore Carson Colucci, passed for 324 yards; another brother, senior Coltin Colucci, played both ways.
Carson was back on a 2022 team that went 9-3, including the second playoff win in school history, 47-22 over Orrville.
Coltin made 20 tackles as an Allegheny linebacker in a recent college game against St. Vincent. Carson is a freshman quarterback at Wheeling University.
“It’s so cool to watch them still playing football,” said Hunter, 28. “I’ve watched them religiously and they’re my best friends and my brothers.”
“Carson,” he added, “is a better quarterback than I was.”
He has a lasting respect for Tressel, now the retired Youngstown State president.
“He had so many conversations with me when I was going through that transition of being a starter, getting benched, coming back, the ups and downs,” Wells said. “I still talk to him and text him when I see something cool he’s doing.
“It was an emotional roller coaster at Youngstown State, but it taught me so many life lessons. I made so many great relationships with so many great people.”
He is a life-long Browns fan who thought his team had found a quarterback.
“I’m 28 years old and I’ve gone through the pains with the Browns my whole life,” he said. “I loved Baker Mayfield. I still do. He played through an injury and got punished for it, and …”
Wells is familiar with long stories about quarterbacks.
Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com
This article originally appeared on The Repository: Hunter Wells made mark on Stark County football, Youngstown State
