Jake Fromm, the other Georgia quarterback of the future

Jake Fromm wakes up at 4:30 a.m., before the sun has risen and before any heat in the late fall and early winter can warm the Middle Georgia earth.

Fromm doesn’t hesitate to stand up out of his bed. In fact, he often is one of the first in his family to do so. Plus all the equipment needed for the family duck hunting trip is packed up and ready to load, thanks to the wide-eyed 17-year-old taking the initiative to get to the water as soon as possible.

Forty-five minutes after waking up, at the latest, Fromm, his father, grandfather and any buddies tagging along begin the trip to Twiggs County to hunt some ducks. Fromm has ensured everything is packed so the hunters will have what they need, including a 10-foot Jon boat and a golf cart that sometimes will spend all of its battery getting from the parking spot to the lake, forcing the Fromms to push it back when the hunt is over. Packed, as well, are shotguns, shells, waders and decoys.

When they get to the lake, they can hear the creatures waking up in the crisp, cool morning.

Fromm wades through the water with the boat and leads the crew to the hunting hole.

“The best times are when you’re cracking ice,” Fromm said. “You know it’s going to be a good morning when you’re cracking ice, and it’s cold. You hope you don’t fall in. If you fall in, your hands are done.”

Hunting is as much a part of Fromm’s DNA as football is. It’s also as natural of an activity for Fromm to take a leadership role in. On game days for Houston County, Fromm is the quarterback putting his teammates in position to succeed.

He does the same on each hunt, taking the time to make sure all of the supplies are packed and that the hunters are in their spot to best hunt the game.

And as good as Fromm is at football, he would choose the hunting life if given the choice between that and competitive sports. Fortunately for Fromm, and for Georgia, the program he has committed to, he doesn’t have to make that decision.

Hunting is a way for Fromm to live a normal Houston County life while the pressure of competitive sports takes its toll. Ever since Jake was about 4 years old, he has accompanied his father, Emerson, on various hunts. He would collect the doves his father shot. When he was old enough to handle a firearm, he started joining the hunts.

The Fromms will go duck hunting roughly 15-to-20 times per year. They go dove hunting five-to-six times and deer hunting much more frequently at roughly 20-to-30 times each year.

“It kind of sucks sometimes because right at the end of football season is right when duck season and deer season really pick up,” Jake Fromm said. “It’s like, ‘All right Coach, I really want to go deer hunting this afternoon.’ But we got football practice. November, December and January, those are always fun. My family, we’ve been going to Louisiana the last couple of years after Christmas and having a duck trip over there. Man, it’s awesome. It’s a great experience for everybody.”

While he would love to hunt as much as possible, that’s ultimately a hobby. And while he’s not considered the most athletic in his family — his 15-year-old twin brothers Dylan and Tyler possess more natural athletic ability and his mother, Lee Fromm, was a basketball, track and softball star from Dublin — he possesses a skill that has given him a one-way ticket to the SEC.

“Between my brothers, they say I’m the least athletic one and that all I have is a right arm,” Fromm said.

All eyes on Fromm

As early as age 8, Fromm was attracting large crowds.

It started on the baseball diamond when he would crush home runs in Little League. Children his age and younger would crowd around when it was Fromm’s turn to bat.

So the attention he began drawing as a freshman quarterback in Houston County wasn’t anything new. And it wasn’t too hard to deal with the attention that came his way when his stock began to rise to high four-star status on the recruiting trail.

“We had little kids come up and hang on the fence, ‘Hey, has Jake batted yet?’ ” Emerson Fromm said. “Just to see if he could hit a home run. All the way from 8 to 13. Everyone in the park knew when Jake was about to bat. They’d get over there and try to watch and hit more. It’s almost comical now, but toward the end of his Little League career, there would be people showing up out of nowhere to watch a kid hit. He wanted to perform. He wanted to hit the ball, too.”

Fromm grew up a Georgia fan and dreamed of playing for the home-state Bulldogs. That dream seemed on its way to reality back when former Georgia offensive coordinator Mike Bobo saw Jake throw, thanks to a connection Bobo’s father, George Bobo, made with Jake at a camp in Cochran.

As Emerson Fromm tells it, Bobo was enamored with the quarterback’s ability. No doubt would a Georgia offer come his way. Then Bobo took the head coaching job at Colorado State.

In came Brian Schottenheimer, who did travel down to Houston County to watch Fromm practice. But a Georgia offer never materialized before his junior season. Instead of offering multiple quarterbacks, Schottenheimer, along with former head coach Mark Richt, elected to go after McEachern quarterback Bailey Hockman, who then committed.

“If it was Bobo’s decision, Bobo was going to pick Jake,” Emerson Fromm said.

At that point, Jake Fromm didn’t think he would play for Georgia. While the old Georgia staff didn’t want Fromm, the neighboring dynastic Alabama program did.

Former Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart was Fromm’s primary recruiter and did a terrific sales job on the Crimson Tide. And the method of Alabama’s recruiting differed from Georgia’s. While Richt and Schottenheimer were locked in on Hockman, Alabama put out multiple offers to top-tier quarterbacks.

“The old staff just played too many games in recruiting,” Emerson Fromm said. “Alabama doesn’t do that. They’re going to come to you and tell you, ‘This is what we’re gonna do.’ Georgia should have handled it the same way, ‘We’re going to offer the two of y’all and keep evaluating.’ ”

Jake Fromm figured he would roll with Alabama until the end.

But then Richt was fired, and Smart became Georgia’s head coach.

It didn’t take long for Smart to offer Fromm. It also didn’t take long for Hockman to decommit from Georgia and later wind up at Florida State.

“Coach Smart, as a person, his personality, he’s just a leader,” Fromm said. “He has a lot of charisma about him. When he talks, you really want to sit there and listen to him and hear what he has to say. I look up to him as a coach, and I really think he can change the players and the coaches around him and have everybody bought in. I really think we’re going to be able to win a national championship at Georgia.”

The duality of playing for Smart, as a head coach, and for the home-state team was too good to pass on.

Fromm also knew that meant telling Alabama head coach Nick Saban to he would no longer be joining his team, which turned into a tough 30-minute conversation.

“It was tough,” Jake said. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do to this day. I had to do it. It’s part of it.”

No, or not as much, pressure

Fromm will enroll early at Georgia but without the level of expectations placed upon the quarterback in the class ahead of him.

Five-star quarterback Jacob Eason, who enrolled at Georgia in January, has dealt with a lot of hype during the past year. The story line developed through time as it’s no secret Georgia’s quarterback play hasn’t been what the program is used to the past two years.

In 2015, the Bulldogs didn’t have a quarterback throw for 2,000 yards and only had two on scholarship for the TaxSlayer Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. With Eason grabbing a ton of headlines, Fromm has been able to take a bit of a backseat from an outside perspective.

“I think he’s going to surprise a lot of people when they get more of a look at him,” said Rusty Mansell, a recruiting analyst for 247Sports.com. “He is a very, very good quarterback. Georgia is going to be in a really good situation with those two kids competing head-to-head in the future.”

Fromm has yet to earn a fifth star from 247Sports.com, but Mansell said his standing as the No. 4 quarterback in the nation puts him right on that line of being in that category. Before his junior season, Mansell said he would’ve rated Fromm his third-best quarterback in the state. Now, he has Fromm at the top.

A lot of it has to do with the physical tools — the strong arm, his throwing mechanics and ability to make most throws on the field. A lot of it also has to do with his mental acumen. Mansell described Fromm as having the “it-factor” and being a “gamer.”

Houston County head coach Von Lassiter noted that the big-moment plays Fromm has put on tape the past two seasons stem from the amount of time he spends studying film.

“It’s a direct reflection of his work ethic in the video room — watching video, knowing what defenses are going to give him,” Lassiter said.

Jones County head coach Justin Rogers would certainly agree from what he has observed.

Rogers first watched tape of Fromm when Rogers took the Jones County job in 2014. It was Fromm’s freshman tape, in which Rogers quickly realized he had his work cut out in having to defend him. Jones County, which is no longer in the same region as Houston County, split the two games they played in 2014 and 2015.

Rogers said Fromm’s decision-making and ability to go through his reads without forcing the issue separate him from other quarterbacks in the state.

“There are guys all over the Southeast who can spin it and throw tight spirals and hard-velocity balls,” Rogers said. “But do they have the decision making to go along with that? That’s what makes him such a special talent and such a rare talent. He has all the components. And he has the charisma as well to be a leader. The mental part is a huge reason why he’s had the separation and success he’s had.”

Fromm said he really developed that part of his game after a 34-33 loss to Northside as a sophomore. In the high-scoring affair, Fromm said he was tossing the ball all over the field and being reckless. That game taught him a lot about being a quarterback. It’s not always about showing off the big arm. It’s about making the correct reads and the best decisions.

“When I go back to that game, I Brett Favre’d it. I threw it all over the place,” Fromm said. “I tried to sling it as hard as I could. I learned a lot from that game — what to do, what not to do. I learned a lot about game management. Our offense is really about completing balls and being on rhythm. If we have a good rhythm on offense, our offense is really hard to stop.”

Bright future

Fromm never has been one to sit still.

The energy level for the 17-year-old is quite high. On a recent spring afternoon, Fromm practiced with the Houston County baseball team for an hour before running to the football field.

He picked up a football and yelled, ‘Y’all ready?’ in the direction of the coaching staff. He stepped in with the offense and ran a six-or-seven play series before jogging back to the baseball field.

Fromm got home from practice and spent 45 minutes with his family. Then he and his friends went frog gigging until around 1 a.m. The next morning, Fromm was up at 6:30 a.m. to take his brothers to school.

“He’s one of those guys who will stay busy and will make you stay young,” Emerson Fromm said. “You’re not going to sit down and watch TV. I honestly can’t remember the last time he sat and watched TV.”

Jake Fromm will walk into a great situation at Georgia. If the Eason hype rings true, Fromm can redshirt, back Eason up for a season and potentially have three years as a starter if he wins the job. If Eason doesn’t seize the starting job in 2016, Fromm will walk into a quarterback competition as a true freshman.

It will also mark the first time Fromm will walk into a competition like this. At Houston County, he hasn’t had an elite-level talent pushing him at practice.

It’s a challenge Fromm is looking forward to.

“When you’re making that decision, you can’t worry about competition at all,” Fromm said. “I really wanted to be at Georgia from day one. That’s where I wanted to be. I grew up a Bulldog fan.”

This story was originally published May 7, 2016 at 4:14 PM with the headline "Jake Fromm, the other Georgia quarterback of the future."