He wanted to stay under center, set on being an NFL quarterback following in the footsteps of his late cousin and former NFL quarterback, Steve McNair, who also grew up in the Magnolia State.
Yet, even with piling stats, Hodge wasn’t highly recruited as a quarterback coming out of Mendenhall, despite throwing for 3,808 yards on 198 pass completions, 43 touchdowns, 10 interceptions while rushing for 2,642 yards and 32 touchdowns.
“Schools like Ole Miss and Mississippi State came to my house and wanted me to play receiver or safety,” Hodge said, “and I’m like ‘I never played that in my life.”
They viewed Hodge as an athlete but didn’t really see him as a quarterback at the college level.
“I thought I was, and I still think I could be,” Hodge said with a grin.
Alcorn State University, a historically Black university where McNair became a four-time SWAC Player of the Year, offered Hodge to come play quarterback. Everything seemed to align perfectly. He was playing in his home state, doing it at the same school where McNair starred and earned a full Division-I scholarship to play quarterback at the next level.
Like many freshmen across the college football landscape, though, he took a redshirt year after playing a few games. It wasn’t ideal, but Hodge stuck with it. The following spring, he then made a tough decision to transfer from Alcorn State to Hinds Community College.
“I just had to make a business decision because at the time I didn’t feel like quarterbacks from the SWAC were going to the NFL,” he said. “So, I had decided to make the transition as a receiver.”
However, that semester at Hinds felt like a nightmare. It seemed like things were getting worse and, for a brief moment, he wondered if he had made the wrong decision for his football career. There weren’t any schools recruiting Hodge outside of lower-level Division II and Division III schools.
But then the unimaginable happened.
Willie Simmons, Alcorn State’s offensive coordinator when Hodge was there, got the head coaching job at Prairie View A&M University in early December of 2014, and gave a Hodge a call following his appointment.
“I kind of asked how he was doing and if he had signed somewhere, and he told me he hadn’t,” said Simmons, now Florida A&M head coach. “And I told him I had got the job at Prairie View, and he said, ‘well, bring me with you.’ I was like, ‘Well, that’s music to my ears.'”
Hodge had no idea what Prairie View A&M was or where the school was located, but he knew this was the…
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