The scene was classic Joey O’Connor.

As students, teammates, parents, teachers, administrators and community members filed through the doors of the Windsor High School cafeteria Wednesday night to help O’Connor celebrate the signing of his national letter-of-intent to Ohio State University, one of the nation’s top football recruits greeted every person who walked through the door with a hand shake or a hug.

Unlike a lot of top recruits around the country who sat at a table with four or five college hats in front of them while holding televised press conferences on ESPN to milk their announcements to the max, there was O’Connor making sure everyone who came out to celebrate with him felt right at home.

That’s the Joey way.

“I’m just another average Joe. I’m another student here at Windsor High School, and that’s how I think of myself,” O’Connor said before the signing ceremony. “I’m not any big time — ‘Yeah, I’m going to Ohio State.’ I hope that someone in the next few years goes somewhere bigger. I’m just trying to be like everybody else. Everyone thinks it’s all fun with the fame and everything, It’s not fun. It’s stressful. It’s hard, but I definitely have my support to keep me grounded and help me from getting that big head and staying humble.”

PROMISES NOT TO DISAPPOINT

After greeting everyone, O’Connor then told a crowded room of supporters inside the cafeteria that he wouldn’t disappoint them.

“I won’t disappoint you. I will work hard,” O’Connor said to more than 150 people who helped him celebrate his special day. “I’ll do everything I can to represent Windsor well.”

Hold him to his word.

All the 6-foot-4, 295-pound O’Connor has done for Windsor football fans since he stepped onto the field as a starting offensive lineman his freshman year to becoming an All-American offensive tackle his senior year was give them a reason to smile — all the way to a Class 3A state championship victory over Silver Creek in December.

“It’s crazy and humbling to see all this happen, and the support that I have is what really helps me get through it, especially my mom,” O’Connor said. “She’s the one who helps me stay grounded and helps me through it all.”

O’Connor, the son of Ann and Joe O’Connor, signed his letter-of-intent at 7:01 a.m. Wednesday and Ann faxed the letter to Columbus, Ohio, an hour later when she got to work at the University of Northern Colorado.

“He’s my special guy. He gets it,” Ann O’Connor said. “Joey’s that kid that just keeps everybody in our family going, and he does things the right way. He makes good choices. Family is important to him and the people that are around him. He’s a very passionate kid, and that’s what makes him so special. It is important to him that he does well for the community, and that he doesn’t let people down.”

O’Connor and his mother have had plenty of heart-to-heart talks during the crazy recruiting process.

“It’s been lots of talks just focusing on goals and making sure that he’s on the right path and that he can do whatever he sets his mind to,” Ann said.

BIG-TIME RECRUIT

O’Connor, a four-star (out of 5) recruit and Under Armour All-American, is part of Ohio State coach Urban Meyer’s first recruiting class. Rivals.com ranked the class as the fourth best in the country, while ESPNU ranked it as the No. 6 best class in the nation. A one-year bowl ban and probation, the resignation of head coach Jim Tressel in 2011 and the loss of scholarships imposed by the NCAA on the Ohio State football program when players sold memorabilia in exchange for cash and tattoos didn’t seem to matter to recruits once Meyer was hired as head coach on Nov. 28.

“I’m going to go in trying to play at center. I feel like I have the leadership and the ability to play center,” said O’Connor, who will turn 18 on Wednesday. “If not, then I’ll move to guard.”

O’Connor, ranked as the 102nd best player in the country by Rivals.com and No. 104 in the ESPNU 150, is the first Windsor lineman to receive a Division I football scholarship since Broc Finlayson signed with Colorado State University in 1997.

“It’s great that I’m ranked in the top 150, but that’s now what matters to me,” O’Connor said. “What matters to me is finding a place that I’m going to fit in and enjoy and have fun the next four or five years.”

O’Connor, who received his first recruiting letter his freshman year from UCLA, never imagined that his national ranking as a player would end up as high as it did.

“I thought for sure two star, CSU and CU and a couple of other schools but nothing like this,” said O’Connor, who bench presses 405 pounds and squats 615 pounds. “It’s humbling to see all this happening.”

O’Connor verbally committed to Penn State in June 2011, but decommitted from the university on Nov. 10 following the child sex-abuse scandal involving former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky and the firing of head football coach Joe Paterno, who passed away from lung cancer on Jan. 22 at 85. O’Connor narrowed his five schools down to Ohio State, Cal, Iowa, TCU and Boise State.

CONNECTING WITH URBAN MEYER

O’Connor told Windsor head football coach Chris Jones after he decommitted from Penn State that the one coach he’d like to play for was Meyer, whom at the time was a college football analyst for ESPN. Eighteen days later, Meyer was hired at Ohio State and O’Connor e-mailed the Ohio State recruiting office after Windsor’s state championship game saying he was interested in going to Ohio State.

“Fifteen minutes after I sent the e-mail, I got a call from Urban Meyer,” O’Connor said. “In that 15-minute gap, they were watching my film and making sure that I was good enough to play at Ohio State. The next thing he did was call me and see what kind of person I was.”

Once O’Connor decommitted from Penn State, his recruiting experience got crazier than ever from late-night phone calls to coaches visiting the high school daily, some of them arriving unannounced.

“I’d get 30 calls a day over and over again. It exploded. Everyone starts to sound the same. At Division I, everyone has state-of-the-art facilities,” said O’Connor, who admits to never being a college football fan or watching college football while growing up because of his love for hockey. “It comes down to the character of the people, the integrity of the coaches and players.”

CRAZY RECRUITING PROCESS

O’Connor will be the first one to say that he hates all the publicity, and he doesn’t really care about the attention from local media to national media such as the recent ESPN The Magazine story and photo on O’Connor.

“I hate all the attention. I don’t need it,” O’Connor said. “If you don’t have that mind-set as an offensive lineman, then you’re not an offensive lineman. I don’t need the cameras. I don’t need the newspaper articles. I just want to go to school, and I just want to play football.”

O’Connor’s father said the last thing the family and his son wanted was the attention.

“He just wanted to play football, and he wanted to go to college and he wanted to go to a place that had tradition,” Joe O’Connor said of his son. “It was a revolving door of coaches every day, unannounced, no appointment just showing up. What do you do with that? There were times coach Jones was just inundated, and that’s not fair to his students, faculty and everybody else. Eventually, the ladies at the office ran damage control for everybody.”

Joe O’Connor said the mail his son received over the recruiting process was unbelievable.

“Our mail lady, I want to stop her one day and thank her. She’s stuffing our mail boxes with pounds of mail a day,” Joe O’Connor said. “Not every other day, or every three or four days, but every day. It got a little bit monotonous.”

According to the Ohio State football website, O’Connor is believed to be the first football recruit from Colorado to sign a letter of intent with Ohio State since Chris Sanders, from Denver’s Montbello High School, did in 1990.

O’Connor said he’s looking forward to playing for Meyer, whom he said stood out over all the other coaches who recruited him.

“He’s a genuine person,” said O’Connor, who plans to major in criminology at Ohio State. “He doesn’t talk to me like I’m just another piece of meat. He talks to me like a human being, and he talks to me like he cares about me and not just about what I can do on the football field. He’s more intrigued by what I do off the football field and what type of person I am.”

THE TOTAL PACKAGE

Windsor High School dean of students Kevin Copher said O’Connor is very special off the field.

“I think Joey is one of those kids that is so authentic and cares very deeply about others around him,” Copher said. “It’s not about him on the field. He’s always thinking about others first, and that’s such a marvelous characteristic to have not only as an athlete but as a student body president and an academic scholar in the classroom. He’s just a really genuinely neat, young man.”

Windsor High School principal Jeanne Findley says O’Connor is the total package.

“He has the academics, he’s athletic, he has the leadership, he has a kind heart,” Findley said. “He is the total package.”

Jones said he knows the type of football player and person he’s coached for the past four years and the kind of kid that Windsor is sending to Ohio State.

“I know he’s going to be successful because that desire is so tied to everything he does,” Jones said. “He makes sure that everything he does is about him being the best Joey O’Connor football player he could be.”

Windsor athletic director Mark Kanagy said Ohio State is getting a gem.

“We are sending them a very strong, very intelligent, very kind and passionate kid,” Kanagy said. “If he gives them half of what he’s given us, there’s going to be great things ahead.”

The what ifs of Windsor High School star lineman Joey O’Connor’s recruiting experience are what make his story so fascinating. When O’Connor verbally committed to Penn State in June 2011, he fell in love with everything the university had to offer, from the football program to the coaches to the campus and academics. Things changed drastically for O’Connor and his family in November. The 6-foot-4, 295 pounder decommitted from Penn State on Nov. 10 following the child sex-abuse scandal involving former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky and the firing of legendary head football coach Joe Paterno when he didn’t do enough to stop the abuse. After his dismissal, Paterno was soon diagnosed with lung cancer and died on Jan. 22 at 85. What if the Sandusky scandal never happened? With Paterno’s death, would O’Connor still have signed with Penn State less than two weeks later knowing that they’d be looking for new head coach? O’Connor, a four-star (out of 5) recruit who will play for Ohio State in the fall, said all along that he was all in at Penn State no matter how long Paterno remained as coach. “Definitely. I’m going to Ohio State, but I’m still a Penn State fan of what it used to be,” O’Connor said. “I went into this when I committed to Penn State knowing that there’s a possibility that Joe Paterno would not be around. Maybe one year he’s around. You have to go into thinking about all that. You have to play devil’s advocate for everything. It was cool to be able to meet him. It was an honor to be able to meet him and kind of get to know him a little bit. It’s heartbreaking to see the things that happened and the way he had to go out because it all happens for a reason.” Joey and his parents — Joe and Ann O’Connor — visited Penn State on an official visit the weekend of Sept. 24. The O’Connors were invited into Paterno’s home on a Sunday morning visit and sat at Paterno’s kitchen table talking to the coaching legend. “We actually sat at that table where he raised his kids and visited with him there,” Joe O’Connor said. Joey said he couldn’t believe it when he heard that Paterno had died. “I sat at his kitchen table. You watch the TV and say, ‘This isn’t happening.’ I talked to that guy a couple of months ago,” Joey said. “He will forever be the legend. It’s a shame that people are going to look at him as the guy who didn’t do enough. As much as he did for that university, that’s the best part and people will always look at the negatives. Yeah they’re big, but the stuff he did for that university is unreal. It kind of took its toll on me. I was down for a couple of days because I felt like I was part of that Penn State family, and all of sudden it’s just a wreck.” Joey’s father agreed that Paterno was not the deciding factor in his son’s decision to go to Penn State. “It was the people that really had that message from Paterno,” Joe O’Connor said. “It was (assistant coaches) Bill Kenney and Bill Kavanaugh, the people that were 100 percent bought into the Penn State philosophy and all of the support that they had. At the end of the day, I even told him, ‘There might be a chance that you bury Paterno. He may not live through your four years, or even the first year. You still want to go?’ He said, ‘Oh yeah.’ ” At the time of Joey’s visit to State College, Pa., Paterno had run a scandal-free program since he took over in 1966 at Penn State and ended with the most victories (409) in Division I football history. Joey might have been one of the last recruits to ever sit with Paterno at his kitchen table and visit Paterno’s modest house. “It was probably the smallest house in that campus area, and he lived there 40 years. The guy was in the phone book,” Joe O’Connor said. Joe O’Connor said Paterno showed signs of being ill when they met with him. “Ultimately at 85, anything can happen,” Joe O’Connor said. “Joey was probably the last recruit to visit with him prior to the scandal, the last recruit for sure that was in his office and his home. It really is a little overwhelming. It really is. It’s really crazy to think about that.” The senior O’Connor said Paterno was still alert and knew all about his son’s accomplishments and skills. “He never did a lot of recruiting out in Colorado, but he really understood that this was a special deal coming out of Colorado,” Joe O’Connor said. “He was very articulate and very sharp.”