Printing an Entity Reference Field Value in a field collection in views-view-fields.tpl.php
I found my main answer from this question here.. Calling a field in views-view-fields--view-name.tpl.php ---- Error

My problem was excluding the display of the field. I assumed that I would want the field hidden as I wanted to show it elsewhere, but as I am overriding the views.view.fields.tpl.php anyway, I could choose to declare it or not.

As soon as I set the field to display again, I could use...

print $fields['field_link_to_content']-&gt;content;


If I had wanted to keep the field hidden, I could have used something like...

$row-&gt;field_field_my_custom_field[0]['rendered']['#markup']