Ohio State’s starting quarterback competition is officially underway.
With the start of spring practice on Friday morning at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, each of the three young quarterbacks competing for the Buckeyes’ starting job – second-years C.J. Stroud and Jack Miller and true freshman Kyle McCord – will have their opportunities over the next four weeks to make their case for why they should be chosen to lead Ohio State’s offense in 2021.
Every pass they throw and everything else they do will be evaluated by Ohio State head coach Ryan Day and quarterbacks coach Corey Dennis, and how they perform this spring could ultimately determine who takes the first snap for the Buckeyes’ offense in their season opener at Minnesota on Sept. 2.
As spring practices begin, though, Day isn’t expecting perfection from any of them. After all, none of them have ever thrown a pass in an Ohio State game while Friday is the first time McCord will even participate in an Ohio State practice. What Day wants to see from each of them, though, is consistent development and improvement over the course of the spring.
“I’m really looking for leadership and the ability to kind of learn day in and day out, not make the same mistake twice,” Day said Wednesday. “It’s one thing to make a mistake. You don’t just jump on a bike and start riding. You’re gonna make mistakes, you’re gonna fall. But how quickly can you make the correction the next day? If you’re making the same mistake for two or three days, that’s not a good sign for a quarterback.”
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As the quarterback competition just begins to unfold, it’s unlikely Day will make any proclamations about who’s leading the competition any time soon. Day didn’t drop any hints on Wednesday – not that he had any reason to, given that they hadn’t even taken the field for their first practice yet – and he’s not going to be in any rush to name a starter this spring.
Unless one of them clearly separates from the others this spring, it’s most likely the quarterback competition will continue into preseason camp this summer with a starter being chosen at some point in August.
“The way that I look at it is you have 15 practices in the spring and then you have preseason, and preseason No. 1 is just the next practice of spring. They’re not two separate entities, they’re all a lead-up into the preseason,” Day said. “They all have a lot of learning to do. They haven’t had a lot of snaps, and to be fair, they need to kind of spend some time in this offense learning. And then as we start to get them into game situations through the spring and through preseason, we’ll have a better idea.”
All three potential starting quarterbacks will rotate with the first-team offense this spring, and Day said Ohio State will try to split up reps between the three as equally as possible. This won’t be the first quarterback competition he’s overseen at Ohio State – most notably, he was the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach when Dwayne Haskins, Joe Burrow and Tate Martell competed for the starting job in 2018 – so he’s confident they’ll be able to make that happen and ensure all three quarterbacks get a fair shot to win the job.
“We’ve kind of been through this before, where we’ve had several guys in there, and I think we do as good of a job of anybody of making sure that guys get equal reps and compete,” Day said. “And that’s gonna happen. There’s gonna be a lot of reps to go around.”
Of course, all three quarterbacks want to win the starting job and will be trying to do whatever they can to show they deserve it. What Day doesn’t want that to lead to, however, is friction between the quarterbacks. All three of them have expressed previously that they were looking forward to competing against each other, but Day also wants them to make each other better.
Rather than constantly focusing on where they might stand on the depth chart against each other, Day wants them to commit themselves to being the best quarterbacks and teammates they can be, and if they do that, he believes that will lead to the betterment of everyone in the room.
“What you can’t do is you can’t get in a daily battle with the guy next to you,” Day said. “You’re in a room, in a unit where you’re all playing the same position and typically only one plays. So that’s a unique situation in football. But I’ve been in those rooms my whole life. And what you find is the guys who fight it, the guys who end up in this kind of battle with the guy next to them and it becomes kind of friction there, it’s not good for either guy.
“And so some of the best, most fierce battles I’ve been around, they’ve become really, really close. And they have to just dive themselves into the process. They can’t worry, day in and day out, about ‘Am I gonna get one leg up on the guy next to me?’ Certainly it’s a competition, and there has to be a little bit of that, but what has to happen is you just have to get really just immersed in the process, and how do I get better every day?”
“I’m really looking for leadership and the ability to kind of learn day in and day out, not make the same mistake twice.”– Ryan Day on the quarterback competition
McCord, Miller and Stroud all have the physical tools to potentially be Ohio State’s next great quarterback; that much is evident from watching their high school film. And Day is excited by the fact that whoever wins the job will be at Ohio State for at least two more years, giving them time to work through the growing pains that typically come with being an inexperienced quarterback.
But Day also knows that even though Ohio State will have a young quarterback this year, it will still be expected to have a national championship-caliber offense. So it’s on his shoulders over the next five-and-a-half months to determine which of his three scholarship quarterbacks are most capable of making that happen.
In order to identify that, Day will be watching how his quarterbacks process what’s happening on the field and “anticipating what’s going on on defense as opposed to reacting.” And he’ll also be watching to see how their teammates rally around each of them.
“It’s not all gonna happen in one day. But as long as we can start to see a gradual movement toward those things, then that’ll be signs that things are going well,” Day said.
Due to ongoing COVID-19 protocols, the first practice of the spring will not be open to the media as it typically has been in years past. However, multiple Ohio State coaches and players will meet with the media via Zoom after practice, so stay tuned with Eleven Warriors for additional coverage from the first day of spring football.
