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Future Ohio State - Michigan QB Battle Starting to Take Shape

+9 HS
Defiance's picture
by Defiance
May 19, 2020 at 1:07pm
91 Comments

As we are all aware of as members of 11W, football recruiting is a 24/7/365 day endeavor. Whether your personal favorite is titled The Hurry Up or Dotting The 'Eyes, the message is pretty clear that the goal is to keep up with a constantly evolving picture of current events and trends on the recruiting trail:

The Hurry-Up is your nightly dose of updates from the Ohio State football recruiting trail, keeping tabs on the latest from commits and targets from around the country.

Stay in touch or be left out because Ohio State recruiting is a 24-hour, seven-day-per-week obsession. What’s the latest news as the Buckeyes build for the future? Get that and more Sunday through Thursday on Lettermen Row. 

With that being said, while we are enjoying the build up to the 2020 CFB season in whatever shape it may happen to be, we are also enthralled with the building of the 2021 recruiting class. While our primary focus is on tOSU and who will be suiting up for The Buckeyes, we also keep a close eye of the entire CFB landscape. One of the places we most like to keep tabs on is the B1G and specifically, a certain rival who resides to our North and even more specifically, the recruiting battles that involve players being recruited by both schools.

One such battle that we've watched closely for the 2021 class is QB. As in most years, the QB position carries a greater amount of time and effort as they are expected to be the proverbial field general both on the field and many times in the recruiting process as classes take shape. The 2021 QB recruiting saga is one that has had an extra amount of intrigue as offers went out to some the top rated QB recruits across the country. 

After wrapping up their 2020 quarterback recruiting by signing CJ Stroud and Jack Miller, two of the country’s top QB’s, the Buckeyes set their sights on landing a great 2021 quarterback. Scholarship offers went out to Kyle McCord, J.J.McCarthy and others. The staff had McCord No. 1 on their list and it was a mission accomplished when McCord announced a commitment to Ohio State on April 30, 2019. McCarthy subsequently committed to Michigan on May 11, 2019.

Make no mistake about it, it's no coincidence that JJ McCarthy committed to Michigan less than two weeks after Kyle McCord committed to The Ohio State Buckeyes. The former made no bones about feeling disrespected when the latter made his announcement and the battle lines have been drawn early between these two as the futures QB's in a long standing rivalry that we know all too well. There's a reason they refer to it as The Game, right?

While we are excited to see how this played out once both commits put pen to paper and prepared to suit up for their chosen squads next year, what we didn't know was we may get a chance to see a preview sooner than we thought. This is being made possible by JJ McCarthy's decision to transfer to IMG Academy and the chance that JJ's new IMG teammates may be suiting up against McCord's squad this year.

Today McCarthy (from Illinois) announced that he will play his senior football season in Florida for Bradenton IMG Academy. Last season McCord and his Philadelphia (Pa.) St. Joseph teammates lost 25-21 to IMG. There could be a rematch this season with McCord this time going against McCarthy. McCord hopes the rematch with IMG happens. And it could. St.Joseph has two open slots for national games and IMG is a possibility.

If the game happens it will match McCord against McCarthy for the first of what could be multiple match-ups over the next few seasons.

While there are still some moving pieces that need to line up, this could be our first chance to see the future pigskin slingers line up across from each other on the field of play before either signs their NLI and I for one am excited to see this thing go down. 

Here's a link for the full read if that's your cup o' tea.

So jump on in here and get this thread messed up with you opinions, impressions and #HOTTAKES like nobody else can do!!

This is a forum post from a site member. It does not represent the views of Eleven Warriors unless otherwise noted.

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