Shortly after spring football concluded in 2022, Ohio State thought it had its quarterback for the 2024 class.
Five-star Arizona quarterback Dylan Raiola committed to Ohio State in May of 2022. For months, he was a vocal peer recruiter and looked to be the crown jewel of the Buckeyes' current class.
But in December, that all unraveled. Raiola decommitted from OSU on Dec. 17. Ryan Day and quarterbacks coach Corey Dennis, who had thought quarterback recruiting was taken care of for the 2024 cycle, had to go back to the drawing board.
Dennis and Day didn't cast a wide net in a four-month period, as only two new quarterback prospects received offers: Alabama commit Julian Sayin and four-star Georgia prospect Air Noland. As it turned out, a small net was all Day and Dennis needed to catch a big fish, as Noland committed to the Buckeyes on Saturday night.
In Noland, OSU still landed a top-10 quarterback in the class and a signal-caller fans can feel confident about potentially becoming a star in Columbus one day.
It’s far from the first time Day has navigated quarterback recruiting turmoil in his tenure and still yielded a positive result. In fact, it’s happened almost every year.
In the 2023 cycle, the Buckeyes struck out on flipping Austin Novosad from Baylor (though he eventually flipped to Oregon). Ohio State landed a commitment from Brock Glenn in July, but he ended up decommitting in November after the Buckeyes decided to explore other options. Ohio State eventually flipped four-star South Dakota quarterback Lincoln Kienholz from Washington one week before the Early Signing Period, giving the Buckeyes a quarterback they felt confident in.
The 2022 cycle was extremely unprecedented in that Quinn Ewers decided to graduate high school early and enroll at Ohio State one week into fall camp instead of playing his senior season in Texas. Ohio State tried to rekindle the relationship with top Ohio signal caller Drew Allar, but Penn State was already too far ahead in that recruitment. Still, OSU landed a highly-touted signal caller late in the process once again, getting a commitment in December 2021 from Devin Brown, who decommitted from USC after it fired Clay Helton. Brown is now competing with Kyle McCord for the starting quarterback job.
McCord committed to Ohio State nearly 20 months before signing day for the 2021 class, which was really the only drama-free cycle of quarterback recruiting in Day's tenure at OSU.
In the 2020 cycle, the Buckeyes landed the commitment of Jack Miller III in July 2018, but needed another signal caller after Tate Martell and Matthew Baldwin transferred in 2019. The Buckeyes wouldn’t land that second signal-caller until the Early Signing Period, but that worked out just fine for Day and company as that quarterback was C.J. Stroud, who is now the favorite to be the first overall pick in the upcoming NFL draft.
There was a reason Martell and Baldwin decided to transfer in the first place. After the Buckeyes did not sign a single high school quarterback in 2019, when quarterback commit D’Wan Mathis flipped to Georgia on Signing Day, Day still landed the Buckeyes a premier quarterback after Justin Fields transferred from Georgia to Ohio State, where he immediately became the starter and one of the best quarterbacks in college football.
Should more quarterback recruiting turmoil arise in the future, it's probably a safe bet that Day will be able to pivot accordingly, as he's shown in the past. While Day would love to have more drama-free quarterback recruiting cycles like with McCord, the goal is ultimately to land the best possible quarterback on signing day no matter what path the Buckeyes have to take to get there.
“Something we always look at is when is the right time to go in on quarterbacks,” Ryan Day said during Ohio State's Early Signing Day press conference in December. “Is it early in the process? Is it late? There's certainly some great positives to jumping on somebody early, you identify who that person is early on ... Everybody has their own journey. But it's something that we always look at and try to evaluate what gives us the best chance of choosing the best guy for Ohio State and allowing them to choose Ohio State on their own.”
