Julian won’t be the only Sayin playing quarterback in Columbus this year.
Aidan Sayin, the older brother of Ohio State quarterback Julian Sayin, signed last month with the Columbus Aviators, the UFL team that will play its inaugural season in Ohio’s capital city this spring. Having made “countless” trips to Columbus over the past two years to see his brother, the elder Sayin is thrilled to have the opportunity to play in the 614.
“I love the city, whether that's in the winter with the snow or in the summer playing pickleball. I've had a great time there, and the fans and the environment around football is second to none,” Aidan Sayin told Eleven Warriors in an interview this week. “So I'm excited for what the fans can bring to the Aviators this season.”
Aidan Sayin is starting his professional football career with the Aviators after his final season at Penn in 2024 was cut short by a torn UCL in his elbow. The all-time leader in pass completions at Penn, Sayin spent 2025 recovering from that injury after undergoing Tommy John surgery. But after participating in a UFL showcase last fall, Sayin landed the opportunity to play for the Aviators. He’s excited to be back on the field.
“Really, it's just been great to get back out there and play again,” Aidan said. “I love football and I love the camaraderie that it brings, so it's just exciting for me to get this opportunity.”
For now, Aidan is in Arlington, Texas, where all eight UFL teams are holding their training camps. But Julian is looking forward to having his brother in Columbus more often when the Aviators’ season begins, with their home opener set for April 3 vs. the D.C. Defenders at Historic Crew Stadium (8 p.m., FOX).
“It's been cool to have him be in the city,” Julian said this week.
When Aidan gets the chance to play in Columbus, he hopes Ohio State fans will see many of the same qualities that they’ve seen in Julian, a Heisman Trophy finalist last season as he led Ohio State to a 12-0 regular season record while completing a school-record 77% of his passing attempts.
“I hope they see a person that’s slinging the ball around and is in complete control of what they're doing and what their team’s doing,” said Aidan Sayin, who’s expected to be a backup quarterback for the Aviators behind projected starter Jalan McClendon.
Aidan, who preceded his younger brother as the starting quarterback at Carlsbad (California) High School, believes he and his brother are similar quarterbacks.
“I think we play a similar style of game. I think we try to emphasize accuracy, getting the ball out of our hands and into the hands of playmakers,” Aidan said. “We really want to be in complete control of what our offense is doing, knowing what we're doing, what the other team's doing, and how we can put ourselves in the best position possible each and every play to succeed.”
Sayin brothers still pushing each other
As you might expect, there was plenty of competition in the Sayin household growing up between Aidan and Julian. Aidan says he won most of those competitions, being two-and-a-half years older than his brother, but that Julian never backed down from a chance to compete.
“I'm a super competitive person. He's a super competitive person,” Aidan said. “A two-and-a-half year age gap, it’s pretty big when you're 10 and seven-and-a-half or whatever it is, so he didn't win in many things, but he always tried. He was upset when he didn't win and wanted to play again. So whatever it was, whether it was video games or basketball or football, it was always a competition and it was always fun.”
Aidan said that competitive streak still comes out between the brothers when they have the chance to train together.
“With different games we would play while we were throwing, rating your throws on an A through F scale or whatever it is, just trying to be 100% as perfect as we can, but also knowing that perfection is something we strive for and very rarely hit,” Aidan said. “So still having fun with it in that competition, whether it's who buys lunch that day or just bragging rights for the next couple of days until we go at it again, that was always a great time.”
Aidan believes those training sessions together have made both Sayin brothers better quarterbacks.
“When you're training with someone else, you can learn from your own mistakes, but you can also learn from someone else's mistakes,” Aidan said. “Seeing what they do, maybe what they like, what they don't like, and then, ‘Oh, maybe I didn't think about that,’ and trying to incorporate that into my game, or trying to make that sort of movement out there during a training session, it can be a lot of fun and also very useful to help your own development.”
As they go through their own separate football careers, the Sayin brothers talk to each other frequently about quarterback play, both with what they see with their other teams as well as what they see from quarterbacks in the NFL.
“We try to have a good balance of talking outside of football, but being in such similar positions and just growing up together playing this position, it's a constant talking point,” Aidan said. “It's something we love to talk about, too. It's fun to talk about other quarterbacks or what defenses are doing, or just the latest NFL news. All that is fun for us to talk about, so it comes up quite a lot.”
“We really want to be in complete control of what our offense is doing, knowing what we're doing, what the other team's doing, and how we can put ourselves in the best position possible each and every play to succeed.”– Aidan Sayin on how he and his brother Julian play quarterback
Sayin proud of brother’s success
While Aidan Sayin is starting the next step of his football career, Julian Sayin is looking to build off the success of last year’s regular season and bounce back after a disappointing postseason, in which the Buckeyes lost the Big Ten Championship Game to Indiana and the Cotton Bowl to Miami. That said, Aidan said he’s advised Julian to focus on his day-to-day process rather than worrying about what the end result will be.
“I think some of the best advice that I can give him and have been giving him through this whole process is to take it day by day. To realize that your process is the most important part,” Aidan said. “The outcome will come in the end, but we want to be process-oriented people that focus on our day-to-day habits because that's what's going to build our future. If we just focus on the outcome, you'll never actually make it there.”
Aidan isn’t surprised that his brother has emerged as one of the best quarterbacks in college football. He says he could tell by the time Julian was in middle school that his younger brother had the talent to be an elite quarterback, and he watched Julian get better and better each year as they grew up together.
“I think you could see it early on. I'd say when I was maybe a sophomore in high school, he was in middle school then, he was really starting to excel in the accuracy department and really show his ability was up with many high school quarterbacks that we were throwing with,” Aidan said.
Aidan and Julian only had the opportunity to play one year of high school football together, and it was a shortened five-game season in the spring of 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But both Sayins saw playing time that year as Carlsbad went 5-0, including four wins by 40-plus points, allowing the then-freshman Julian to get late-game reps after the senior Aidan came out of the game. Aidan says that playing that season alongside his brother remains one of his fondest memories.
“That was when we had some of our most fun,” Aidan said. “We had just been training, waiting for a season, waiting for a season in California that felt like it would never come. We finally got a five-game season this spring where we were able to play together; I played the first half of most games, and then he would come in in the second half when we were up by 40 points, and got to get some film together, and that really helped his recruiting process as well. So it was a lot of fun just watching him really elevate from middle school and show all these colleges that he can do it on the varsity stage in high school.”
Four-and-a-half years later, Aidan watched from the stands as his younger brother led Ohio State’s offense in his first season as starting quarterback. Aidan was in attendance for nearly all of Ohio State’s games last season as he was recovering from his injury, and he was impressed by just how much his brother has developed since their days playing high school football together.
What struck Aidan most was the command Julian showed of Ohio State’s offense – the same command he hopes to show for the Aviators as he begins his UFL career.
“It was so fun to watch his maturity as a quarterback,” Aidan said. “First year starting to be able to have the completion percentage numbers that he did and to be able to get through his reads and into his checkdowns, it was some of the most fun stuff.
“To be honest, one of the most exciting plays that I would see him make is when he would motion in receivers to go get safeties that were rolling down. It just showed how much control and how much understanding he had of his offense and the defenses they were playing. So I was super proud of him with that.”
The Columbus Aviators will begin their inaugural UFL season on March 29 with a road game against the Orlando Storm (8 p.m., ESPN).
