As Ohio State prepares to hold a three-way competition for the starting quarterback job this spring, we’re taking a closer look at each of the three talented but inexperienced signal-callers who will be vying to lead the Buckeyes’ offense.
Our three-part series on Ohio State’s potential starting quarterbacks for the 2021 season wraps up with Kyle McCord, who will look to win the job as a true freshman.
From both a team and individual perspective, Kyle McCord accomplished just about everything he could have during his three years as the starting quarterback at Philadelphia’s St. Joseph’s Preparatory School.
He led the Hawks to three straight state championships. He set Philadelphia city records by throwing for 6,887 yards and 88 touchdowns, even though his junior season was cut short by injury and the Hawks played only six games in his senior season due to COVID-19. He was recently named as the National High School Player of the Year by the National High School Coaches Association. He finished the 2021 recruiting cycle as a five-star recruit, ranked as the No. 3 pro-style quarterback prospect in his class.
As the star quarterback of a team that some joked had replaced the Eagles as the best football team in Philadelphia, McCord was a local celebrity by the time he finished his high school career. But his coaches at the Prep never saw that get to his head or impact the way he worked.
“Kyle is a relentless worker,” said Prep offensive coordinator Tom Sugden. “He approaches the game like he’s a disrespected, no-star, gets-no-publicity kind of guy. He loves to compete, and he loves to be coached ... we coached him hard, and he really wanted to be coached. He wanted to get better. He wanted us to add more to his plate. And you could hold him accountable. I was never concerned about his ego.”
That’s the kind of attitude McCord needs to have now as he begins his career at Ohio State, where nothing will be given to him easily. To get on the field this year, he’ll have to beat out a pair of quarterbacks who have already been at Ohio State for a year – C.J. Stroud and Jack Miller – and if that doesn’t happen, there’s no guarantee he’ll ever be the Buckeyes’ starting quarterback, with another five-star recruit (Quinn Ewers) already committed for the class of 2022.
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Yet despite the experience edge the quarterbacks in front of him have, and the No. 1 overall prospect ranking Ewers has behind him, McCord’s track record of success is all that’s needed to know it would be foolish to count him out. And although it’s rare for a true freshman to be the starting quarterback at Ohio State – Art Schlichter, Terrelle Pryor and Braxton Miller are the only three who have ever done it – Ryan Day has made it clear that McCord will have the opportunity to compete for the job.
“That is going to happen. He will compete for the job,” Day said when the Buckeyes signed McCord in December. “I know he’s excited about getting here early on and competing the minute he walks in the door.”
Even before he started his high school career at St. Joseph’s Prep, college football teams were already eyeing McCord as a top quarterback prospect. He received his first Division I offer from Central Michigan in the summer before his freshman year at SJP, and added offers by the end of his freshman year from Michigan, Penn State, Baylor, Boston College, Syracuse, West Virginia and Rutgers (where his father Derek played quarterback).
His offer from Ohio State came in January 2019, shortly after leading St. Joe’s to the state title in his first season as the starter, and he committed to the Buckeyes less than four months later, while he was still just a high school sophomore.
“Kyle, right from the jump, is somebody that we recognized early as very, very talented,” Day said. “You had an opportunity to watch him play, and thought he had a chance to be a really, really good player.”
McCord’s ability to pass the ball downfield jumps off his film, which is why he piled up as many offers as early as he did. He’s demonstrated he can make throws to all areas of the field with accuracy and has sound throwing mechanics. While he’s more of a pocket passer than a dual-threat, he’s also shown that he can extend plays with his legs and throw accurately on the run.
Over the course of his high school career, McCord proved he could consistently lead his team to victory, losing just two total games in three years as a starter. He showed that ability right off the bat in his sophomore season, when he led his team to one-score victories with game-winning fourth-quarter touchdown drives in each of its first two games. In the season-ending state championship game, McCord threw a pick-six on the game’s opening drive but rallied back to lead his team to a 40-20 win over Harrisburg, throwing for 284 yards and two touchdowns in the process.
Even though McCord missed the final four games of his junior year with an injury, St. Joseph’s Prep head coach Tim Roken said he still played an integral role in the Hawks’ state championship run that year, too, by continuing to be a team leader from the sidelines. And Roken felt that season-ending injury drove McCord to work even harder going into his senior year.
“Here’s a young man, never been injured before really and missed time, so it was very hard for him at first, but learning how to be more of a coach at that point and guiding the backup quarterback at the time and helping him out and being a great teammate, and we were thankfully able to go and finish out the job that year,” Roken told Eleven Warriors. “But after that junior season, he doesn’t take things for granted. He spent time in the weight room and got himself stronger and more durable to be able to head into his senior year, and obviously was a big piece in closing out three years in a row in the state championships.”
As his high school career progressed, Roken and Sugden gave McCord more and more influence in game planning during the week as well as freedom to call audibles at the line of scrimmage, trusting in his ability to read defenses and put the offense in positions to succeed – which Sugden admitted bailed him out at times.
“We’re a no-huddle, up-tempo offense, so for him to be able to have the keys to the Ferrari and drive the thing at the line of scrimmage, it just allowed us to be even more explosive and dynamic as an offense,” Sugden said. “His senior year, we had such a good relationship with protections and things like that where in-drive – which was super impressive to me – in-drive, he would make protection adjustments for me.
“He would save me as a play-caller. You call a play, it’s a run play, all of a sudden, ‘Aw crap, there’s eight guys in the box.’ I could trust Kyle’s gonna get me out of it. Where in the past, it was like, you gotta live and die on some of that stuff; tip your hat to the defense, ‘You got me on this.’ But we were never pinned into a corner or backed into a corner with him, because he knew the answers and how to get us in and out of things, and it’s a pretty special deal.”
McCord believes that responsibility his coaches trusted him with made him a better quarterback and helped prepare him to run Ohio State’s offense, which he’ll have to master quickly if he’s going to win the starting job this year.
“I felt like this season really helped me progress as more of a mental quarterback, like taking the next step in my game there,” McCord told Eleven Warriors after signing with the Buckeyes in December. “I think that’s where I took the biggest step honestly.”
McCord doesn’t necessarily believe there is one aspect of his game that stands out above the rest, but his film shows uncommon polish for a quarterback who hasn’t even started his college career yet, and there aren’t any obvious weaknesses in his game.
“I really think that I’m a complete quarterback, I can make plays in every single way,” McCord said. “I’m not much of a boaster, I’m not gonna say I’m great at this or great at that, it’s just not who I am. But I’m a winner, first and foremost. I think that my high school resume speaks for itself.”
“Kyle, right from the jump, is somebody that we recognized early as very, very talented.”– Ryan Day on Kyle McCord
McCord’s high school coaches agree with his self-assessment that he is a complete quarterback. One trait that both Roken and Sugden believe stand out about their former quarterback, though, is his poise to stay calm, cool and collected in any situation.
“His game elevates under the big lights,” Sugden said. “The bigger his opponent, he raises his level of play, and he’s not gonna be star-struck at all. He’s gonna be reared up, ready to go and he’s played in a lot of big games in high school. I know it’s different playing in the Horseshoe and everything like that, but he does a great job of putting blinders on and getting to work.”
Undoubtedly, the biggest challenge McCord faces in his quest to win the starting job is the fact that he’s a true freshman who will be going through his very first college practices when the competition begins this spring. He’s going to have to get up to speed quickly to make up ground on Stroud and Miller, who have already been through a full year of practices and meetings at Ohio State.
The experience gap between McCord and the second-year quarterbacks isn’t nearly as big as it could have been, though. Neither Miller nor Stroud threw a pass in a game last year, so they’re still just as unproven as college quarterbacks as McCord is, and they didn’t have the full first offseason they should have because of the COVID-19 pandemic keeping the Buckeyes away from campus for three months in 2020.
There’s no safe choice in this quarterback competition, and that helps McCord’s chances. Any quarterback that takes the field on Sept. 2 at Minnesota will be throwing his first pass in an Ohio State uniform, and the 10 snaps Miller played and eight snaps Stroud played in 2020 aren’t likely to hold significant weight compared to the multitude of practice reps all three of them will take this spring and summer.
Becoming mentally ready to run Ohio State’s offense and building a starting-caliber rapport with the Buckeyes’ receivers as a true freshman won’t be easy, but if his high school success was any indication, he should be able to earn confidence from his teammates quickly.
“He’s the type of guy that the linemen want to run through the wall for,” Sugden said. “And those leadership abilities and the way he’s able to connect with his teammates and things like that and bring the offense together, I think is really gonna stick out and stand him apart from some of the competition he’s facing.
“Everyone’s got a live arm, everyone’s got some athletic ability. We’re at Ohio State now. But I think it’s all the intangibles, all the moxie, the makeup of him that’s really going to impress. And he’s energetic, man. I think the fans are really gonna be attracted to him from a standpoint of he’s going to get them going and everything like that, and he’s an emotional leader.”
McCord knows the potential opportunity to become Ohio State’s starting quarterback isn’t one that most people get as a true freshman, and he’s motivated to take advantage. Like the other two quarterbacks, he’s confident he can do what it takes to prove he belongs on the field this year.
“I feel like I’ve been preparing to the best of my abilities to put myself in a good position to win the job. But obviously there’s a lot of work that has to be done between now and then to do so,” McCord said. “I’ll bet on myself no matter who I’m competing against, and as long as I put my head down and work and get better every single day, I think that I have a good opportunity to do whatever I want.”
