Even though spring football practices are now over, there’s still a long way to go in Ohio State’s quarterback competition.
While meeting with the media to wrap up spring practices on Friday, Ohio State head coach Ryan Day and offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson both said they want to see more from their three potential starting quarterbacks – redshirt freshmen C.J. Stroud and Jack Miller and true freshman Kyle McCord – before they make any decision about who will lead the Buckeyes’ offense in 2021.
Although the Buckeyes won’t practice again for more than three months, there’s still a lot the quarterbacks can do between now and then to improve their chances of winning the job. In particular, Day said he wants to see how they commit themselves to improving their strength and conditioning and to watching film and mastering the offensive playbook.
“They’re tasked with being obsessed with learning the offense, and a lot goes with that,” Day said Friday. “They gotta get in the weight room with (director of sports performance Mickey Marotti). They gotta get stronger, they gotta get faster, they gotta get quicker. We grade our guys in there, and we have a champions meeting right before the beginning of preseason camp, and if you’re gold, then that means that you’re one of the top performers in the weight room. That’s the first thing they’ve gotta do.
“But then it’s off the field, it’s studying film, watching film, spending time in the Woody ... That’s what they’ve gotta do. The fluency of the offense, they’re getting there, but they’ve got a long way to go.”
Wilson says they’ll be looking not only at how the quarterbacks throw the ball individually, but also how their teammates rally around them and whether they make their teammates better.
“You want to be very fair and give them all a chance to develop, give them all a chance to be potentially the starter,” Wilson said. “They’re all in the mix, and they’re all going well, but they all got a lot of work to do. And it’s obvious they’re talented, but they need to play, and we just gotta keep battling through that.”
Day has gone out of his way not to compare the quarterbacks to one another while speaking with the media this offseason, and Friday was no different. Although there’s constant speculation about how the quarterback depth chart will stack up this fall, Day isn’t saying anything about what the pecking order could be.
That’s by design, as he wants all three of his quarterbacks to remain engaged in the competition – and perhaps more importantly, their own individual development – going into preseason camp in August.
“I think the idea is to get the guys ready,” Day said. “Across the board, the focus is ‘Who’s the starter?’ OK, well, you could be the starter, but if you’re not ready to go, that’s not gonna last very long. So the race is to get ready to play.
“The focus for these guys, again, just has to be ‘How do I get developed faster? How do I get the most ready to play in this season faster?’ Not trying to win the job. Because I think maybe sometimes, it’s ‘How do I compare myself to the guy next to me?’ It’s not about that. It’s ‘How do I get myself ready?’ Because we have to go win some really hard games this season.”
At some point in preseason camp, though, Day and Wilson and quarterbacks coach Corey Dennis are going to have to decide on a starting quarterback for Ohio State’s Sept. 2 season opener at Minnesota.
When will that decision be made? Day said that will depend on how soon one of the quarterbacks separates himself from the other two, so the competition could continue until the week of the season opener, though he would prefer to name a starting quarterback before then so that quarterback can get the majority of reps leading up to the trip to Minneapolis.
“If we feel like someone’s taken that much of a step ahead and they’re ready to play against Minnesota in that first week, then we’ll name the starter at that point,” Day said. “If it’s not until the week before, it’s not gonna be until the week before. It would be ideal to be able to name somebody a little bit sooner than that, so they can get the majority of the reps. But until someone really puts themselves out in front of the other two, we’ll just keep going.”
Wilson, who said he anticipates it will take at least two weeks of preseason camp for a starter to emerge at quarterback, acknowledged it can be difficult to get all three quarterbacks the reps they need. So naming a starting quarterback a couple of weeks before the season, or at least narrowing the competition down to two, could be important to ensure that whoever becomes the starter gets enough snaps in practice to prepare him for the first game.
Ohio State’s offensive game plan could look at least slightly different depending on who the starting quarterback is, too, so that could be another incentive for the Buckeyes to name a starter before they get too deep into preseason camp.
“Three different quarterbacks, very similar, but I think all three have different strengths and weaknesses, so as we go into a game, we’re certainly going to do the things that they do best,” Day said. “And I don’t think I have the answer to that yet.”
