It’s been customary in recent history for Ohio State freshman quarterbacks to enroll in January, but Lincoln Kienholz strayed from that trend this year.
Until this year, six of the last seven quarterbacks to sign with the Buckeyes out of high school – Devin Brown, Kyle McCord, Jack Miller, C.J. Stroud, Matthew Baldwin, Tate Martell – were all midyear enrollees. Aside from Quinn Ewers, who joined the Buckeyes in August 2021 after his reclassification, the last non-transfer scholarship quarterback to join Ohio State as a summer enrollee was Dwayne Haskins in 2016.
Kienholz, however, chose to stay at T.F. Riggs High School for the entirety of his senior year, allowing the three-sport athlete to play his final season of high school basketball and win a state championship in baseball. Ohio State head coach Ryan Day and quarterbacks coach Corey Dennis were both supportive of that decision.
“There's pros to coming early, there's cons to coming early. We sat down, we talked about all of that. And you know what, he’s competitive. He wanted to win a state championship in basketball and he wanted to win one in baseball,” Dennis said during an interview session in May. “And he just felt like at the time, there wasn't an opportunity for him to leave early, and he kind of made that decision that he was going to stay and so we were behind it.”
Ohio State didn’t have any need to rush Kienholz’s arrival. Even if he had been on campus this spring, it’s unlikely he would have factored into the starting quarterback competition between Kyle McCord and Devin Brown. The transfer addition of former Oregon State quarterback Tristan Gebbia also lessened the need for Kienholz to be ready to play this year, as Kienholz will likely enter the 2023 season as Ohio State’s fourth-string quarterback.
Still, Ohio State did what it could do remotely to help Kienholz prepare for his freshman year during the winter and spring before his arrival on campus earlier this month.
“There’s creative ways and creative things that we do to make sure that he gets caught up,” Dennis said. “The actual getting the reps, that's the best way to work your craft, but there's ways. Sending playbooks, talking about the playbooks, diving into film studies, you can do a lot of things now in today's world, especially with Zoom and everyone, Zoom’s just second nature to them. So you can be creative with some certain things.”
Given that, Dennis said his expectations for Kienholz as a freshman won’t be different than they were for any of the previous freshman quarterbacks who enrolled in January.
“I don't know if the goals are ever different,” Dennis said. “You obviously have goals and you have benchmarks. And we have to, the process might be a little different, but we'll definitely get him caught up so he's ready to go.”
Unless multiple injuries occur in front of him on the quarterback depth chart, Kienholz isn’t likely to play any snaps with a game on the line for the Buckeyes in 2023. But Ohio State, which famously won its most recent national championship in 2014 with third-string quarterback Cardale Jones leading the offense in the season’s final three games, will still want to make sure Kienholz is prepared to play this season just in case.
“The process might be a little different, but we'll definitely get him caught up so he's ready to go.”– Corey Dennis on Lincoln Kienholz enrolling this summer
The key objectives for Kienholz in year one will be to work on his mechanics, learn the ins and outs of Ohio State’s offense, build chemistry with the Buckeyes’ receivers and get bigger, as the 6-foot-3 quarterback is currently listed at only 185 pounds. While Kienholz’s opportunity to compete to start for the Buckeyes won’t come for another year or two, Dennis expects Kienholz to compete with himself to develop into the best quarterback he can be.
“Coach Day says it all the time, like ‘How do you fight to be the best version of yourself?’” Dennis said. “He'll know whether or not, has he reached his ceiling or where he needs to go, and those guys understand. And so I think that you just kind of explain the culture, explain where we are, and when your time's right, you'll be ready to go.”
While McCord and Brown will likely get the majority of the reps during team drills in preseason camp as they continue their competition for the starting job and prepare to be Ohio State’s top two QBs this season, Dennis expects Kienholz to take advantage of the reps he gets.
“You have to find ways to steal reps. One thing that we talk about at Ohio State is competitive excellence. And that's, when your number's called, are you ready to go?” Dennis said. “So guys have to find ways to be creative, to find reps, whether it's standing in the back, taking those mental reps behind the snap.”
