There Is No Rushing The Process Of Quarterback Development

When Ohio State takes the field in their season opener this August against Texas, they’ll be doing it with a quarterback who has only started games in high school. For somebody — be it redshirt freshman Julian Sayin, redshirt sophomore Lincoln Kienholz, or true freshman Tavien St. Clair, this will be the first collegiate start of their career.

It may be the toughest way land a first start, but it’s also the first step towards gaining the kind of experience that leads to true development. There is no substitution for playing, even though coaches are always trying.

“Man, I’ve tried so many of those different things,” Buckeye head coach Ryan Day said this week. “This is a long conversation, but even having a son who’s now a sophomore and is a quarterback, you just realize that if you play basketball, baseball, lacrosse, all these other sports, you constantly play games. You can play five basketball games on a weekend. I don’t know how many lacrosse games they play, but they play a lot. Soccer, my daughters, they play all these soccer games. How often are you actually playing 11-on-11 football and playing the quarterback position?”

College football players are playing more games than ever, but even the longest season is still only half the length of an average college basketball season and a quarter of the length of a college baseball season. But that doesn’t even include the summer leagues or AAUs before players ever get to college.

In any other sport, before a player gets to college, they could have played in hundreds of full-tilt games. In football, however, a player is going to suit up in 10-16 actual high school games in a year.

“I think that’s why you see so much back and forth, confusion,” Day said. “It’s just not very much a science. Even when you get to the NFL in the draft process, because these guys haven’t played a lot of football. And so you don’t know where they are. You don’t know always how to compare where they played to where they need to play, the types of throws that need to be made.”

Nobody does more evaluating than NFL teams. The level of investment requires high levels of due diligence — or at least should. And yet the NFL still gets it wrong just as often as they get it right.

Just as a snapshot, there were 10 quarterbacks selected in the first round of the NFL Draft from 2020-2022. Only five of them are still with their original teams. Four of the five first-rounders in 2021 are on a different team than the one that drafted them.

Day himself saw the difficulties of developing NFL quarterbacks prior to arriving at Ohio State in 2017.

“We tried the virtual reality when I was in San Francisco,” he said. “We would actually have people simulate defenses, simulate blitzes so they could stand in there. We’d actually put the turf down and they’d have the VR and they’d be going through the reads. And it wasn’t the same. It was just not the same when a 320-pound guy is trying to rip your head off in front of you. It’s just not the same.”

As Day said, there is no science to this. There are standards and practices, but nothing can simulate the speed and reality of an actual 11-on-11 game. Which is why what was supposed to be a somewhat relaxed spring camp for the Buckeyes actually turned into as much 11-on-11 as the roster could handle.

“So what do we try to do? We try to watch as much film as we can and try to simulate it the best we possibly can,” Day said. “But there’s nothing like getting real reps. And that’s why we made the guys live this this spring to feel what that was like, because these guys haven’t played a lot of football and so they don’t know what that’s like. I’ll go off for an hour about this, but this is the kind of the world we live in and something I’m I’m passionate about. So the more these guys can play 11-on-11 football, the better.”