Urban Meyer’s doubts about Ohio State’s quarterback depth aren’t really about one player. They’re about how the Buckeyes ended up here.
Ryan Day is leaning on a true freshman to keep the season on track, with Luke Fahey now in line to start Saturday against USC after Julian Sayin’s injury. That alone is enough to make people squint at the depth chart. Meyer did the same thing last week.
“I’m curious about the five-star (prospect),” Meyer said on his Triple Option podcast last week. “I know how talented he is. It’s perplexing why he’s not the quarterback.”
That reaction only scratches the surface. The bigger mystery involves Tavien St.
Clair, the former five-star prospect who had a full year in the offense and still sits behind Fahey. It’s fair to ask why he wasn’t the next man up when Sayin left the Indiana game.
Maybe Ohio State underestimated how steep the learning curve would be for a player coming from Ohio’s third high school division. Maybe the staff didn’t do enough to help him close that gap.
Either way, something clearly didn’t go as planned, and that’s a forgivable miss for a 20-year-old quarterback still growing into the job.
Still, this is Ohio State. The Buckeyes have tradition, money and a staff built around quarterback development. That’s why the idea of being this thin at the position stands out.
Fahey deserves the chance to show what he can do this weekend. The issue is less about him than about the room around him.
Across the Big Ten, only Michigan, Michigan State, Wisconsin, USC and Ohio State have brand-new quarterbacks as backups. That’s not exactly the group you want to resemble, and outside of Lincoln Riley’s Trojans, who have openly talked about infrastructure issues, it’s not a reassuring comparison.
A more stable model would look something like Oregon’s setup under Dan Lanning, where the Ducks have been able to stash starting-caliber quarterbacks behind each other. Dylan Raiola transferred from Nebraska to sit behind Dante Moore, who came from UCLA to sit behind Dillon Gabriel.
Raiola has taken two losses in spot starts, and both he and Moore arrived in Eugene with starting experience. Oregon also paid heavily to bring them in, with the hope that promotion would come later.
For now, though, the Ducks can at least feel a little better knowing they have a veteran backup if disaster strikes.
That kind of comfort hasn’t been Ohio State’s reality. Day has always seemed to prefer quarterbacks from the high school pipeline, or at least that’s how he’s framed it.
But the results tell a different story. Only two of his five full-time starters since 2019 actually chose Ohio State out of high school, and Justin Fields, Will Howard and Julian Sayin all arrived as transfers.
The last true Buckeye recruit to start for Day was Kyle McCord, who went 11-1, missed the College Football Playoff and entered the transfer portal after Day wouldn’t promise him the job before the Cotton Bowl.
McCord left three years ago. Since then, Air Noland, Devin Brown and Lincoln Kienholz have also moved on. Now Ohio State’s season sits with Fahey, a talented redshirt freshman who lost the backup role to the true freshman, and senior transfer Justyn Martin, who came into the year with 35 career pass attempts in three seasons at Maryland and UCLA.
Maybe one of them will handle the moment just fine. But no program feels calm when QB1 goes down.
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Ohio States Playoff Path Looks Different With ESPNs New QB Outlook
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For Ohio State, the larger takeaway is not just how the projections shifted, but how much each remaining opponent matters in shaping the final stretch. Some of those games carry far more weight than others, and ESPNs model gives a sense of where the Buckeyes are favored and where the road gets far less forgiving. The full picture still depends on what happens next, but the updated outlook makes clear that the margin for error is thinning. [Read more 🡒]