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Quinn Ewers’s image probably benefits from Joe Burrow’s time at Ohio State. Burrow, who would go on to be named Ohio’s Mr. Football, committed to Ohio State before his senior season. He was a four-star recruit. Burrow was prepared to sit behind Cardale Jones and J.T. Barrett, but when the younger Dwayne Haskins leapfrogged him on the depth chart, the quarterback from Athens High School decided to transfer. The rest is history.
Ewers’s situation is different than Burrow’s. It always was.
Naturally a member of the class of 2022, Ewers created a small shockwave in August of ‘21 when he announced he would skip his senior season of high school football and enroll a full year early at Ohio State. It was unusual timing, and in 2021, the reason behind the decision was new and unusual as well: Earlier that summer, the University Interscholastic League—Texas high school football’s primary governing body—had told Ewers he wouldn’t be able to profit off of his name, image, and likeness while playing for the Southlake Carroll Dragons. Like many athletes before him, Ewers would have to leave school early if he wanted to make money off his talent right away. The difference? Athletes who “left early” used to leave college early, not high school. Ewers wasn’t going to the NFL. Ewers was leaving high school for Ohio State.
Ewers’s recruitment had been a big deal inside and outside the Lone Star State. Upon reclassifying from the class of ‘22, he took the number one ranking in the 247Sports Composite’s class of ‘21, meaning that even as a junior, he outshined every senior football recruit in the country. To be fair, he was a little old for his grade, turning 18 in March of his junior year. Still, Ewers was good enough after three years of high school ball to be a bigger recruiting prize than everyone who started high school a year earlier than he did. Ewers wasn’t only better than everyone his age. He was better than everyone with an extra year of experience.
Originally, the prodigy from the Dallas suburbs was a Texas Longhorns commit. The plan was that under Tom Herman’s leadership, Ewers would take the job over from Sam Ehlinger after one or two years of an intermediary—most likely Casey Thompson or Hudson Card. In October of 2020, though, halfway through what would become Herman’s final season, Ewers decommitted from his favorite childhood team. A junior at the time, he reopened his recruitment. Three weeks later, he landed with Ohio State. Ten months after that came the reclassification. In August of 2021, Ewers showed up in Columbus, openly well-paid and not expecting to play right away.
Here’s where Ewers’s story most diverges from Burrow’s, and where it’s easy to conflate the two: When Ewers was part of Ryan Day’s 2022 recruiting class, the cautious expectation was for him to sit behind C.J. Stroud for a season and then compete with Kyle McCord for the starting job. McCord was also a composite 5-star, and he was one year ahead of Ewers in the high school progression. McCord was not, though, the top-ranked player in the class of 2021. A great high school quarterback? Yes, one of the best in the country. But McCord was not Quinn Ewers. Barring a big surprise, Ewers, an expected redshirt freshman, would start ahead of McCord, an expected redshirt sophomore. The big surprise came, but not in the way it was imagined. Ewers joined McCord’s class, setting them up to both come out of the Stroud era as redshirt sophomore QB’s.
It’s sometimes assumed that the story goes like this: After his freshman season (which would have been his senior season in high school), Ewers saw another year ahead of him spent sitting behind Stroud. Beyond that, Ewers saw the competition with McCord, a competition he wasn’t guaranteed to win. Accordingly, Ewers decided to transfer somewhere he could play right away as a redshirt freshman.
Maybe that’s part of the story. Maybe Ewers wasn’t sure he could reach the top of Ryan Day’s QB room, or he didn’t want to wait a year to find that out. A more likely explanation, though, the one that seems to be canon in those Ohio State and Texas spheres where the saga was followed most closely, is that Ewers used Ohio State as a placeholder, somewhere he could make his million dollars at the age of 18 while keeping his options wide open. Ewers knew he could beat McCord for the job. Ewers knew all along he might leave Columbus after his freshman year. When Joe Burrow came to Columbus and again when he left Columbus for LSU, he was looking for a place to play. When Quinn Ewers came to Columbus, he was looking to make some money. When he left, he didn’t cite playing time. He said he wanted to go back to his native Texas.
There’s nothing wrong with using football to make money. We’re all trying to do it, from the Ohio State boosters who paid Ewers to advertise products to me, blogging about the now-Heisman favorite. What Ewers did was rather transparent, and anyone giving six figures to a backup quarterback made their choice (and likely had six figures to spare). Ewers wanted to make money, and Ewers made money, and 2021 was the beginning of this era where recruitment doesn’t end when the player sets foot on campus. Recruitment continues now throughout a player’s four or five or however many seasons in college ball. What Ewers did was use Ohio State as a place to make money and learn a lot about college football from one of the best quarterback developers in the sport. In exchange, he gave the Buckeyes the inside track on recruiting him for his redshirt freshman season. Eventually, Day’s staff lost that recruitment battle to Texas, where Steve Sarkisian was trying to right the ship.
Ewers didn’t create the transfer portal and NIL environment which was so new in 2021. But he played it like an expert. He and his family treated the business like a business, and they came out in their ideal place: Ewers made one million dollars while massively reducing his injury risk over the 2021 season. Ewers got to learn for a year beside C.J. Stroud under Ryan Day. Ewers landed at Texas, his childhood dream, under Steve Sarkisian, an even better quarterback developer than Day (if you trust the Manning family’s judgment on this, as we probably all should). Ewers got to start at quarterback for Texas in 2022 with full eligibility remaining. This—minus the million dollars, the Stroud apprenticeship, and the upgrade from Herman to Sarkisian—had been the original plan. Instead of coming to Austin without a million dollars, though, and with no familiarity with high-level college football, Ewers came to Austin with a million dollars, and with some comfort in this higher level of the sport. Things really, really worked out for Quinn Ewers. He and his family also played the game quite well.
I certainly don’t mind what Ewers did. But I’m surprised more people aren’t upset by it. That’s what makes me wonder if Burrow provides some cover. Instead of, “That kid stole a million dollars!” it’s, “Oh look, Ohio State let another great quarterback slip away.” Did Ohio State ever have a chance?
What Ewers did is a thing many college football fans hate: He treated the sport as a business, leaving his high school teammates and Ohio State in unfortunate positions in the process. But from at least my limited outlook, neither Southlake Carroll nor Ohio State seems unhappy with Ewers. Southlake Carroll isn’t all that surprising. Ohio State’s more odd. Maybe it’s because Ewers continues to play the off-field game with so much polish, shouting out the Buckeyes before and after beating Michigan. Maybe it’s because Ohio State fans are already a little fed up with Day. Maybe it’s because Ohio State fans know this NIL world as well as anyone and accept it with fewer qualms. To other fanbases, Ewers might have become a villain. To Ohio State, he’s just another quarterback who got away. In that sense, the Joe Burrow parallels are true.
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How about on the field? How does Ewers compare to Burrow there?
We mentioned Ewers as the Heisman favorite, and right now in betting markets, he is. He’s not the odds-on favorite, though, or anywhere close to that. He’s sitting around 5-to-1. Ewers is the most accomplished quarterback in the sport so far, a crown which goes hand in hand with quarterbacking the most accomplished team. To actually win the Heisman, he’ll have to do more, especially against this season’s competition, with more teams set to achieve playoff status and more quarterbacks set to receive the notoriety that entails.
There are still concerns about Ewers’s accuracy on deep balls, mostly because he hasn’t had to throw many. What scouts do seem to like is his professionalism in the pocket. There’s that word again. “Professionalism.” Professional in the pocket. Professional when he scrambles. Professional when he calls Michigan “That Team Up North” at SEC media days, doing what he can to keep Ohio State on his side. The kid from one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country who maneuvered his way to a million dollars before his scheduled high school graduation? That’s not a football player. That’s an entrepreneur.
Yes, Quinn Ewers is a professional. He might not look it—folksy, with his childlike smile persisting long after his legendary mullet was shorn—but even that might be a professional choice. Quinn Ewers is a college quarterback. A professional college quarterback.
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