Julian Sayin came to Ohio State to be developed and he’s stayed to become a two-year starter and a Heisman Trophy finalist last year. (Press Pros Feature Photos)
Ohio State and Indiana represent two different ways to treat the quarterback position. Which one will win out Saturday?
Columbus, OH – A Big Ten Championship Game rematch is on tap for Saturday in Bloomington, Indiana, and the quarterbacks are in focus.
Julian Sayin or Josh Hoover: Who ya got?
The quarterbacks for Ohio State and Indiana, respectively, appear to have a lot of similarities, both relying more on efficiency than physical gifts.
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To that end, Hoover leads the Big Ten in passing efficiency at 200.5 while Sayin is No. 2 at 194.4.
They both have 17 touchdown passes and have absorbed their share of sacks. They can run a little, but that’s not a primary part of their game.
Veteran columnist Marcus Hartman writes the Buckeyes and sports at large for Press Pros Magazine.com.
Hoover has the unenviable task of replacing Heisman Trophy winner Fernando Mendoza, who was bigger (6-5, 225 vs. 6-2, 205), more physically gifted and passed every test along the way to leading his team to the national championship last year.
Sayin has the unenviable task of replacing… himself.
Yes, he also took the place of a bigger, stronger veteran transfer quarterback (Will Howard) last season, but that is in the past.
Now Sayin is in his second season as the signal-caller at Ohio State and suffering some slings and arrows from a commentariat eager to see him make a big jump from the redshirt freshman version they saw last season.
Sayin has had lots of good moments so far, and he added timely scrambling to his game over the last few weeks, a sore spot from his redshirt freshman campaign.
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He fumbled twice last week (losing one) and threw an interception that was returned for a touchdown that momentarily let Maryland back in the game. The specter of a sub-par second half at Texas also continues to haunt the Buckeyes. The offense struggled to put away the Longhorns and the team blew a 20-point fourth quarter lead in no small part because Sayin missed a few throws he is expected to make.
Sayin is still a 6-1, 214-pounder who is going to have to rely on elite accuracy and some guile to be at his best. No bad decisions or off-target throws allowed when you’re not blessed with the arm of Josh Allen or the feet of Braxton Miller.
Julian Sayin’s results can be seen as mixed this season, but the grading curve for a QB under Ryan Day is steep.
So far, Sayin’s 2026 results are maybe mixed, though that is admittedly grading on a harsh curve at a place where elite quarterback play is supposed to be the rule rather than the exception since Ryan Day arrived as offensive coordinator in 2017 and took over as head coach in 2019.
How each quarterback plays could determine the winner of the game Saturday, but it is also an interesting part of a larger discussion about how teams approach the most important position in the game.
Hoover is the third-straight starting quarterback head coach Curt Cignett found in the transfer portal.
Kurtis Rourke and Mendoza elevated the Indiana program, leaving a tall task for Hoover to at least maintain, though adding Nick Marsh from Michigan State to pair with returnee Charlie Becker to form an elite WR duo helps make the job easier.
Sayin, who gets to throw to Heisman favorite Jeremiah Smith, is technically a transfer, too, but he spent only about a month at Alabama as an early-enrolling freshman. He left Tuscaloosa when Nick Saban announced his retirement and was at Ohio State for spring practice, so he was more like a signing day flip.
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The California kid is in his third season at Ohio State, so he is deep in the development program of Day, who was asked this week about how he views the debate between grabbing veteran quarterbacks out of the portal vs. grooming them within his own program.
Bake the cake, or just go to the bakery and grab the one that looks best?
Will Howard excelled as an experienced quarterback in 2024. Indiana has chosen transfer QBs like Howard in all three of Curt Cignetti’s seasons as head coach.
“I think most coaches would tell you they wanna bring in somebody and develop them and keep them within their program because when you bring somebody in for a single year, you may know a lot about them, but you don’t know everything about them,” Day said.
“We knew a lot about Will, but we didn’t know everything about Will, and that worked out great because it was a veteran guy who had a lot of experience and had an unbelievable season.”
He rolled the dice with a first-year starter last season, but Day can’t deny the success schools have had with transfer quarterbacks.
Aside from Howard helping him get that elusive national championship two years ago, Day has seen the Heisman Trophy ceremony become an annual convention of the country’s top transfer quarterbacks in New York City: Jayden Daniels, Michael Penix Jr. and Bo Nix (with OSU WR Marvin Harrison Jr.) in 2023, Dillon Gabriel and Cam Ward (with CB/WR Travis Hunter and RB Ashton Jeanty) in ’24 and Mendoza, Sayin and Diego Pavia along with Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love last year.
Sayin had a great first season as a starter, but he also hit a wall at the end when the lights got brightest against the Hoosiers and in the College Football Playoff loss to Miami (Fla.), whose quarterback was former Georgia signal-caller Carson Beck.
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Mendoza and Beck were not flawless against Ohio State, so perhaps there is a distinction without a difference when it comes to the absolute value of experience when cards are down, but Sayin as a sophomore still figures to be better than the redshirt freshman version.
That begs the question, what about Sayin as a junior?
Indiana quarterback Josh Hoover, so far, has cured the turnover epidemic he had at TCU.
Time will tell — beginning a little bit after noon this Saturday — but that is not to absolve Hoover from questions about how ready he is for this type of stage.
The TCU transfer entered the season as the nation’s active career leader in interceptions with 33, but he has not thrown one this season.
Is that a measure of his development, a reflection of the defenses Indiana has faced so far or a byproduct of the way Indiana does things?
Of course it could be one, two or all three of those things.
Day might have betrayed his top theory in the way he answered a question about Hoover on Tuesday.
“Yeah, 17 touchdowns, zero interceptions, so he’s playing really efficient, and they’re doing a good job of putting him in a system that takes care of the ball,” Day said of the Indiana offense that relies heavily on run-pass option plays that let the quarterback decide on the fly if he should hand off or pull the ball and throw it based on coverage. “And that’s one of the reasons why they’ve been so successful — won so many games — because they do take care of the football. So you’ve got to give a lot of credit for their scheme.”
The plot thickens!
Naturally, the coaching staff’s job is to make the quarterback’s tasks easier.
The staff did not do all it could to help Sayin last season, but sometimes the difference in a game is a quarterback simply carrying his team to the top.
Can either do that this weekend?
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