Gilbert: Do The Buckeyes Have A Quarterback?

Amid a topsy-turvy college football season across the land, the Buckeyes remain alive for titles despite the loss of quarterback Julian Sayin. But there are no guarantees the backup or backups will be good enough.

Delayed reactions from the trusty, old suede recliner – Standing behind the opposite end zone Saturday, I could see straight down the sideline where Indiana’s Nick Marsh caught a football that almost wrecked Ohio State’s season.

As the football floated downward toward Marsh, my instant thought was “there goes the season.” Two losses and quarterback Julian Sayin out for the foreseeable future created the only logical conclusion.

However, the Buckeyes won because Marsh stepped out of bounds. That’s not enough to save the season, but it does give the Buckeyes more wiggle room depending on how long Sayin is out and how well quarterback Plan B goes.

We are right to wonder if this is a disaster that not even a great defense can overcome. Because when has Ryan Day had a backup quarterback anywhere close to ready to start a football game?

Never. At least it’s never had to be proven.

Remember the fear every time Justin Fields ran the football? Remember Devin Brown going down with an injury and Lincoln Kienholz playing as the No. 3 in the Cotton Bowl?

In the portal era, it’s not all Day’s fault. Backups are usually guys who, more often than not, haven’t played significant snaps. J.T. Barrett and Cardale Jones aren’t taking first-team reps this week for No. 3 Ohio State.

Julian Sayin will be watching from the sideline for the foreseeable future. Everything Day said after Saturday’s 19-15 heart-stopping win at Indiana, says freshman Luke Fahey will start on Halloween night at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum against No. 16 USC.

Fahey played high school football an hour drive south of the Coliseum. Will that add to the pressure? Will it calm him?

Fahey stands 5-foot-11, two inches shorter than Sayin. That will change things about the offense. He can’t stand in the pocket. He tried to throw a screen pass Saturday and hit a lineman in the back of the head. The Luke Fahey playbook of moving the pocket, calling more QB runs and relying more on the running backs was, out of necessity, built in a day.

Fahey’s statistics against Ball State and Kent State are meaningless. Those were scrimmages against the JV team.

We are right to wonder why Tavien St. Clair, the all-Ohio five-star from Bellefontaine, isn’t ready to be the guy. He’s 6-4 and mobile with a strong arm. He looks like an NFL quarterback. Fahey looks like a high school quarterback.

It’s fair to point out that Ohio State’s three national champion quarterbacks this century were 6-4 Craig Krenzel, 6-5 Cardale Jones and 6-4 Will Howard.

The choice of St. Clair by all the measurables is obvious. But the coaching staff sees it differently. They have a library full of more information than we do, and they like his moxie. That doesn’t mean this will necessarily work. If you saw how poorly Sayin threw the football Saturday under pressure, what do you think will happen at USC if the offensive line doesn’t play its best game?

The burning question is one Day won’t answer. Is it Fahey because he is wildly good, or is it Fahey simply because he’s better than an under-performing St. Clair? They clearly believe Fahey is better, but to what degree?

If it’s because Fahey is legit and just waiting to be turned loose, the Buckeyes have a chance. If it’s the latter, those chances diminish right along with Jeremiah Smith’s Heisman chances. That’s the glass half empty.

For the glass to be half full, these two weeks of practice and film study must be an exercise in Fahey growing up fast.

That the Indiana game moved too fast for Fahey was no surprise. These two weeks must make football slow down and feel a lot closer to high school than the NFL. And St. Clair had better get his share of first-team reps and prepare himself like never before in case Fahey is ineffective or gets injured running around.

Fahey, unless we hear differently from Day after Tuesday’s practice, is Ohio State’s new starting quarterback for however long is necessary. Or until he fails and St. Clair gets his chance.

Either way, the Buckeyes are fortunate to be 6-1 and not 5-2. And they’re just as fortunate for this to be a season in which a dominant team or two has yet to rise up. And, maybe most fortunately of all, they have two weeks to prepare.

Matt Patricia’s defense better be ready to win the game.

The parity fans love

The full-on NFL-ization of college football grabbed our attention like a surprise party Saturday.

But it shouldn’t have.

We’ve seen it coming for a few years, but maybe not quite like this. A day like Saturday, full of so-called upsets, was required to make us stop denying it, accept it and, like it or not, affirm it. Are you there yet?

The evolution from the historic standard of a clear separation of the haves and have-nots into a new standard of anything goes, began with three dynamic changes:

• Conference realignment after conference realignment (kinda like NFL expansion).
• The transfer portal (more permissive than NFL free agency).
• NIL and revenue sharing (not as lucrative as the NFL, but lucrative, nonetheless, and a million times better than any other campus job).

If Indiana winning a national championship didn’t make us accept it, this past Saturday did, when cataclysmic events shocked some of the presumed top-10 teams in the all the land.

NFL-style parity is here to stay.

Do you like it? All I’ve heard is how great Saturday was. So, I assume everyone loved it. Funny how the heavily criticized changes – see the bulleted list above – created results championed from Athens to Provo.

Programs can – and do – go from losing to winning a lot. And upsets happen but not usually this quickly, rarely within the same season and to this degree.

The margins between winning programs and losing and struggling programs used to be like a wide load taking up two lanes of interstate. Now the margins are like the one-lane chute on east-bound I-70 in far east Indiana I navigated in the dark Saturday. Keep your eye on the road or you’ll be scraping concrete, and concrete is undefeated.

Five of the top eight teams won’t lose every week. But tell the world now that only five or six teams are legitimate national championship contenders.

Who ya got?

Who ya leaving out?

Miami, BYU, Texas Tech, UCLA and Utah are unbeaten and all in the AP top 10.

The one-loss teams we can’t eliminate: Ohio State, Notre Dame, Georgia, Indiana, Ole Miss. And do you dare give one-loss Tennessee and Kentucky a shot? What about two-loss Alabama?

What happens if one-loss USC beats Ohio State on Halloween? Will the Trojans jump into the mix?

Look at the poll voting voter by voter. Anything close to an orderly top-10 consensus does not exist.

The sifting toward those five or six true contenders will continue through Thanksgiving. That’s the assumption anyway.

So who ya got? Indiana again. BYU. Georgia. Ohio State.

Take your pick.

Here’s the future of college football:

Start of the season: Maybe six can be champion.

Middle of the season: Maybe a dozen can be champion.

End of the season: Maybe six (and maybe only one or two of the original six) can be champion.

That’s how parity evolves in a season. Happens in the NFL every year.

By the way, this discussion does not mean I will roll over and advocate for a 24-team playoff. I get why in October it might start to sound appealing. But the list of true contenders will shrink by Thanksgiving.

Officiating or lack thereof

The next step in the NFL-ization must be the nationalization of officiating. The amount of obvious bad calls, especially at the end of games, must be taken away from the conferences. What we have is dereliction of duty.

Standards must be consistent from coast to coast. Defensive pass interference and holding are officiated differently from league to league and game to game and player to player, if at all.

A crew must exist somewhere that would call defensive pass interference committed against Jeremiah Smith at least once. You’ve seen the plays and the replays. He gets hit but doesn’t flop. And he’s so strong that he doesn’t move like lesser athletes. Flag throwers need to watch what the defender does, not just how the receiver reacts.

And timing issues? After what happened between Michigan and Western Michigan, how could it happen that Notre Dame should have had one second left and one more play for a chance to beat BYU?

The Cougars should’ve had second-and-goal with one second left. The Big 12 announced that a timing error happened. Why is it the Big 12? Why isn’t it the NCAA or some other entity that oversees all of officiating making that announcement?

Nonsense.