We knew big changes would be coming to Ohio State football in 2025, with several key pieces from last season's national championship team moving on to the NFL. Foremost among them: quarterback Will Howard, who suffered through some ups and downs during the regular season but earned his place in Buckeye lore with a legendary run through the College Football Playoff.
Howard may not be CJ Stroud or Justin Fields, but he was a very good college starter, and those aren't easy to replace — even at a program like Ohio State. Luckily, Ryan Day seemed to have his heir apparent already in-house in Julian Sayin, an all-world recruit who flipped from Alabama to Columbus after Nick Saban's retirement and spent the 2024 season getting comfortable Ohio State's system.
With Howard off to the NFL Draft, this year figured to belong to Sayin, who seemed to check every box on the "next Ohio State five-star quarterback" application. Except, well, spring practice hasn't exactly gone according to plan: Sayin, by all accounts, isn't wowing his coaching staff, and former four-star prospect Lincoln Kienholz has taken that opportunity and run with it. Day, for his part, is keeping things strategically vague, delivering platitudes about how everyone has to earn their role.
Of course, there's a chance that this is all just typical spring smoke, the kind designed to prevent players from hitting the portal after practices wrap up later this month; this time last year, remember, Ohio State fans were hearing that Devin Brown was giving Howard a real run for his money. But it's also possible that, by the end of the weekend, we have a full-blown controversy on our hands.
Ohio State spring game will tell us whether Lincoln Kienholz buzz is for real
What kept last year's "QB battle" from ever really taking off was an ample amount of evidence. We'd seen Howard succeed at Kansas State, and we'd seen Brown flounder in his opportunity to lead Ohio State's offense, all of which meant far more in the court of public opinion than some positive spring buzz.
This time around, though, everyone's in the dark. Sayin has yet to take a meaningful college snap, and while Kienholz was thrown into the fire in the 2024 Cotton Bowl, making your first-ever start against a very good defense without any of your usual offensive starters isn't exactly easy. Kienholz, too, was a well-regarded recruit, and so all we have to go on are the whispers that make it out of spring practice.
Until Saturday, that is, when Ohio State holds its spring game at noon ET at the Horseshoe. Both Sayin and Kienholz will get their best chance yet to stake their claim to the starting job, and now the entire fan base will be watching. If Sayin looks polished, it'll back up the considerable hype that followed him to Columbus, and we can go about our usual business. But if Kienholz looks as good or better, then this is a controversy that threatens to envelop the rest of Ohio State's offseason.
Again, all the optimism about Saying at the moment is assumed; we know what kind of recruit he was, and what Saban thought of him, and in a QB room full of similarly unknown quantities, that's enough. But nothing is promised in college football in 2025, and if Kienholz is performing better in game situations, Day is going to have to start answering some tough questions about who's going to lead his offense this season.