Ryan Day critiques how QB development is handled across football

The Ohio State Buckeyes are coming off a national championship season under Ryan Day. There’s no time to rest, though, with Day overseeing a quarterback competition in Columbus this offseason.

One thing Ohio State lacks going into the 2025 season is an experienced quarterback. Day was recently asked about that, and simulating experience for a young quarterback, which prompted him to explain that there are unique challenges when it comes to how quarterbacks are developed across football.

“I’ve tried so many of those different things and this is a long conversation,” Ryan Day said. “But even having a son who’s now a sophomore and is a quarterback, you just realize that if you play basketball, baseball, lacrosse, all these other sports, you constantly play games. You could play five basketball games on a weekend. You could play — I don’t know how many lacrosse games they play, but they play a lot. Soccer, my daughters, they play all these soccer games. How often are you actually playing 11-on-11 football and playing the quarterback position? And I think that’s why you see so much back and forth, confusion.”

That lack of experience becomes a major issue. On the field, players can be unprepared. When it comes to evaluations, this can also lead to issues because there’s a lack of results to draw from. It, ultimately, can lead to a lot of unknowns.

“It’s just not very much a science, even when you get to the NFL and the draft process,” Day said. “Because these guys haven’t played a lot of football. And so you don’t know where they are. You don’t know always how to compare where they’ve played to where they need to play, the types of throws that need to be made. So, I think about this a lot.”

Ryan Day recently shared that the Ohio State quarterback race is down to Lincoln Kineholz and Julian Sayin. That’s left Freshman quarterback Tavien St. Clair, a five-star-plus recruit on the outside looking in at the battle. His lack of experience at the college level, ultimately, became a major factor.

“And Tavien needs to get as many of those reps as he can. We’ve tried in the past. We’ve tried the virtual reality, where when I was in San Francisco, we would actually have people simulate defenses, simulate blitzes so they could stand in there. We’d actually put the turf down,” Day said. “And they’d have the VR, and they’d be going through the reeds, and it wasn’t the same. It’s just not the same when a 320-pound guy is trying to rip your head off in front of you. It’s just not the same.”

One thing has become clear in Ryan Day’s career and that’s his ability to develop quarterbacks. CJ Stroud, Justin Fields, and Dwayne Haskins are among the quarterbacks he’s worked with while at Ohio State. That experience developing quarterbacks has taught Day that experience is the most important thing when it comes to quarterback development, even if it’s the hardest to get.

“So, what do we try to do? We try to watch as much film as we can and try to simulate it the best we possibly can,” Day said. “But there’s nothing like getting real reps, and that’s why we made the guys live this spring, to feel what that was like, because these guys haven’t played a lot of football, and so they don’t know what that’s like. So, I’ll go off for an hour about this, but this is kind of the world we live in and something I’m passionate about. So, the more these guys can play 11-on-11 football, it’s better.”

Lincoln Kienholz has been with Ohio State since 2023, having come as a four-star recruit. He’s hoping to win the Ohio State job over Julian Sayin, who came as a five-star recruit in the 2024 recruiting cycle. Both come with top-end raw talent, but neither has experience outside of garbage time. So, experience likely won’t be the deciding factor for Ryan Day.