Will Howard opens up on what pushed him to leave Kansas State

One of the offseason acquisitions prior to the 2025 campaign that had one of the biggest impacts on the season was Will Howard going to Ohio State. The quarterback would go on to win the national championship.

And on Footbahlin with Ben Roethlisberger, the talented gunslinger opened up on how he ended up with the Buckeyes. It was a fateful move from Kansas State.

“So it was coming out of my fourth year at K-State,” Will Howard said. “I had just graduated, yeah, that fall. And I had one more year of eligibility. The goal was coming out after the season that we won the Big 12 after 2022, my goal was, ‘Hey, we’re going to have a really great senior year, go to the league.’ …

“I’m all fired up. And the season, we went 8-4. I’m thinking that we’re going to go out there, and we brought a lot of guys back from that Big 12 championship-winning team. I thought maybe we were going to make a push for maybe a national championship. And just didn’t go how I wanted it to go.”

That didn’t sit well with Will Howard. It simply wasn’t what he envisioned. So as he prepped for the NFL Draft, he decided to keep another option open.

It was a decision, in part, borne out of necessity. He explained.

“We had a young kid, Avery Johnson, who was really talented,” Will Howard said. “I was getting paid no NIL money and he was getting a lot. There were some things, and I think that was the direction they wanted to go. K-State’s been known long time for running quarterbacks. Collin Klein, Michael Bishop, Ell Roberson. They can run the ball. And Avery is a 22-mile-an-hour fast guy.

“I understood, I had played there for a while. I had gotten a lot out of my career there. But I just didn’t think coming back for a fifth year there was the best option for me. I think I had kind of maximized my potential there. I knew that if I wanted to go out and do another year of college that it had to be somewhere else.”

So Will Howard began to vet his options. There were several of them.

“Going into the portal there was a couple teams reaching out,” Howard said. “Miami was texting me a lot. Their big pull was they had a lot of money. They were throwing around a lot of money. USC was also in the picture. USC, I thought Lincoln Riley was an unbelievable coach and developed quarterbacks really well.

“But then Ohio State came into the picture, and the two things I was telling teams when I was in the portal, was I want to compete for a national championship and I want to elevate my draft stock and develop as a quarterback. I just felt like those two things, there was no better place than Ohio State for me.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Will Howard helped lead the Buckeyes to a national championship. Then he was drafted in the sixth round by the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Now he’ll prepare for the next step in his career. It’ll come after no shortage of success at the college level, success enhanced by a timely move that paid handsome dividends.