After losing Will Howard to the NFL, the Buckeyes have another quarterback battle on their hands going into the 2025 season. Lincoln Kienholz and Julian Sayin duked it out during the spring, each of them having some good days and some bad, but after the end of spring practices, head coach Ryan Day believes they are dead even.
“I felt like Lincoln, going into the spring game, was a little bit ahead of Julian,” Day said. “Then, if you just watched the game, Julian probably performed a little bit better than Lincoln during the spring game, and here we are.
“(We’ve) gone back through, watched the spring practices, looked at the grades. They’re very similar. So we’ll take it into the summer and we’ll let them play. The more you play, the more those things find a way to work themselves out.”
A quarterback battle is nothing new for Day and Ohio State, with each of the last two seasons since C.J. Stroud was drafted taking a battle into the fall. But in those seasons, the Week 1 schedule looked a little different, with Indiana as the first game two years ago and Akron on the schedule Week 1 last year.
But does Texas being on the schedule for Week 1 make Day want to choose a starting quarterback sooner?
“No,” he said. “You still have to focus on the long term. This is a long season, but that being said, we’re going to do everything we can to make sure we have the right person in that place to go in that first game.”
With four months to go until the first game of the season, there’s a lot of time until the Aug. 30 contest against the Longhorns, which means there’s a lot of time for both quarterbacks to improve their games, which each of them have room to do, according to Day.
“Each guy has something throwing-wise, some things they can get better at, so they’ll go out there and work on those things,” Day said. “Then also just the overall understanding of the offense. When you have the cut ups to watch and you actually see yourself doing it as opposed to Will (Howard) doing it, or C.J. (Stroud), … it looks and feels different.”
But it’s not a situation that Day is concerned about despite the lack of experience from his QB room. He thought both Kienholz and Sayin handled the spring battle well.
“Lincoln missed a couple early, but then got into a rhythm,” Day said. “Other than that part of it, I thought both Lincoln and Julian handled the environment well. I thought they handled the huddle well. I thought they handled everything about that. It was a step in the right direction.”
