If you’re at all familiar with the big-picture story lines within college football, and I trust you are if you’re reading this article, you’ve probably noticed that the past two Heisman Trophy winners were freshman quarterbacks. Before Johnny Manziel took home the trophy in 2012, not a single player in his first year of eligibility had ever won the prestigious award given to the nation’s most outstanding player. No more than a year later did we witness another talented frosh signal caller, Jameis Winston, rise above the rest and find himself holding the most coveted individual award in the sport.
It’s a brave new world we live in, isn’t it? No longer should we expect prospective star quarterbacks at major programs to arrive on campus, potentially redshirt, and then spend a year or two learning the ins and outs of a given system before they’re ready to take the reins and lead their teams to national glory with themselves collecting individual accolades. When circumstance requires it, they need to be capable right off the bat.
In Ohio State redshirt freshman quarterback JT Barrett’s case, his opportunity came as a result of a season-ending injury in preseason practice to the incumbent starter Braxton Miller. This differs from the two previously mentioned stars, who replaced graduating quarterbacks. Ironically, both Manziel and Winston succeeded players who are now members of NFL rosters in the same division, with Texas A&M alum Ryan Tannehill on the Miami Dolphins and former Florida State star EJ Manuel in his second season with the Buffalo Bills.
With the Buckeyes non-conference slate completed, it’s downright impossible to predict whether or not Barrett can even partially replicate the heroics of these two fabulous freshmen over the course of an entire season. He’s had flashes of brilliance and has been able to put up ridiculously gaudy statistics in the previous two games for a player with such a paucity of game experience, but it should be noted that these numbers came against vastly overmatched defensive units from their Ohio FBS rivals Kent State and Cincinnati. We all know what happened against Virginia Tech’s stout secondary, and since then the Hokies have proceeded to lose at home to East Carolina and Georgia Tech.
I guess it would make sense at this point to run a comparison between the three players through four games from a statistical standpoint. Though it’s difficult to determine how much a given team’s strength of schedule affects stats of this nature among other things, it may give us a small yet meaningful window into what we might be able to expect from Barrett going into the meat of Ohio State’s schedule.
After one-third of their regular season games, Barrett actually has a higher passing efficiency rating (176.6) than Manziel (170.9) did back in 2012, even though Winston had both of them beaten by quite a bit (209.9). If we look at the total percentage of a team’s offensive touchdowns a given quarterback is responsible for, Manziel’s was 69.5% two years ago and Barrett’s is currently 67%. Winston was pretty low on this measure with four games complete, accounting for 58.3% of the Seminoles’ total touchdowns on offense.
What’s interesting about these numbers is that they tend to correlate pretty closely with percentage of total yardage a quarterback accounts for. So far, Barrett’s passing and rushing yard totals come out to 1,292, which is 62% of Ohio State’s 2085 yards on the season. Manziel had accounted for 1,460 total yards four games into his Heisman-winning campaign. equating to 69.4% of Texas A&M’s total yardage output at the time. Winston’s percentage of total yardage was 54.3%, a tad below his touchdown percentage from 2013.
Barrett has shown marked signs of improvement since his debut in Baltimore against Navy, and especially coming off the three interception performance he had in the Virginia Tech loss. In the subsequent two games since that setback he’s thrown for a combined 642 yards, ten touchdowns and a single pick.
Ironically enough, the Buckeyes return to the state of Maryland Saturday afternoon to take on the Terrapins, who will be hosting their first ever conference game as a member of the Big Ten. Maryland should be riding high after dominating Indiana on the road last week, and Barrett will have to keep an eye out for linebacker Cole Farrand, who was all over the field for the Terps, registering 19 tackles against the Hoosiers. They have proven themselves capable of forcing quarterback mistakes as they’re currently tied for 19th in the nation in total interceptions, including returning one for a touchdown.
People are beginning to take note of Barrett’s stellar play. During coach Urban Meyer’s weekly press conference this week, he was asked if he was thinking about the possibility of a quarterback controversy next year when Braxton Miller returns from his injury for his senior campaign. Meyer was predictably mum on the topic:
“Not until you said that. Braxton is our quarterback. To be fair to Braxton, Big Ten Player of the Year. Good to know we’ve got both of them,” Meyer replied.
It’s still a long way to go before we’re at that situation, but Barrett is starting to make believers out of the Buckeye faithful with respect to his ability to possibly lead this team back into contention for at least the conference title. The path towards that feat begins Saturday and if the Scarlet and Gray can somehow remain in the conversation and make it to Indianapolis come the first week of December, you will have seen the emergence of another freshman phenom behind center. They say the trend is your friend, and in college football the increasing tendency is to see youngsters come right out the box and rise to the occasion as freshmen.
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