The following is an edited transcript of Wednesday’s episode of Deep Purple discussing Will Howard’s transfer to Ohio State. Howard and the Buckeyes will meet Texas at the Cotton Bowl in the College Football Playoff semifinals on Friday, January 10. Transcript via Otter.ai.
This will be the first of two videos as we look at the transition of quarterbacks that took place at Kansas State after the 2023 season. Will Howard ended up in the transfer portal after starting the 2023 season, and Avery Johnson ascended to the starting quarterback role and took over this season for K-State. I thought it’d be a good time to look back and see how this all came to pass and evaluate where the two quarterbacks are following this season.
If we’re talking about Will Howard, the season is not done. Will Howard eventually ended up at Ohio State and became the starting quarterback for the Buckeyes, and they are now in the semifinals of the college football playoff after routing and pounding Tennessee and Oregon in a workman-like fashion. Will played a big role in that, showing that he is becoming an elite college quarterback.
He wasn’t that way when he showed up in Manhattan in 2020. There’s a national pandemic going on. The campus is closed. Much of society is closed, and everyone is in a really weird place, but they did decide to play college football, and K-State attempted to play every game. The Wildcats did play every game, sometimes shorthanded.
And in the midst of that season, junior quarterback Skylar Thompson was injured, and the top choice by Chris Kleiman, K-State’s coach and his staff was turn the ball over to the true freshman named Will Howard, who hadn’t even had a full spring practice, didn’t know the system very well, and now we’re starting Big 12 football games in the middle of a pandemic with a true freshman running back behind him named Deuce Vaughn.
It was a mess. The Wildcats went 4-6, but they played every game because they were committed to playing to get everyone better for the future. As Will Howard now looks back, he knows that that helped him.
Howard eventually ended up at Ohio State. We’ll get into that in a second. But as he arrived at Ohio State, he kind of looked over his shoulder and realized that while 2020 was a mess, and he didn’t play well. The 2020 and ’21 season might have skewed his stats. Well, it still paid off. Let’s hear from Will Howard.
“I went through that scenario in 2020 where I came in early. I was a young kid. I didn’t I’d never done this before. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” Howard said. “And, you know, it was COVID, so I didn’t get as many reps as I, you know, I barely got any reps, honestly, going into the season.