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“Haskins scares me, but he has the most traits to work with. Still, he’s not [Jared] Goff or anything. He would have been QB4 in last year’s class.”
- NFC area scout via Bleacher Report’s Matt Miller
Exciting news friends, we’ve returned to the dreadful time of the year where football is mostly quiet, which means that NFL front office guys are bored, and need to gossip to reporters. This week, some of those scouts and various personnel people took aim at former Ohio State quarterback Dwayne Haskins when asked to dish on prospects they feel are “overrated”.
“He’s probably QB1 in this class, but that doesn’t mean he’s a good quarterback. This is a bad draft for passers, but he’s still going top five. It’s just how the league works now.” — AFC scouting director
These quotes are, of course, meaningless. The NFL is going to continue needing quarterbacks for as long as the league exists, and it’s going to continue to be enamored with tall, strong, accurate passers. Dwayne Haskins is each of those things, and regardless of what Jonah Hill’s character in Moneyball thinks, Haskins will be a very rich man when he goes top 10 in a couple months.
Tap the brakes
Following Ohio State’s tough loss to Illinois last night, I happened to see a small, but vocal faction of Ohio State fans making some noise online. It certainly wasn’t many people, but there were a few folks, in the year of our lord 2019, that were calling for Ohio State basketball coach Chris Holtmann to be fired.
This is obviously absurd, for several reasons, some of which have been broken down by writers more in the know than I am. However, I would like to step up on to the soapbox for a moment, and give my two cents on Holtmann, and Ohio State basketball on the whole, so bare with me.
Firstly, Chris Holtmann isn’t going anywhere, and that’s the best possible thing for Ohio State basketball. He’s on a long term deal (seven years in total), and he’s been trusted to fix a program that was fundamentally broken at the end of the Thad Matta era. He was tasked with cleaning up the culture, bringing in guys to fit his system, and establishing a new foundation, because the old one was never getting fixed, at least not by Thad Matta in the state he was in.
Two years in, Holtmann has done that. He cleaned out the parts of the program that needed cleaning, brought in a staff far more capable than Ohio state saw in the years prior to Holtmann’s hire, and landed recruits that have already started to contribute quite a bit just two years in. He got lucky with a very good senior class that was able to mask the serious lack of development around the rest of the program, and that helped the Buckeyes overachieve last year.
Those guys are gone, and in their place is a roster filled almost exclusively with underclassmen. This year was the start of the rebuild that we expected from the start under Holtmann, and because it was delayed a year, some folks shifted their expectations far too much in far too short of time. This roster isn’t ready to compete in a stacked Big Ten, and was never going to be. Seven of its ten contributors (Luther Muhammad, Musa Jallow, Kyle Young, Kaleb Wesson, Duane Washington, Jaedon LeDee, and Justin Ahrens) are underclassmen. There are exactly three consistent contributors on this team that can legally consume alcohol. This is an extremely young basketball team.
It’s also a basketball team without a point guard, a void left by a complete lack of point guard recruiting by Thad Matta in his final years. That’ll be fixed next season by C.J. Walker and DJ Carton. The fixes are coming, the development is happening (hell, just look at Luther Muhammad and Andre Wesson in November compared to now). Holtmann is the man for the job, and firing him, or even thinking about it is the dumbest thing I’ve seen all week. The losses stink. Rebuilding stinks. But it’s necessary, and it’s temporary. R-E-L-A-X.
Lacrosse Bucks head to Massachusetts
In case you haven’t been paying attention for the past few years (understandable), Ohio State’s men’s lacrosse coach Nick Myers has built quite the program in Columbus, and early returns on the 2019 season indicate the success is going to continue. The Buckeyes won their first two games of the year against Cleveland State and Boston, and now sit at 13th in the national rankings.
They’ve got their biggest test yet this weekend though, as they head to Massachusetts to take on UMass tomorrow at 1 p.m. ET. UMass lost their first game of the season, 12-11, to Army, but is usually one of the best teams in the country. That’s likely true again this season, so the Buckeyes have a great chance to get a quality win early on for their tournament resume in a few months.