Jay Busbee Senior writer Wed, October 28, 2026 at 4:19 PM UTC · 6 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A whole lot of firsts await Ohio State this weekend. The Buckeyes face USC for the first time in Ryan Day's nine-year tenure as head coach. Ohio State will play in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for the first time since 2008. And, most importantly, whoever starts at quarterback will be getting their first-ever college start. No pressure or anything.
When Julian Sayin left the Buckeyes' game against Indiana with an injured shoulder , possibly for weeks to come, opportunity kicked open the door for one of Ohio State's young, highly touted, almost completely untested quarterbacks, true freshman Luke Fahey and redshirt freshman Tavien St. Clair. Fahey took the initial snaps against Indiana, but Day has made it clear over the course of the bye week and this week that the competition between the two remains wide open.
"They've both been really into it and practice was good last week," he said Tuesday, "so we need to stack a few more days, and then we'll kind of go into the game and figure out what gives us the best chance to win."
To Day, the competition starts with a simple requirement: "They've got to be tough. If our guys play tough, and what I mean by that is like physically, mentally and emotionally tough, that's critical here," he said. "We know we've got to make routine plays routinely. You know, we've got to stay on schedule. We can't make bad situations worse."
Luke Fahey may not have the size, but all he's done as a starting quarterback is win.
Fahey, out of Mission Viejo in California, won the backup job in training camp, and entered the Indiana game after Sayin's injury. He'd had previous mop-up stints against Ball State, Kent State and Maryland, throwing two touchdowns and two interceptions. But against Indiana, he did little, throwing incompletions on both of his attempts.
Long before that emergency duty, Day noted that Fahey impressed Ohio State coaches during his recruiting. A three-star, Fahey led Mission Viejo to both state and area championships during his three years as a starter, where he threw for 7,021 yards, 68 touchdowns and only nine interceptions. While he's only 5-11, he has a quick release and the right mindset to appeal to Ohio State's coaching staff.
"When you got a chance to meet him, you saw what the makeup was. How he looked at the game. His mental approach was in line with what you saw on the film," Day said. "Everybody's built a little bit different, but the mindset that he had was something that certainly attracted us to him."
"We've seen a ton of quarterbacks that weren't the most talented, they didn't have the most talented supporting cast around them, but why are they productive? Why are they still scoring touchdowns? Why are they winning ballgames and championships? It's that leadership quality," Ryan Powell, founder of QB Cavalry and Fahey's trainer, told Yahoo Sports. "They got this aura about them, they find a way to figure it out, and that's Luke. … Satisfied people don't get much done, hunger is a gift, and that's who Luke is."
Tavien St. Clair was a five-star recruit out of high school.
As a five-star high school senior, St. Clair, now a sophomore, ranked alongside Keelon Russell and Bryce Underwood at the top of national recruiting quarterback assessments. He played at Bellefontaine High School, about an hour northwest of Ohio State, and threw for 10,694 yards and 102 touchdowns against 22 interceptions. Coming out of high school, he exhibited more pure athleticism than Fahey would, but Ohio State's coaches gave Fahey the nod in preseason.
Still, Day noted that St. Clair very much has the opportunity this week to capitalize on the potential he showed coming out of high school. "Either way, whether it's a starting position or the backup, he has to prepare like he's going into the game," he said. "That's not going to change. But I think sometimes when you find yourself maybe getting the second or third team reps, you can find yourself maybe going through the motions. I think this (opportunity has) been re-energizing."
"Tavien was a true rising tide for us here, you know, and they say rising tides raise all ships," Jason Brown, St. Clair's high school coach at Bellefontaine, told Yahoo Sports. "He made the people around him better every day, was an excellent leader in word and in deed. … He's big, strong, athletic, has a cannon for an arm and has a knack for making plays. Mentally, he's just driven to see the best from his teammates."
Day is keeping his cards close, not committing to naming a starting quarterback ahead of the game, and not committing to going with just one quarterback. "What the situation would be and what the circumstances would be, we'll have to see," he said of the two-quarterback possibility, "but there's definitely a chance."
It's worth noting that while the quarterback will lead the team on the field, he's also joining an already elite unit on both sides of the ball. To start, both quarterbacks have one hell of a security blanket: Heisman front-runner Jeremiah Smith.
"Jeremiah is a tremendous talent and he can adjust quickly," Day said. "You just gotta get it somewhere in the neighborhood of No. 4 and he's gonna pull it down."
Not only that, when you're practicing against the first-team defense, you're practicing against the No. 4 scoring defense in the entire country. That, to Day, is a durable and necessary message for both of his young quarterbacks.
"Every day in practice, you're going against a really good unit on the other side of the ball," Day said. "Every day you're going against really good defenses, and you're gonna go against a really good defense this week. But you've been preparing for this moment. So just prepare at eye level, do a great job focusing, and then just trust your training at the end of the day and find the speed of the game."
If there's a big-picture bright side to all the quarterback drama, it's this: by virtue of the win over Indiana and the utter implosion of Oregon, Ohio State still has a wide-open pathway to a playoff berth. After USC, the Buckeyes close the regular season with four likely-favored games against Oregon, Northwestern, Nebraska and Michigan. But regardless of the odds, the Buckeyes won't be able to mask erratic or poor quarterback play. Whichever quarterback takes the snaps — Fahey, St. Clair or both — will need all the support he can get.
"It's going to be everybody's job to rally around our quarterback, you know. We need everybody in the building. We need the defense. We need the special teams. We need the offense, the offensive line, the receivers. Everyone's got to help out here," Day said. "We need everybody, too. Like, we need fans. We need Buckeye Nation to rally around our quarterback."
Whoever that may be, they're about to get a sudden, harsh lesson about life in the white-hot spotlight. Ohio State has to hope both Fahey and St. Clair are fast learners.
Source: Sports
0 Comments