O-H-I-O
The number-one recruit of 2022 just finished high school early and is bringing his mullet of the gods to Ohio State this season
Well, well, well. Look what we have here. It’s the first week of August and already college football chaos is upon us, with the number-one-overall prospect of the 2022 recruiting class, Quinn Ewers, announcing on Monday that he finished his homework early and will be enrolling at Ohio State just in time for summer training camp.
Can we get an O-H-I-O?
According to Yahoo Sports’ Pete Thamel, Ewers is in the process of completing his remaining high school workload online and should be eligible to reclassify to the 2021 recruiting class by the start of Buckeyes’ summer training camp on Tuesday. Due to NCAA red-tape, he probably won’t be ready to go day one, but Ohio State reportedly expects him to participate in at least a portion of their camp before their season begins September 2nd against Minnesota.
Ewers’ timetable was accelerated due to the NCAA new NIL (name, image, likeness) policies. State law in Texas, where Ewers is from, prohibits high schoolers from profiting off NIL, but that is no longer the case in the NCAA wild west, where Alabama’s Bryce Young is reportedly pulling in seven figures without having taken a single college football snap and the entire Notre Dame offensive line is now sponsored by a pizza joint.
Ewers and his glorious bleach-blonde mullet will surely get a piece of that pie (Head & Shoulders, where you at?), but his path to meaningful snaps in Columbus this fall is somewhat murkier. Ewers will be one of four scholarship QBs fighting for the starting job this fall, including the 2020 recruiting class’ second-ranked pro-style QB, C.J. Stroud. Could an 18-year-old true freshman who’s been on campus all of a couple weeks really make the leap to starting quarterback for a national-championship contender? It seems a little far fetched, but hey, if Craig Krenzel can win a national title, anything is possible.