One player on the Ohio State football team who has garnered everybody’s attention is Dwayne Haskins. The quarterback is now a Heisman favorite.
Coming into this season after J.T. Barrett’s departure, Ohio State football fans had high hopes for Dwayne Haskins, a redshirt sophomore out of Maryland. They had seen glimpses of him from the past season whether it be from the spring game, ends of blowouts or most notably the game against TTUN when he came in and lit a fire under the Buckeyes going 6/7 and throwing for 94 yards in the 31-20 win.
During that game, J.T. threw for just 30 yards on 3/8 passing. Buckeye fans knew who the better passer was after that game, but out of respect for all that J.T. had done, he remained the starter for the entirety of the year. This year with Barrett now out of the picture, Haskins has been let loose and has not held back one bit.
The first game of the season was a relative tune up against Oregon State. But Buckeye fans were excited to see just what Haskins could do throughout the entirety of a football game.
He put on a show throwing for 313 yards on 22/30 passing and 5 touchdowns. Buckeye fans had a reason to be excited after that game.This kid could play.
It wasn’t that he made better decisions than J.T. Barrett or was more composed. It was that his passes just looked better, they had more zip on them, and his accuracy was unbelievable.
It was better than Buckeye fans could have imagined. It had seemed like Ohio State had a running back playing quarterback for four years and Haskins was throwing the ball all over the field.
The Buckeye offense was wide open again and the athletes Urban Meyer had put on the field were finally beginning to show the totality of what they could do.
The next game was against conference foe Rutgers. Haskins’ first conference game of the so far short career as starting quarterback.
What did Haskins do in this one? He only threw for 233 yards on 20 of 23 passing for 4 touchdowns, electrifying a sold out horseshoe en route to a 55-3 victory over the Scarlet Knights.
Now as the season has worn on, we have come to learn that doing this against Rutgers really isn’t a huge feat for Haskins. Nonetheless, the accuracy he had shown to that point had Buckeye fans simply awestruck.
The simple truth was, doing all of this against Rutgers and Oregon State was great but how would this young quarterback respond to facing a 15th ranked TCU team in their own backyard?
The start of the TCU game was a bit rough. I will admit that it had me a little worried that Haskins was going to falter under the pressure of a big game, much like J.T. did his freshman year at home versus Virginia Tech. However, the response that came from Dwayne after he got his feet wet was astounding.
Going 24/38 and throwing for 344 yards against a fast TCU defense was very impressive for a first year starting quarterback. He showed in this game that even in times of adversity he was able to rise up to face the challenges which comes with being a starting quarterback at The Ohio State University.
Going into the game against Tulane, Dwayne Haskins had done virtually everything asked of him through three games. He had thrown for 890 yards on 66/91 passing and 11 touchdowns, but yet on ESPN’s poll, he was a mere 4th on the Heisman Watch list.
To many Buckeye fans this came as a surprise and a slap in the face to Haskins. So what did he do?
Against Tulane Haskins came out slinging throwing for 3 touchdowns in the 1st quarter and 2 in the 2nd. At the end of the first half he had amassed 304 yards on 21/24 passing for the Buckeyes.
In this weeks edition of the same polls, Haskins now sits at 2 in the rankings behind Alabama standout quarterback Tua Tagovailoa.
My question is this, why is Dwayne Haskins not number one? He has a better completion percentage, more yards, and more touchdowns than Tagovailoa but yet is seen as the lower of the two.
This is no disrespect to Tagovailoa who is a stud at Alabama and deserves the recognition that he has gotten. My gripe is that Haskins has not gotten enough recognition.
What he has done over the first part of the season is remarkable and is best described by Cleveland.com. The current single season record for passing yards by and Ohio State quarterback is 3,330 held by Joe Germaine in 1998. While it is still early, through 4 games behind center this season, Haskins is on pace for 3,881 yards in a 13 game season, 4,179 yards for a 14 game season, and 4,478 yards through a 15 game season.
All of these would absolutely blow Germaine’s record out of the water. This is all speculation of course, as Haskins has only played against one legit defense in TCU’s. If he performs as well against good teams going forward as he did against TCU the record will be his.
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Next week the #4 ranked Buckeyes travel to Happy Valley to take on Trace Sorely and the #9 ranked Nittany Lions. This will be a ‘White Out’ game and that stadium is sure to be buzzing as this is potentially the Big Ten East title game.
Haskins has never seen anything like this before and there will not be much in his college career that will be able to match the environment he is going to have to play in Saturday night. The closest thing that he has experienced was last year at the Big House.
This season, while the TCU game was in Texas, there were still a lot more Buckeye fans than TCU fans. The other three games were played at home.
This Saturday night is when we really find out just how great Haskins is. If he can come out and perform like he did against TCU in Happy Valley, it would be a disgrace not to see him at the top of Heisman lists.