DALLAS — No matter what happens in Friday’s College Football Playoff semifinal or potentially the national championship later this month, Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers already has authored the signature play of his college career.
Facing fourth-and-13 near the end of last week’s Peach Bowl, with his only options being convert or lose the game and the season, Ewers identified the pressure Arizona State was bringing, changed his protection at the line of scrimmage and delivered the 28-yard touchdown strike that put Texas on the path to a 39-31 double overtime victory.
“He did exactly what we kind of tried to get everybody to do in the game,” offensive coordinator Kyle Flood said. “Which is, you know, stay in the moment and trust your training and do what we train you to do, which was perfect.”
The irony though, as Ewers’ time in a Longhorns uniform reaches its potential ending, is that there was no training for a career like his. In the new era of college athletics, he has been a trailblazer, an enigma, a savior, a disappointment and now — once again — a symbol of the NCAA’s chaotically free name, image and likeness market.
Though the 21-year-old Ewers is expected to enter the NFL Draft after Texas’ season ends, there has been persistent buzz around the sport that at least one or more massive offers – perhaps as much as $6 million – are being lobbed his way to transfer for his final season of eligibility. Asked by USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday evening about the speculation around millions of dollars waiting for him in the portal, Ewers did not exactly knock down the possibility.
“I mean, right now I’m just not worried about all that stuff,” he said. ‘I mean, people can say all they want to say. But, you know, I’m just focused on Friday at this point in time.”
Asked a few minutes later whether the results of Friday’s game or potentially the national championship would impact his assessment of his future, Ewers again demurred.
“That’s a great question,” he said. ‘I couldn’t tell you. I’m just focused on Friday because I think (addressing it) would be doing a disservice to my teammates.”
As Ewers gets ready for the biggest game of his career — against Ohio State, of all programs, where he started his college career in 2021 against a backdrop of uncontrollable hype and scrutiny around his NIL deals — the defining question of his career is much the same now as it was then.
Is Ewers worth all of this?
“Boy, it’s strange how it all shook out,’ Ohio State coach Ryan Day said.
Ewers’ story cannot be put in proper context without acknowledging that he is, for all intents and purposes, the first true avatar of how NIL reshaped recruiting in college sports.
Raised to be nothing other than a big-time quarterback prospect, in the state where big-time quarterback prospects have always been the biggest of big deals, Texas law prohibited high school athletes from signing NIL deals.
So Ewers packed up and left the state, skipping his senior year of high school to enroll at Ohio State in the middle of fall practice just a few months after the NCAA approved NIL rights. It was seismic. ESPN reported at the time that Ewers signed a three-year, $1.4 million deal with a sports marketing company to sign autographs. And just like that, the era of unproven prospects making huge money had begun.
“It was a weird dynamic for someone to do that,” Ewers said, though he has nothing but praise for how he was treated by everyone at Ohio State, including some of the players he’ll face Friday.
The expectation was that Ewers would eventually pilot the Buckeyes to a national title, proving that Texas was losing ground to other states by allowing some of its top high school athletes to leave for big paydays and end up attending out-of-state colleges.
But the reality for Ewers was inescapable: C.J. Stroud had established himself as the Buckeyes’ quarterback, and that was unlikely to change until at least 2023.
So after just a handful of months on campus, Ewers left Ohio State and enrolled at Texas. By the season opener in 2022, Ewers had established himself as the Longhorns’ starter, where he was probably supposed to be all along.
“He decided he really wanted to play,” Day said. ‘It was disappointing for us, but we certainly understood. And from afar, I’ve watched him, and he’s got a lot of talent. He’s a really good player. He comes from a great family and he’s had a great career at Texas. A lot of people here still have good relationships with him and think the world of him.”
Has Ewers lived up to the hype?
On one hand, here he is with 35 games under his belt as Texas’ starter. His record is 27-8, and the Longhorns have been in the final four each of the last two years. Without the fourth-and-13 play he made when it was literally do-or-die against Arizona State, the entire legacy of this Texas run is different. That is why, at least in theory, someone with a big NIL piggy bank might open it up for Ewers this spring.
Now, the flip side: Ewers has not had a great year and is not projected by most of the mock drafts to be a first-round pick. And among all Ewers’ options, there’s surprisingly little chatter around the Longhorns’ program that he’ll come back next season, as the program prepares to hand the keys to Arch Manning.
Is that because Texas, for some reason, just hasn’t run the ball very well (it ranks 60th nationally at 4.46 yards per carry) and the load on his shoulders has led to some bad decisions and too many turnovers? Is it because he’s been banged up this season, including two missed games with a strained abdomen and an ankle sprain in November? Has his development simply stagnated?
There isn’t a great answer, but the reason Texas is a six-point underdog in this semifinal — despite having a likely crowd advantage in Dallas — is mostly because there’s little evidence that Ewers and the Longhorns’ offense can match the firepower of Ohio State.
“If you look at the games where we perform really well up front, we generally play really well,” Flood said. ‘And the games where we haven’t been disruptive on offense, we haven’t played as well. It’s going to be really important that we do a good job up front of trying to keep the line of scrimmage clean, because that’s really what allows our offense to go.’
If Ewers can rise to that challenge against the Buckeyes and then deliver the program’s first national title since 2005, he will be a Texas legend and it really won’t matter what he does next year.
If he doesn’t, his legacy will forever be complicated by the money, the expectations and the promise that was almost but not quite met — both in Columbus and Austin.
“It’s a full circle moment, for sure,’ he said.
Ewers is pouring it all into this week, this game, avoiding all talk of the future. But just as he entered college, he potentially plays his last game under the cloud of what’s next. In the NIL era, that just seems to be the way it’s going to be.
Follow columnist Dan Wolken on social media @DanWolken