In the summer of 2021, the nation’s top-ranked football recruit, Quinn Ewers, arrived on Ohio State’s campus in what represented a recruiting coup.
Less than a year earlier, the teenage quarterback from the Dallas suburbs had backed out of his commitment to play for the Texas Longhorns and reopened his recruitment. Now he was apparently next in line to help the Buckeyes win the college football national championship.
More than three years later, Ohio State’s two dominant victories to open the College Football Playoff landed it in Friday’s semifinal in Arlington, Texas. For Ewers, a national title is just two wins away.
Except now he plays for Texas.
These reunions with stakes for the national title would be remarkable as a football story. Jack Sawyer, a star defensive end for the Buckeyes who will spend Friday trying to sack Ewers, was once his roommate.
Both schools are trying to end title droughts. Texas last won a national title in the 2005 season and Ohio State won in 2014. The winner will advance to the national championship on January 20 in Atlanta to face the winner of the other semifinal , between Penn State and Notre Dame.
“I don’t regret any decision I made or anything like that,” Ewers told reporters before Friday’s Cotton Bowl, site of a semifinal. He said his relationships with many people at Ohio State “still feel like if I saw them walking on the side of the road, it would be like I was hanging out with them yesterday.”
Ewers’ story has also become one of the leading illustrations of the changes reshaping the NCAA.
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As of June 2021, players can finally legally be compensated for the use of their names, images, and likenesses (and, in the future, players will also be able to earn a share of the revenue generated by their schools). At the same time, relaxed rules have made it easier than ever to transfer between schools without penalty.
Initially on track to graduate from high school in the spring of 2022, Ewers instead skipped his senior year of high school and reclassified to the class of 2021 to sign with Ohio State.
Part of his motivation was his relationships with coaches such as Ryan Day, who offered Ewers a scholarship when he was in eighth grade. (“He was very much a boy at the time, who had just had a tremendous release,” Day said.) But a big factor in his decision to accelerate his path to college, Ewers said Monday , was an opportunity to take advantage of Zero Payouts as a college athlete that he would not have been allowed to earn if he had remained a high school student in Texas.
“One of the main things was there was this, I don’t know if you remember this or not, but the Texas legislature was not going to allow high school football players to get paid,” he said. Ewers said. “And me and my family had a pretty big opportunity in front of us and we felt it was a good decision for me to go ahead and forgo my senior year and enroll early at Ohio State and I the opportunity to have a lot of money in our pockets as a family.
Days before stepping onto Ohio State’s campus in August 2021, Ewers announced his first endorsement — from a kombucha company. Soon, ESPN reported, Ewers had signed an NIL deal with a sports marketing company worth $1.4 million over three years.
After less than three months and a semester at Ohio State, Ewers transferred to Texas to play for new Longhorns coach Steve Sarkisian.
“The first reason I moved back to Texas was to be closer to where I’m from and closer to the resources that I have and the relationships that I’ve built over time just by being from Texas ” said Ewers.
As the Longhorns’ starting quarterback for the past three seasons, Ewers has exploited those resources as lucratively as anyone in college sports. He has signed as many as 25 NIL agreements, according to a count by On3with companies that make a variety of products, like tea, video games, and jerky, as well as a streaming network.
Ewers could have one more turning point in his career path ahead. At the end of December, On3 reported that Ewers, who could turn pro and enter this month’s NFL draft, was offered $6 million by an unnamed school to enter the NCAA transfer portal and sign to play another college season. From a strictly financial standpoint, Ewers is already one of the biggest winners in college sports’ new era of permissiveness. Now he’s trying to be the big winner of the College Football Playoff’s ultimate prize.
However, his old team stands in his way.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
