Ohio State’s J.T. Barrett emerges from up-and-down seasons a better person,
QB has ridden roller coaster last two seasons
Easily attracting the biggest crowd during Ohio State’s media day, J.T. Barrett proved as adept at completing someone else’s sentence as he has looked at completing passes and drives as the Buckeyes’ dualthreat quarterback.
Reporter: “You’ve been through ... ” Barrett: “... a lot.” For someone who has rewritten the OSU record book, ranked among the leaders in Heisman Trophy voting and played a major role in the Buckeyes’ 2014 national championship season, Barrett’s college career has been a soap opera played out in front of one of the largest fan bases in America.
He went from winning a starting job in 2014 because of an injury to losing the job when he was injured, to failing to win back the starting job in an open competition in 2015, to regaining the job before losing it again after an arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol. He got back in time to share the blame for last year’s only loss and looked like his old self in resounding back-toback victories against the two winningest programs in history. Got all that? “The things that happen in your past, good and bad, make you who you are,” Barrett said. “I’m not going to shy away from those things. They make me who I am today. I like who I am. I think I’m a better person for it. I’ve grown as a person, and I think it’s also made me a better football player.”
“Better” is good for a team with the least amount of returning experience (for a 12-1 team) in the 128-school Football Bowl Subdivision. Barrett is one of three starters back on offense, matching the total of returning starters on defense. Gone are 16 starters, 12 of them having been taken in the first four rounds of the NFL draft.
How quickly Barrett elevates the level of play around him will determine if the Buckeyes have what it takes to again contend for a College Football Playoff berth.
“The talent’s still there, but the experience is lacking,” Barrett said. “And without experience, confidence might be lacking. Knowing (the unproven players) can make a play on Saturday is something that needs to be developed.”
Barrett and tailback Ezekiel Elliott meshed well in OSU’s read-option attack the past two seasons, but Elliott left early for the NFL, meaning Barrett needs to start over and develop chemistry with redshirt freshman running back Mike Weber.
Compared to what Barrett has been through, that should be a snap. He hadn’t taken a meaningful snap in nearly two years when he was thrust into a starting role at the outset of the 2014 season after incumbent Braxton Miller injured his shoulder.
Barrett went on to set 19 school or Big Ten records that season as a redshirt freshman before breaking his ankle in the regular-season finale against Michigan.
Cardale Jones took over, preserved the lead against Michigan and led the Buckeyes to postseason victories against Big Ten championship game opponent Wisconsin and Alabama and Oregon — the latter two in the semifinal and final of the inaugural Playoff.
Barrett finished fifth in the 2014 Heisman balloting but didn’t do enough in the offseason to win back the job until third-down and red-zone deficiencies prompted coach Urban Meyer to switch from Jones to Barrett midway through the 2015 season.
After one game back, the Texas native was arrested on a drunkendriving charge during a bye week and given a one-game suspension. He returned to the lineup in time to be a non-factor in the inexplicable loss at home to shorthanded Michigan State — a defeat that cost OSU a chance to repeat as Big Ten and national champions.
Barrett and the Buckeyes rebounded to finish strong, cruising to a 42-13 victory against Michigan and dumping Notre Dame 44-28 in the Fiesta Bowl.
“J.T.’s been through a lot of adversity, and that’s when you see a person’s true colors,” said center Pat Elflein, a tri-captain with Barrett and middle linebacker Raekwon McMillan. “He handled it better than anybody I know. I love J.T. I’m always learning from him. He leads by example and people want to be around him.”
Had Barrett started from Day 1 last season, maybe he’d have been in such good rhythm that the Buckeyes would have beaten Michigan State and finished the regular season unbeaten. But Meyer said Barrett didn’t win the job from Jones in training camp.
“Your program falls apart if you start appointing people who didn’t earn it. It was very close,” Meyer said. “J.T. just wasn’t playing at the level we wanted him to play at. But it was hard because he wasn’t getting all the reps. There’s a lot of reasons (he didn’t win the job), but I don’t want to keep going backward.”
Barrett said he did too much thinking last season instead of relying on his instincts.
“I remember in 2014, Coach Herman telling me to stop thinking and just relax,” Barrett said of Tom Herman, OSU’s former quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator. “It’s almost like thinking slowed me down. I like to play fast. I guess I was trying to break down every situation and I hindered myself.” He offered some examples. “We’re playing Michigan State in 2014,” he said. “We run a quarterback counter to the left. Zeke (Elliott) chops a guy and I’m running down the sideline and I’m thinking, ‘Should I step out of bounds?’ I’m like, ‘Well, we’re up, we want the clock to run,’ so I stayed in bounds.
“A bad example (of thinking too much) is I’m at the line of scrimmage thinking, ‘Ah, they could do this, or the defense could do that, but if they do this, I need to do that.’ I’ve got like two seconds left on the play clock. That’s the difference between good thinking and bad thinking. I was definitely doing some bad thinking last year.”
Barrett said he was trying to do right by the position and was aware, maybe to a fault, of the responsibility that comes with being Ohio State’s quarterback. His leadership will never be more important than this season.
“I don’t really have a lot of regrets,” he said. “Things you have gone through make you who you are.”