Editor’s note: Steve Doerschuk spent months researching quarterbacks. The result is three waves of a series, “Year of the Quarterback.” The first wave revolves around tremendous high school quarterbacks fighting to find the field in college. This is the seventh article in the first wave.
A time machine meets the transfer portal.
Mid-American Conference quarterback history scrambles beyond recognition.
Journey two decades back. Behold. Ben Roethlisberger, Charlie Frye, Josh Cribbs, Josh Harris and Bruce Gradkowski were the quaterbacks of the Miami RedHawks, Akron Zips, Kent State Golden Flashes, Bowling Green Falcons and Toledo Rockets.
They spent long MAC careers in one place. Their teams signed them out of high school, played them early, watched them grow, and saw them off to the NFL.
They left college with a combined 45,775 passing yards and 333 touchdown passes.
Perhaps it was Julian Edelman who broke the tend. Before he started for three years at Kent State on the heels of the Cribbs era, he transferred in from the College of San Mateo (California).
Time has flown. Everybody transfers, it seems now.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary spells out the definition of what fits current MAC quarterbacking:
“A powerful often violent whirlpool sucking in objects within a given radius, or something resembling such a whirlpool in turbulence or confusion.”
The word is maelstrom. For NCAA football purposes, it is two words: transfer portal.
There was no portal when the above-named group gave the MAC the best cluster of quarterbacks in its history. Among the six Ohio members, only Ohio University lacked a longtime star then.
Even the Bobcats wound up with “a name” at the position.
Ryan Hawk, whose younger brother A.J. became an All-American linebacker at Ohio State, spent two years at Miami. Stuck behind Roethlisberger, he transferred to Ohio, sat out the 2002 season under the rules of he day.
He shared the job with Fred Ray and Austen Everson in 2003, when the Bobcats went 2-10, losing back to back-to-back-back to Cribbs, Frye and Roethlisberger.
Roethlisberger graduated from Findlay High School in the spring of 2001. Three months later, he started Miami’s 2001 opener against the Michigan Wolverines.
Five weeks after that, Roethlisberger won a 30-27 duel against Frye, an Akron freshman from Willard High School.
The Sept. 11 attacks unfolded four days before Miami was to face Kent State. When the postponed game came off on Nov. 24, Cribbs, a freshman from Washington, D.C., led the Golden Flashes to a 24-20 victory over Roethlisberger’s RedHawks.
They met again and again. They became campus icons.
In the same era, Harris grew at Bowling Green under head coach Urban Meyer. In 2003, after Meyer left for Utah, Harris was a senior on an 11-3 team. The losses were 24-17 to Ohio State and twice to Roethlisberger’s RedHawks, including in the MAC championship game.
All those MAC stars are gone, and the sky is portal gray. The conference is clouded under a world where quarterbacks transfer out and in, on and on, leaving something of a quarterbacks anonymous.
College Football Hall of Fame coach Larry Kehres tries to wrap his head around it. His former Mount Union player, Jason Candle, is Toledo’s head coach. His son, Vince Kehres, is the Rockets’ defensive coordinator.
“What’s the Mid-American Conference going to be? A feeder league?” he said.
It isn’t that dire, yet, although, to Kehres’ point, Kurtis Rourke, Ohio’s starting quarterback last year, stands to be Indiana’s starter this year, and DeQuan Finn, Toledo’s 2023 starter, is the new QB1 at Baylor.
It’s getting quite convoluted.
Consider the story of 2023 Kent State starter Michael Alaimo.
Coming out out of high school in Montvale, New Jersey, Alaimo had size, a big arm, and a No. 3 ESPN ranking among pocket passers for the USA’s 2020 recruiting class.
He weighed offers from Boston College, Cal, Cincinnati, North Carolina, Pitt and Michigan State before enrolling at Purdue.
As the 2021 college season opened, Hammer and Nails, which covers the Boilermakers, wrote:
“Coach Jeff Brohm needs someone to be the guy. It may not be Alaimo this year, but his time is coming.”
Not really.
In 2021 at Purdue, Alaimo was behind Aidan O’Connell and Jack Plummer. Plummer left for Cal in 2022, but Alaimo was still a backup, behind O’Connnell.
Follow along in a game of musical chairs in a microwave.
Plummer transferred again in 2023, to Louisville, which had hired Coach Brohm away from Purdue, which in turn got its 2023 starter…
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