COLUMBUS, Ohio - With all signs pointing to Braxton Miller being healthy enough to return for Ohio State's Big Ten opener on Saturday vs. Wisconsin, Kenny Guiton's football future is uncertain. Guiton might continue to play in spots -- Urban Meyer has said he deserves that much -- or he might get extended action over what Ohio State hopes will be 10 remaining games; Miller has a penchant for running himself into trouble.
That very thing happened ten plays into Ohio State's game vs. San Diego State on Sept. 7, bringing Guiton into the game. The Buckeyes scored on Guiton's very first play.
It was not by accident. Though the competition has been overmatched each week, Guiton directed Ohio State to 42 points in that game, 52 the next week at Cal and 76 last week vs. Florida A&M, 55 in the first half thanks to six Guiton touchdown passes, a school record for a game. His 90-yard touchdown pass to Devin Smith for the first score at Cal was also a school record for longest play from scrimmage. Guiton ran 44 yards for a touchdown against San Diego State, too, as the Buckeyes brought out a new overloaded formation, the Aztecs defense overreacted, and Guiton simply read the defense, read his blocks and ran to daylight.
He's thrown for 13 touchdown passes this season, tying him for the fourth-most nationally thus far. Ohio State's high-powered, high-tempo offense is still a work in progress but it continued to make important progress after losing its Heisman Trophy candidate to a sprained MCL because Guiton came in cold -- he'd thrown all of 28 career passes before throwing 25 in that San Diego State game -- and the Buckeyes got hot.
It goes down as maybe the greatest three-week run by any backup quarterback, ever.
It was five years in the making.
"I can’t imagine a better story," Meyer said on his radio show this week. "Imagine a young athlete getting to read this story about Kenny Guiton. You can say, ‘Boy, they didn’t use him well two years ago.’ Because he wasn’t very good. Now look at him. A new coach, a quarterback coach has come in and worked him hard.
"The kid has grown up and matured. Don’t blame (the old coaches); blame Kenny. But then look at him. You cut him open, and he’s an incredible human being. I love his leadership, his passion for life, his passion for football and his love for Ohio State and his teammates."
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Meyer may or may not be a football miracle worker; his 16-0 record as Ohio State's coach makes the notion tough to dismiss. He has a track record of fixing programs and fixing them fast.
Meyer and offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach Tom Herman fixed Guiton really fast.
"I don't know how many snaps he played before our staff got here, but he probably didn't play any, and it's not because the staff was screwing him over," Meyer said. "He wasn't very good in a lot of areas. He has pushed himself academically, and he's an exceptional guy, and he didn't do things exceptionally. He (was) an underachiever, and to an underachiever, that's fighting words.
"He's an efficient player right now. He's an incredible manager, coach on the field. His time came. He was prepared, and his coach and him did a very good job. I think Tom Herman ‑‑ it's not by accident that this thing happened, now. It's not because Kenny had the buckeye in his pocket or his lucky t-shirt; it's because he worked hard with the position coach to get ready for his opportunity, and boy did he."
As the offensive coordinator at Rice, Herman had recruited Guiton out of Eisenhower High School in Houston. The recruiting game is a tough one, but that's the level at which Guiton was recruited. He'd been considering Rice, Kansas, Wyoming and Prarie View A&M and, as legend goes, the first time Guiton got a call about Ohio State coming to see him, he thought it was someone trying to play a joke.
"The word was out that Ohio State needed a quarterback, and (the coaches at Eisenhower) said, 'We have one. Someone's finally coming to the right place,'" said Dre' Thompson, the defensive coordinator at Eisenhower when Guiton was in high school and now an administrator with the Aldine Independent School District. "A school like Ohio State, that's going to get any kid's attention. We always believed Kenny would be good enough to have success there."
Kenneth Guiton Sr. was also an assistant coach on that Eisenhower team. Kenny had an uncle who coached, too, Thompson said, and Kenny "was always our coach on the field. But you know what? It's easy to say that. Anybody who knows the offense and leads a little can be called a coach on the field. But Kenny was exceptionally sharp. When we first got to know him as a ninth-grader, he was already leading.
"He didn't run with the crowd. The crowd followed him."
Part of the reason Ohio State needed a quarterback in its 2009 recruiting class is because other players it pursued knew the situation. Terrelle Pryor was a mega-recruit who took over the starting job as a freshman in 2008, and there was no reason to believe Pryor would give up that job anytime in the near future.
Guiton came to Ohio State knowing he'd have to wait. It's not as if this was Ben Roethlisberger playing receiver in high school because the coach's son played quarterback (that really happened), or a highly-touted college freshman waiting his turn. Guiton waited and waited and waited some more. Just two seasons ago, when Pryor and Jim Tressel were pushed out and the Ohio State quarterbacking was very much a joke with Joe Bauserman eventually giving way to Miller, then a very green freshman, Guiton was a distant third as a third-year player.
And over the last 13 weeks he accounted for 13 touchdowns. At Ohio State.
"Sometimes it comes up in my head, 'What if I (had transferred)? What if i did this or that?" Guiton said "But I'm here. I'm happy with everything going on. I prayed about it. I think I'm supposed to be here.
"I wouldn't say I flirted with (leaving) but everyone wants to play. It comes up. I don't know. I talked to my parents and we said going anywhere else, you're not going to get this good with it. I'm at a great university, the best in the nation in my mind."
Before this season, Herman said he thought Guiton would start for more than half of the 125 FBS programs nationwide. He knew.
"I knew he was a coach's kid, a sharp kid," Herman said last year. "His testing scores were really, really good. It's hard to find athletic kids like that who also can score well enough to get into Rice, and he was one of them. Plus he was in our own backyard, so we definitely recruited the heck out of him.
"Did I always know (he was a good fit for the spread offense)? Absolutely, yeah."
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Nobody knew in the Purdue game last October, one that most figured would be a laugher for the unbeaten Buckeyes against the struggling Boilermakers.
By the fourth quarter, Ohio Stadium was silent, Miller had been taken to the hospital and the Buckeyes trailed by eight points with 47 seconds to go and had no timeouts.
Guiton calmly marched them down the field for a score and threw a two-point conversion pass to force overtime, during which another scoring drive won it and kept an undefeated season alive.
"That changed a lot in my life," Guiton said. "People started recognizing me. I'll be somewhere and I'll have people coming up and thanking me for that game. I always thought that was crazy."
He'd been at a big-time football program but really on the edge of big-time football. He'd forever played the role of That Other Guy, first to Pryor, then to Miller as Miller won Big Ten Player of Year last fall, even going back to his first varsity action at Eisenhower when the quarterback on the other side was Andrew Luck.
Now, he's a team captain for the nation's No. 3 team. Ohio State elected eight captains before its season opener last month, and its backup quarterback was one of them. Guiton said each player had four votes but he used a fifth, voting for himself. He apparently wasn't the only one.
"A backup being a captain, I think that speaks a lot of words," Guiton said. "It was really cool to see the respect my team had for me. I was surprised, but I've always tried to step up and be a leader. I've always tried to lead."
Herman started calling Guiton "Coach" last season for the way he helped Miller and the team's other young quarterbacks learn a new offense. Guiton has outgrown that name now but remains a coach's dream; after the Cal game, he said he understood that when Miller returned from injury, his role "would be going back to helping on the sideline, sharing everything I see, just trying to help this team win."
Whether or not he sees significant time the rest of the season, Guiton may have played well enough to earn an invite to a postseason all-star game -- and maybe even the NFL Scouting Combine.
Craig Krenzel got drafted. Ken Dorsey got drafted. The list goes on.
"Even as a junior in high school, we allowed Kenny to make calls and checks at the line of scrimmage," Thompson said. "We taught the system and he just mastered it. I used to call him Baby Peyton Manning. I always told the offensive coaches, 'Just let Baby Peyton work.'"
Said Meyer: "What he's done doesn't surprise me. (The scouting report) is that he's too slow, not strong enough arm and all that but all he does is lead, man. He has an incredible knowledge of the game and incredible leadership skills where our players really respond.
"He's a great distributor of the ball. It's efficiency. He gets us in the right stuff at the right time. Getting us in the right play, that's a quarterback's responsibility. You don't always notice that...he does it very well. He's a coach out there. He has a really good mind and incredible leadership skills."
Meyer has said he's had uneasy moments while trying both to scheme and simply ponder potential ways two quarterbacks can help the Buckeyes get where they want to go for the rest of the season. He might have the nation's best quarterbacking insurance policy on the sideline, but the standards and expectations are high for a reason. Ohio State can't afford a slip.
Opposing defenses now have to prepare not only for Miller's rare athleticism but for a possible change of pace, a composed conductor who didn't always throw the prettiest spirals over the last three weeks but almost always delivered the ball where it needed to be. Ohio State's passing game and option game are way ahead of where they were at the beginning of this season, and the Buckeyes offense is on the verge of being at full strength, personnel-wise, for the first time all season.
During one preseason interview, Guiton was asked if he'd ever campaigned Meyer and Herman to put Miller at running back and let him run the offense as the quarterback.
"I wish," was Guiton's smiling reply.
Over the last three weeks, he's made just about anything seem possible.
