Mike Yurcich Explains Why OSU Has Stuck With Taylor Cornelius

I wrote a piece literally entitled Corncrow on Monday as an ode to how sharply No. 14 has turned the corner over the past few weeks. It seems like his vision has opened up and his ability to work the ball around the field has improved.

Tyron Johnson is getting more targets than he was early in the season (he’s had 28 in the past two games), and a breadth of players — including Jelani Woods, Chuba Hubbard and Landon Wolf — are getting involved in the passing game.

But there was a groundswell of folks following the KSU game — myself among them — calling for Spencer Sanders or Dru Brown to play over Cornelius. It wasn’t unwarranted at the time, even if Corn has made it look like it was over the last three games.

I asked Mike Yurcich on Saturday about why Corn has improved so much, and he answered that but he also (maybe inadvertently?) explained why OSU stuck with Corn throughout a tumultuous season.

“I think more snaps are going to help you,” said Yurcich. “Just ask a guy like Tom Brady or Drew Brees who’s been playing in the NFL for 20-something years. I think that’s the key to a lot of quarterbacks’ success. The more reps you get, the better you’re going to be.

“That’s why I think there’s a lot of success with certain NFL teams or college teams when the quarterback happens to be a fourth-year guy or fifth-year guy or the quarterback happens to be in the same system for x-amount of years.”

This is a maybe unintentionally ironic statement, given who OSU has on the bench and how much time he’ll take to develop next season, but I understand what he’s saying.

“The changing of the guard … there’s always a place in time for it,” added Yurcich. “The consistency, the gradual improvement. It’s like a … graph. Over time, you want to see a steady incline. There’s going to be some dips, you have to understand that.

“If you’re going to measure [QB success] and say, ‘Hey he’s had a bad game,’ and yank him, you’re going to ride that wave and go down that slippery slope of really not giving a guy a chance to prove where he’s at and how much he can improve. That’s not an easy thing to do, especially this day in age because we want to win and we want to have success. Those are the tricky things.”

I think the QB decisions this year have maybe been more difficult behind the scenes than Gundy has let on. I have no inside knowledge, haven’t talked to anybody about that, but there are a lot of different factors in play here. As for the decision-making plays out at OSU, Yurcich said it’s a collaborative effort.

“It’s great to coach for a guy who’s been a quarterback and to have a tremendous amount of experience on the offensive side of the ball because you don’t make those decisions alone,” said Yurcich. “We’ve done a good job discussing and thinking about it. At the end of the day, I’m proud of that young man.”

It’s a good (and the right) place to land. I really liked what Yurcich said about not bowing to one bad game — although you could make a compelling argument that Corn wasn’t great for far more than the Kansas State game. And I appreciated that he noted that juggling act of letting a guy have some breathing room to grow against knowing when to pull the plug.

I’ll always believe there was a contingency plan for the Texas game and that Corn forced them to put the glass-breaking hammer down by throwing for 241 in the first half. Regardless, he’s rebounded over the last few weeks and rewarded the faith Mike & Mike put in him to start the season. There have been dips — many of them — but the graph of late has looked a lot less like 1929 ? and a lot more like Apple ?.