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The quarterback’s hat was tugged low, his beard cut tight, his old trademark mullet now long gone, and his voice a little low—where, amid the dinner crowd at Goodfellas Pizza a mile North of downtown Indy, you had to lean in a little to hear Quinn Ewers talk.
If you were at another table in the small, lively restaurant, you’d never know that one of the most ballyhooed high school football recruits was sitting nearby.
But that he was so unassuming played right into the point he was trying to make.
Quinn Ewers
And so, with his dinner done Saturday night, and his combine experience nearly complete, the soft-spoken Texas star dove into what you might have heard about him—and, then, what you should know.
“We’re human beings at the end of the day, and you see what other people say,” he says. “It’s a human’s nature to want to make everybody feel good about us, and who we are as people—we want the situation that we’re in to feel right. For sure, I have a great group of people around me that support me enough, more than enough, and they taught me a lot about not focusing on what everyone else is saying. …
“Sure, it gets pretty annoying, but at the end of the day I know who I am, and my loved ones know who I am.”
There’s a lot of uncertainty, in general, affixed to the quarterback draft class of 2025.
That’ll mean, over the weeks to come, you’ll hear about the potential that one guy could rise, another could fall—and that makes Ewers a pretty intriguing figure.
Let’s start, for the uninitiated, with his story in a nutshell. Ewers was pegged as a prodigy in middle school, offered a scholarship by Ohio State after attending a camp in Columbus as an eighth-grader. Three years later, he flipped his commitment from Texas to Ohio State. By then, he was the top recruit in the class of ’22 ranked by every major recruiting service.
Soon thereafter, he was offered a reported seven-figure NIL deal by Holy Kombucha, but couldn’t accept it because Texas law prohibited it. So he reclassified, graduated high school early, skipped his senior year at Southlake Carroll, and enrolled in the summer of 2021 at Ohio State. Four months after that, after a season sitting behind C.J. Stroud, and with Steve Sarkisian now at UT, he made the decision to return to Texas.
Since, he’s become one of the most prolific quarterbacks in Longhorns’ history.
But there’s a lot more to this than just that. Things, for sure, haven’t gone exactly as planned for a kid who was earmarked to be a high draft pick before he could drive.
What he thought would happen over the past four years when he was the confident, sought-after 18-year-old kid—“Yeah, it was, ”—is one thing. The way things have turned out is another thing entirely. And one reason this past week in Indy was so important to Ewers personally is it gave him the chance to tell his story to NFL teams.
“I just wanted to give them an idea of who I am, because I’m sure they hear a lot of different things about me—and most of it’s hearsay or just not true,” Ewers says. “I wanted them to know about the resiliency I show in-game, the mental toughness I have to to go through all that stuff I went through in the three years I was at Texas, and be back-to-back playoff contenders, and in the semifinals, and continue to lead my team …. and continue to be there for my teammates day in and day out.
“That’s the biggest thing I wanted to come across.”
So that was the message for the Pittsburgh Steelers, New York Jets, Las Vegas Raiders, New Orleans Saints, Tennessee Titans, Jacksonville Jaguars and Indianapolis Colts in formal interviews, and for others in informals, with Ewers’s third and final season as the Longhorns’ starter providing the ultimate testament to it.
That, too, was imperfect. He strained his oblique in Texas’s rout of Michigan in Week 2, then injured it again, more significantly, the next week against UTSA. He returned for the Red River Rivalry game against Oklahoma, with the pain manageable, but not gone. Then, on Nov. 23, he suffered a high-ankle sprain against Kentucky, and played through it. But he kept answering the bell, and did it with Arch Manning, nephew of Peyton and Eli, sitting second on the depth chart, as the young, former belle of the recruiting ball that Ewers was once.
After the oblique, he compensated by relying more on his lower body and wrist to generate torque. That was a struggle, which showed up in a brief in-game benching during the first Georgia game in October. After the high-ankle sprain, he couldn’t bend on his back knee as much, and couldn’t turn his front foot in, as he preferred, because some of the bruising on the ankle, which caused some pain in the Achilles, forced him to keep his heel down.
“With the oblique, I had to learn different ways to put the ball where it needed to be, just because I wasn’t able to rotate as much,” he says. “And then I deal with the ankle, where I was getting some of that help off the oblique, and then I get the ankle, and I have to find another way to throw the football. It was like, again, the resiliency, I’m always going to find a way, and I’m always going to be a consistent worker, no matter what.”
The end for Ewers at UT came with a strip-sack at the wire of the Cotton Bowl delivered by his old Ohio State roommate Jack Sawyer. That was Jan. 10. Since, his oblique has finally healed. His ankle—it was diagnosed between a grade 2 and grade 3 sprain—still isn’t perfect.
But that wasn’t going to stop him from throwing here, even with the option to wait until his pro day to do. So there he was Saturday, in his words, “Because I wanted to show them, again, I’ll go back to it—I’m always going to find a way.” And, in this case, it was about finding a way to show teams that he still is what everyone made him out to be when he was a teenager.
“I think I’m the best [in the class] and the most-ready for the NFL because of what I’ve been through,” Ewers said.
Which goes back to the misperceptions. That, because of the NIL deals, he’s driven by money. That, because of his soft-spoken nature and calm play style, he lacks urgency. That, because he changes speed on his ball, he lacks velocity at times.
The hope, for Ewers, is by taking all comers this week, he’d take all those narratives on.
But there is one criticism he’s heard he won’t fight. He’ll concede, now, that he might’ve been a little entitled four years ago, as the kid coming out of a storied Texas high-school program. That, of course, was one transfer, one benching, many calls from fans for his backup to play and a lot of injuries ago. And now, with all those experiences in tow, he has little doubt that he’s prepared for what’s next—perhaps more so than anyone could be.
“I think I’m the most ready for the situations that occur in the NFL, injuries, playing through injuries, having a big name behind you, continuing to play through that amount of pressure, continuing to be confident after being benched—it’s hard to do,” Ewers said. “I wouldn’t trade anything I’ve done, skipping my senior year to go to Ohio State, wouldn’t trade that for anything, because I learned so much about not only myself but the game of football. I matured a lot. Not to say I was immature, but I’m much more mature because of that.
“And then all the injuries I had to deal with and come back from, I wouldn’t trade it. … It’s the reality of the position. Stuff’s gonna go wrong. And I have a plan of attack for pretty much any situation that can arise.”
For now, that means telling his story to the teams that are evaluating him. And selling someone on the idea that this unassuming kid, anonymously hanging in the pizza joint, can become the star everyone was projecting him to be.
