Ohio State EDGE J.T. Tuimoloau left Friday’s Cotton Bowl against Texas with an apparent ankle injury. He appeared to get caught underneath a teammate and immediately headed to the tent.

Tuimoloau got rolled up on the pile in the second quarter and quickly reached for his ankle. He limped off the field and went straight to the medical tent with the training staff for further evaluation.

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Tuimoloau emerged from the tent shortly thereafter with his left ankle heavily taped. ESPN’s Holly Rowe reported he was in plenty of pain, but looked like he’d try to return to the College Football Playoff semifinal.

“J.T. right now, as you see, a very heavily taped left ankle,” Rowe said on the broadcast. “He is in quite a bit of pain. He keeps grimacing as he tries to run. But he has gone up and down the sideline a couple of times here. It looks like he’s going to try to go. But, guys, I can tell you, he is in a great deal of pain right now.”

Tuimoloau is in the midst of the best year of his career after returning to Ohio State this season. He entered Friday with 49 tackles, including a career-high 17 tackles for loss and 10.0 sacks. Prior to his departure in the Cotton Bowl, he had two tackles and 1.5 sacks as the Buckeyes ramped up the pressure on Quinn Ewers.

Ohio State has been rolling through the College Football Playoff, bouncing back well from a season-ending loss to Michigan. The Buckeyes cruised past Tennessee in the first round and blew out No. 1 seed Oregon in the Rose Bowl last time out.

Hot starts have been key to Ohio State’s success, and that was the case on Friday when Quinshon Judkins found the end zone on the Buckeyes’ opening drive. Ryan Day said it’s crucial to set the table for the rest of the game.

“We’ve always wanted to have fast starts and we all know that,” Day said. “I do think that, you know, we’ve talked about, you know, early in games, you know, you want to set the tone for the game, you know, as an individual but also as a team, as a unit.”

“You know, both games, we’ve started off with the ball and we’ve gone right down and scored. So execution fuels emotion. That certainly has a big part of it. They go together. We’ve executed well on those first couple drives and that’s had a big part of it. Defense has got some three-and-outs early in the game. We’ve been able to jump on the last two opponents.”

Rewind to Week 8 of the 2023 season, and Will Howard found himself on the bench in the second half of Kansas State’s game against Texas Tech.

Howard, who attempted only one pass in the second half of the game, was relieved by true freshman Avery Johnson, who scored five rushing touchdowns as Wildcats coach Chris Klieman said the quarterback-run game was open. Johnson’s performance led to Kansas State’s 38-21 win that night.

Fast forward a year, and Howard is in a position no one saw coming. After losing his role for a short time in 2023, the fifth-year senior has Ohio State in the College Football Playoff semifinal and has thrown for a CFP-leading 630 yards with five touchdowns in two dominant wins over Tennessee and Oregon.

REQUIRED READING: Why Ohio State QB Will Howard has extra motivation for Texas in College Football Playoff

The 6-foot-4 signal caller heads into the Buckeyes’ Cotton Bowl matchup with Texas on Friday with 3,490 passing yards with 32 touchdowns to nine interceptions this season, putting himself on the NFL draft radar.

While Howard took the majority of the snaps the rest of the way for Kansas State, he did surrender some work to the Wildcats’ young phenom in 2023. His transfer to Ohio State has been clearly the right move for the Downing, Pennsylvania, native.

Here’s everything to know about Howard’s transfer last offseason, and how he has excelled at Ohio State this season:

Why did Will Howard transfer to Ohio State?

Howard never explicitly stated his reasoning to leave Kansas State, however, with one extra season of eligibility remaining due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Howard likely wanted to play for a team ready to compete at the national stage.

Howard likely wasn’t going to achieve that at Kansas State, although he went 12-5 as the starter there in 2022 and 2023 with a 2022 Big 12 championship win over TCU, who reached the national championship that season. He also knew he’d be one of the top transfer portal quarterbacks available in a year where numerous teams had a spot to fill, along with respecting that the Wildcats had Johnson in waiting.

Ohio State, of course, also had a spot open, as Kyle McCord entered the transfer portal despite throwing for 3,170 yards with 24 touchdowns to six interceptions last season. All signs pointed to the Buckeyes taking a quarterback regardless of McCord’s move, however, to promote competition for the spot after some of McCord’s blunders in big games.

Howard took official visits to Miami, USC and Ohio State, and ultimately chose the Buckeyes due to the opportunity to win a national championship, plus the exposure on the national stage that would hopefully improve his NFL draft stock.

“The goal I have, I want to go win a national championship,” Howard told ESPN after committing. “At the end of the day, I want to go be a starting quarterback in the NFL. … I feel like the best place to stick as a quarterback in the NFL is as a first- or second-round pick in the NFL draft. Going to Ohio State gives me a chance to make a jump and leap into that conversation.”

Howard nearly entered the NFL draft last offseason, especially after landing a coveted invite from the Senior Bowl. However, he seemingly thought that a season at Ohio State would do more for his chances than leaving last season.

REQUIRED READING: Will Howard continues to prove Ohio State football can win with him at quarterback

Howard made huge strides as a passer during his time at Kansas State, going from a run-first quarterback to a consistent passer. His biggest jump came at Ohio State, however, as his completion percentage rose to 72.6% this season, over 10 points higher than his previous best of 61.3% in 2023.

Howard said his production at Kansas State didn’t match what he thought of himself as a player, and that rung true after his showing with the Buckeyes this season.

“The week before I committed here I received a Senior Bowl invite,” Howard told reporters at his introductory press conference last January. “That was probably the thing I was closest to doing was going in the draft. I was projected a third- to sixth-round pick, that’s what I was hearing. You can never really trust everything you hear, but that was consensus what I was hearing.

“I just felt like I had the opportunity and felt like my talent level didn’t match where my stock was. And I felt like I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to try and bump that up and go somewhere to compete for a national championship.”

Will Howard stats

Here are Howard’s year-by-year college stats:

• 2020 (Kansas State): 90 of 168 passing (53.6%) for 1,178 yards with eight touchdowns to 10 interceptions; 78 rushes for 364 yards with three touchdowns
• 2021 (Kansas State): 30 of 55 passing (54.5%) for 332 yards with a touchdown to an interception; 32 rushes for 184 yards with four touchdowns
• 2022 (Kansas State): 119 of 199 passing (59.8%) for 1,633 yards with 15 touchdowns to four interceptions; 35 rushes for 22 yards with three touchdowns
• 2023 (Kansas State): 219 of 357 passing (61.3%) for 2,643 yards with 24 touchdowns to 10 interceptions; 81 rushes for 351 yards with nine touchdowns
• 2024 (Ohio State): 268 of 369 passing (72.6%) for 3,490 yards with 32 touchdowns to nine interceptions; 82 rushes for 165 yards with seven touchdowns

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Respected Ohio attorney and former state Sen. Ben Espy will be remembered at a celebration of life Monday for his decades of service to the state and its capital city.

Espy died on Jan. 4 at age 81 after a brief illness.

Espy, a Democrat, broke racial barriers as the first Black person to serve as president pro tem of the city council in the capital, Columbus, for most of the 1980s and as minority leader of the Ohio Senate, where he served from 1991 to 2000.

Though his hopes of attaining higher office were ultimately dashed, Espy continued to earn honors from members of both parties throughout his career.

Then- Democratic Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann tapped Espy as his top lieutenant in 2007 and chose Espy in 2009 to lead a high-profile internal investigation into allegations of sexual harassment at the office. The final report was damning.

“I don’t think anyone anywhere is going to question Ben Espy’s integrity,” Dann’s spokesperson, Leo Jennings, remarked at the time.

Two years later, Republican Maureen O’Connor invited Espy to deliver the keynote address at her swearing-in ceremony as Ohio’s first female chief justice.

Espy’s most lasting efforts were probably in the city of Columbus.

He established the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, now one of the nation’s largest, as well as the Columbus Youth Corps, a program teaching ethics and professionalism to young people that was designated as one of President George H.W. Bush’s “points of light.”

He also created “The Job Show,” a cable program produced by the city that helped people find jobs. It was named the best municipal cable program in the U.S. in 1986 and 1987.

“He was the community’s person,” daughter Laura Espy-Bell said. “We’re hearing countless stories of people whose lives were changed because of my dad.”

Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther remembered Espy as “a remarkable leader and advocate” for city residents. U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty, who represents Columbus in Congress, said Espy’s legacy “is felt in every corner of community.”

Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin called Espy “a towering statesman and a fighter for justice and equality.”

“Ben Espy is the kind of trailblazer on whose shoulders so many of us stand now,” Hardin posted on X.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, on July 12, 1943, Espy graduated in 1961 from Sandusky High School, where he played football and ran track. He was recruited to Woody Hayes’ Ohio State Buckeyes football team, where he was a running back. He graduated from The Ohio State University in 1965 with a bachelor’s in political science and went on to earn a law degree from Howard University in 1968.

Espy began his legal career as a corporate lawyer for Allegheny Airlines and then entered the U.S. Air Force, serving as an assistant staff judge advocate. He returned to Ohio in 1972, where he began the first of his stints at the Ohio Attorney General’s office before starting his own law practice and eventually entering politics.

He and his wife, Kathy Duffy Espy, who died in 2022, had four daughters and 11 grandchildren. Espy-Bell said that by day her father worked hard for the community, but at night he always had time to read a bedtime story to his daughters or attend his grandchildren’s soccer games.

Espy was involved in a freak accident in 1984 in which he was struck by a falling cornice that broke off an aging building in downtown Columbus as he walked by. He lost the lower part of his right leg.

Espy-Bell said her father didn’t let that slow him down.

“Two things got him through that,” she said. “One was the strength of my mother to carry our family through, raising four little girls. The other was the strength of my father, in his resiliency, to come back even stronger and even better.”

Derrick Clay, president and CEO of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, said Espy’s story “reminds us all that challenges can become opportunities to make an even greater impact.”

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine ordered flags to be lowered to half-staff in Espy’s honor on the day of his funeral.