WILL HOWARD HAD no idea how badly his week was going until the internet told him. "Are you all right?" his girlfriend Skyler Skoglund asked him last month, after Howard opened his phone. He'd flown from the NFL combine to Minnesota to see her -- a quick respite from the frenetic pace of draft season. He honestly thought everything was OK. Then the 6-foot-4, 236-pound quarterback from Ohio State received a curious text message.
It was a screenshot of a social media post from former Colorado quarterback Shedeur Sanders, a projected first-round pick in this year's draft, chiding detractors for hating on Howard.
Confused, Howard texted his agent, Chase Callahan.
"Am I getting hated on right now?" Howard asked Callahan.
Howard had been booed during his passing workout at the combine, but he shrugged it off as some spicy Michigan fans still bitter over Ohio State winning the national championship in January. He didn't know that a viral video of him overthrowing receivers during that workout was making the rounds online, or that he'd become the controversy du jour of the event.
News of Howard's performance even made it all the way across the pond, with a blistering headline from a British tabloid: "NFL prospect Will Howard savaged over 'worst combine performance of all time.'"
His agent told him not to worry. These things happen in the long days between the Super Bowl and the NFL draft. Two years ago, another Ohio State quarterback, C.J. Stroud, was the focus of intense scrutiny when word leaked that he did poorly on a pre-draft test designed to help measure a quarterback's ability to make split-second decisions.
Stroud went on to become the Houston Texans' No. 2 pick in the draft and was NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year.
Howard's possible scenarios for the 2025 NFL draft, which runs April 24-26 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, aren't as glitzy. No one knows where he'll go, but he's not projected to be drafted early like Sanders or Miami's Cam Ward.
Howard isn't worried. He believes that he'll someday be a starting NFL quarterback, and that all the pre-draft noise is just another chapter in the many travails of Will Howard.
"I believe I'm the best quarterback in this class," the 23-year-old told ESPN. "I think there's unbelievable talent. But if you're going to be a competitor, at the end of the day, you have to have that belief in yourself, and I think that's what helps me get through those adverse times.
"S--- happens. You've got to be able to deal with it, and it's the mentally tough people that are able to overcome those things. I think in my career I've just had to do that over and over again, and I've realized it's a never-ending cycle."
HE LOST HIS starting job once, or technically twice, at Kansas State, depending on whom you ask. He was hardly the popular pick to take the reins of a loaded Ohio State team when the Buckeyes plucked him out of the transfer portal in late 2023. He came under fire from critics during the 2024 season when the Buckeyes suffered losses at Oregon and at home to Michigan.
But Howard has seen tougher times. In 2020, he was a freshman at Kansas State living 1,200 miles away from his home in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, isolated and living alone because of the COVID-19 pandemic. He had arrived on campus in January 2020 as an early enrollee, went home for spring break and couldn't return until June. When he got back, he caught COVID. Howard expected to redshirt.
He was thrust into the starting job in the fourth game of the 2020 season when Skylar Thompson suffered a season-ending upper-body injury. Howard's first start was at TCU, against coach Gary Patterson, one of the top defensive minds in football, and though the Wildcats won that day largely because of their defense and then beat Kansas at home the following week, Howard knew he was overmatched. And he was right. Kansas State lost its final five games of the season.
"Will always has an air about him that's confident," Kansas State coach Chris Klieman said. "That's one thing I always enjoyed -- even if he had a nervousness or anxiety to something, man, he didn't let it show. I think our players, especially our older kids, really appreciated that this kid's got confidence coming into the huddle with a bunch of fifth-year guys and saying, 'All right, we're going to go down and score.'
"That's what I think sets him apart right now from a lot of people is the confidence and the belief that kid has in himself because of the adversity that he faced. There were some games he didn't play very well as a true freshman. Makes sense; he hadn't had the reps. But I know he learned so much from it."
Howard served as Thompson's backup the following season, then started three games when Thompson was injured. He figured to be the Wildcats' starter as a junior, but in December 2021, Kansas State added former Nebraska quarterback Adrian Martinez through the transfer portal. Nine months later, Kansas State named Martinez the starter.
The decision to add Martinez from the portal made Howard angry. It made him want to leave. But he respected Martinez for his resiliency after all the injuries and criticism he withstood during four years as a starter at Nebraska, and for the way he handled his transfer.
Martinez didn't come in barking out orders, Howard said. He took the time to get to know everyone, put in the work and was respectful. Martinez in turn appreciated Howard's professionalism.
"It never seemed like he held a grudge against me," Martinez said. "It never seemed like he felt bitter about that situation, which I think would have been very easy to do.
"It's one of those interesting dynamics where you go from being very competitive and splitting reps to all of a sudden someone is the starter and you have to do everything you can to support that guy. And I felt that support from Will. We would study tape together. We had each other's backs. It felt like we were brothers, you know? And I still feel that way about Will. I think he's an amazing teammate."
They became road roommates, and Howard would always break the tension before a big game by cracking jokes. Midway through the 2022 season, the roles reversed when Martinez was knocked out of the TCU game with an injury. Howard led the Wildcats to a 48-0 home win against Oklahoma State the following week with four touchdowns and 296 passing yards. Martinez regained his starting job the next game against Texas but suffered a leg injury a week later at Baylor.
Behind Howard, the Wildcats won their final three regular-season games, setting up a Big XII rematch against TCU. Howard completed 18 of 32 passes for two touchdowns to buoy K-State to a 31-28 overtime win. The next fall, with the starting job finally his, he threw for 2,643 yards with 24 touchdowns and 10 interceptions. But true freshman Avery Johnson, an in-state quarterback, appeared in eight games and impressed, throwing five touchdown passes and running for seven scores.
At the end of the 2023 regular season, Howard said, he talked with Klieman about the future. Howard was about to graduate with a degree in accounting, but he had another year of eligibility and had pondered whether he should enter the NFL draft or stay in Manhattan. Klieman, he said, told him that if he came back, he'd have to compete with Johnson for the starting job. (Klieman declined to comment on the conversation).
Howard said he feels no ill will toward Kansas State -- his younger brother Ryan Howard is an offensive lineman there -- and that he's still close with the coaching staff. But the departure from Kansas State motivated him and made him realize that regardless of how you play, "you never truly make it."
"Do I wish they would have believed in me and wanted me to stay?" he said. "Would I have even stayed? I don't know. I think I kind of got everything out of that experience for myself. I think I needed a new path regardless. But the fact that they wanted to go in some other direction, yeah, it pissed me off."
IN THE WINTER of 2023, Ohio State coach Ryan Day was looking for a change, too. His team had lost to its rival Michigan for the third straight time, a game that knocked the Buckeyes out of the College Football Playoff.
Kyle McCord was Ohio State's starter that season, but he entered the transfer portal in December after Day declined to say whether McCord would be the starting quarterback in the Cotton Bowl.
McCord, playing for one of the best football teams in the country, put up better statistics than Howard in 2023. But Day saw a competitor in Howard. He liked his size, strength and footwork. He was impressed by some of the throws Howard made in the red zone but knew that before he came to any conclusions, he needed to have the quarterback on campus.
"The minute you meet him," Day said, "you just recognize that one, he's got an infectious personality. I mean, he can lead people, and that was important. Then we started talking football. He's bright. He could recall plays; he could verbalize what he had done in games. It was like talking to an NFL player. By the time I got done with that conversation, that won me over more than anything."
Day said he doesn't normally bring in a quarterback for one season in a must-win-now situation. Everything had to fit with his talented, prideful team. The pressure was on Day -- the pressure is always on Day -- but it was also heaped on Howard.
Howard was so enthralled by the trip that he told Day he had him, he was all-in. Howard told the coach he wouldn't let him down, told him something to the effect of, "Let's go win it all."
Back home in Pennsylvania, Howard's mom was skeptical. "Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked him.
Howard knew it was the challenge he needed if he was ever going to play in the NFL. Within a few days of his recruiting trip, he was back on campus, ready to go.
He followed the blueprint that Martinez had left him a year earlier: Be humble, get to know everyone and work hard.
"I'm freaking running sprints when I first got there, and I was so out of shape," Howard said. "I remember throwing up as I'm running, but I was just like, 'I'm not sitting out.'
"I remember Coach Day coming in the weight room one day and [saying] 'I need you to be the guy that we can look to on fourth down and we need a yard. You need to be that guy that's going to be able to go get that. And you need to prove that to everyone so everyone in this building knows that you're going to be that guy.'"
Center Seth McLaughlin, an Alabama transfer who also joined Ohio State in 2024 with just one year of eligibility left, said the Buckeyes went from the Cotton Bowl loss back to work, driven to erase those late-season memories. A half-dozen of them could have gone to the NFL, but they returned with one purpose: to win the title that eluded them in 2023.
All eyes were on the newcomers, McLaughlin said, watching and evaluating them. He said it was more important for them to be trusted than liked.
Howard wanted both. He wanted to be challenged, and Day tested him plenty in the spring. He tried to create scenarios to rattle Howard. You can't throw interceptions at Ohio State, he'd tell Howard. The world would come to an end if he did.
Whenever Day would hammer Howard on something he did wrong, Howard would quickly reply, "Yes sir, I got you."
"And he hated when I said that," Howard said. "He'd be like, 'You don't got me!'"
But Howard's easy demeanor served him well in heated situations, such as the early November game against No. 3 Penn State. His teammates knew how important that game was to Howard, playing in his home state. On his first snap, Howard threw a pick-six. McLaughlin said Howard came back to the sideline and calmly told the team, "Hey, that's on me."
The next series, he led the Buckeyes on a 74-yard touchdown drive.
"That pick never affected him, especially in that emotional environment," McLaughlin said. "That was kind of the moment it clicked for me. I'm like, 'Holy crap, this guy's special.'"
The highs and lows were whiplash-inducing. Three weeks earlier, in Eugene, Oregon, Howard was skewered for his clock management in the waning moments against the Ducks. He dropped back to pass with six seconds to go on third-and-20, trying to get his team in field goal position. He scrambled up the middle for 12 yards, then slid inside the 30-yard line. But the clock had expired, sealing a 32-31 loss. Howard put his hands on his head. He thought he'd hit the ground with one second left.
After the game, Howard, who completed 28 of 35 passes that night for 326 yards and two touchdowns, said he walked through the locker room and hugged every player. He blamed himself for the loss. "My bad," he told his teammates.
The internet exploded with memes and jokes. McLaughlin said they "fully discredited the great game he played up until that point."
The team got back from Eugene early the next morning, and Howard couldn't eat or sleep and didn't know what to do. So he dropped his bags on the turf of Ohio State's indoor facility, propped his head on the bags and stared at the ceiling.
"I was praying," he said, "talking to God, you know. Why me? Why does this keep happening to me?"
He said it was a spiritual moment, in the silence, and that he felt better when he left.
The regular season ended with another crushing low -- a 13-10 loss to Michigan.
A week later, the Buckeyes earned the No. 8 seed in the College Football Playoff. Howard proceeded to put together the best four-game run of his career. He completed 75.2% of his passes for 1,150 yards, 8 touchdowns and 2 interceptions.
After Ohio State's 34-23 win against Notre Dame for the national championship, Howard was named the offensive MVP.
He skipped the Senior Bowl to return to Columbus and celebrate with his teammates. He knew the importance of the Senior Bowl and the impact the week can have on a player's draft stock, but he felt compelled to be with the people who'd had such an impact on him for the previous 13 months.
There was a victory meal for the seniors and coaches at Hyde Park Prime Steakhouse, and the players told stories and laughed.
"It's still kind of surreal," Howard said.
THERE ARE NO records that track the worst performance in the history of the NFL combine. It wasn't televised until 2004, when NFL Network started running portions of the workouts. It was around then that a small group of news media was able to watch the quarterbacks and wide receivers from inside the facility.
Longtime NFL writer Rick Gosselin, who covered many combines, has no recollection of any performances that stood out enough to merit the "worst-ever" moniker.
"There's somebody who's always going to run slower than expected," Gosselin said, "and it's going to be a big deal, and then come draft day, he's going to get drafted where he was supposed to get drafted before the combine.
"The combine workout is way overrated, frankly."
Former New York Jets general manager Mike Tannenbaum said he never made a draft decision based on a combine workout. A good one occasionally can boost draft stock, he said. But a bad one can't hurt it. The only quarterback he remembers moving the needle during a combine workout was Justin Herbert, solidifying his standing as a top-10 pick in 2020. The Chargers went on to select him at No. 6.
Tannenbaum would give a quarterback credit if he participated in the workout, since many others don't anymore. Last year, the top three quarterbacks in the draft -- Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels and Drake Maye -- went 1, 2 and 3 despite none of them participating in on-field workouts.
Sanders and Cam Ward, this year's top quarterbacks, opted to skip the workouts too.
"Context is everything," said Tannenbaum, now an NFL analyst for ESPN. "[Howard] had a really good season. He played for the best team this year in a very, very competitive conference. The game film is exponentially more important than a workout where you're throwing to people you've never thrown to before."
Tannenbaum, like a lot of draft experts, said he thinks Howard will go somewhere in the middle rounds, to a team betting on his upside.
The 2025 quarterback class is considered thin compared to recent years, but ESPN draft analyst/insider Matt Miller said that doesn't mean there won't be high demand.
Continuity at the position, he said, has become a rarity. So has patience.
"So you have the bad teams that have the young quarterbacks," he said, "you have the good teams with the established ones and everyone else in the middle. It's like they rotate years drafting quarterbacks.
"I think the cool thing about this class is there's a middle class at quarterback, which is something that's been missing. There haven't been those Round 2 or Round 3 players that could develop into starters. And that used to be a common thing. This quarterback class is rich in that middle class of guys like Will Howard."
Draft experts are wary of Howard's arm strength and processing ability. On ESPN draft analyst Jordan Reid's 2025 QB Hot Board, he lists Howard as the eighth-best quarterback in the draft, writing that, "Many of Howard's warts show up when defenses speed up his processing."
Pro Football Focus gives Howard a 50.9 under pressure grade, which ranks 27th out of 56 draft-eligible quarterbacks.
Howard, unsurprisingly, is confident in his processing ability. On a mid-March Monday afternoon in Irvine, California, he was finishing up a chicken enchilada and watching film with Jake Heaps, a former pro quarterback who is training him in the days leading up to the draft. Heaps is Russell Wilson's personal coach.
Heaps asked Howard to go to the board and draw up his favorite Cover 2 beater, and Howard quickly scribbled away at the play the Buckeyes used in the Rose Bowl, when Howard hit Emeka Egbuka with a 42-yard touchdown pass down the middle of the field.
"They had a lot of trust in him," Heaps said, "to handle a lot of, I would say, deep pro-style run checks as well as audibles -- from a run to a pass, a pass to a run. These are all things that NFL quarterbacks are asked to do, that not a whole of college guys are asked to do."
IT WAS THE last week of March, and Bob and Maureen Howard were driving down the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Columbus, Ohio, on the way to Will's pro day at Ohio State. Their youngest daughter, Grace, sat quietly in the backseat of their white SUV.
The family usually listens to true-crime podcasts on these long drives, and there have been many of them in Will's college career.
Pro day would be different from the combine, with Howard throwing to familiar receivers in a scripted workout. And Howard would not disappoint, hitting 65 of his 67 throws with two drops. The internet would exclaim, "Will Howard shines in pro day workout!"
Bob and Maureen, like their son, try not to get too caught up in any particular pre-draft event. But it's hard sometimes. In a phone interview during their drive, the Howards preferred to focus on simpler times. Like how Will used to walk around carrying a ball all the time, they said. Grace couldn't pronounce his name when she was little, so she called him "Ball."
He learned the cello and trombone as a child, and he always wanted to play the song from the Peanuts Christmas special on the piano. But he didn't know how to play the piano, so one snowy day when he was particularly bored, he sat down and taught himself to play. He scored a 1,380 on his SAT and got his master's degree in sports coaching in one year at Ohio State.
And oh, here's a fun fact: Will was the inspiration for an invention. He was a large baby, Maureen said, and broke out of his swaddle early. He could sleep for hours when being pushed around in a stroller, but in a crib, he'd wake up cranky after 30 minutes. Maureen, a pediatric physical therapist, designed a sturdy support outfit to help him sleep. It worked, and she and Bob jokingly called it the magic sleepsuit.
After their second child, Tori, was born, they pulled it out again, and people in her mom groups were asking about it. She made a few more prototypes while Bob, who's in finance, started researching swaddle transition products and found a need. They eventually got a patent for Baby Merlin's Magic Sleepsuit. They operated out of their home, which became a true family business -- Will and his siblings even helped make up a little assembly line.
Bob and Maureen sold the business in 2021, which was good because they've had a lot of football games to attend.
Will and his family will watch the draft at home in Downingtown, and it will be a modest gathering. But they've booked space at their favorite restaurant in town for a party on Saturday night, after all the names are called, and plan to celebrate Howard's new destination.
The official end of the draft season might be cause for celebration, too.