Ohio State's QB juggling a rarity among title contenders

— -- Here we are, bearing down on the season's finish, and it finally looks as if No. 3 Ohio State has one quarterback.

J.T. Barrett is behind the wheel of the offense, the only vehicle he'll drive until May, and peace has descended upon the Land of the Buckeye. That blanket of calm has made all of us look past just how extraordinary this Ohio State season has been.

Head coach Urban Meyer appeared to have decided on Barrett over Cardale Jones after staging a seven-game dance-off in which Jones started and played himself out of a starting position. When Barrett got busted for driving while impaired on Oct. 31, one week after making his first start of the season, Meyer suspended him for one game, and Jones received another start. Now Barrett is again in charge as the Buckeyes prepare for No. 9 Michigan State.

Two healthy quarterbacks, two playing quarterbacks, two sharing quarterbacks. Jones has taken 438 snaps; Barrett, 255. We have taken for granted that Meyer juggled them while going 10-0. He juggled them without dividing the locker room or the quarterback meeting room. He juggled them until he believes he got it right. He leaned on his former offensive coordinator, Houston head coach Tom Herman.

"I need his help with Cardale," Meyer said recently. "He had a very good relationship with Cardale and still does. We really care about these kids. The whole world has seen what's happened here."

The whole world has seen this pass de deux without appreciating how hard it is to do. It must be, because so few outstanding teams have done it.

National championship contenders rarely play more than one quarterback unless injury demands it. It may be tradition; it may be the difficulty in two quarterbacks getting half the practice reps during game week; it may be that it's hard enough to find one good quarterback, much less two.

In the past 40 seasons, only a handful of national championship contenders have played two quarterbacks by choice. Alabama head coach Bear Bryant won a share of the 1978 title starting Jeff Rutledge, a better passer, and bringing in Steadman Shealy, a runner ideally suited for the Crimson Tide's wishbone offense.

"You knew every week you were going to play, and how much you played (depended upon) how well you played," Shealy, an attorney in his hometown of Dothan, Alabama, said Wednesday. "It was clear who the starter [Rutledge] was, OK? But, it was also clear that the No. 2 guy was going to play a lot, and if the starter wasn't playing well, the No. 2 guy was going to get to play a lot more."

In an era with 95 scholarships and no limit on practice time, Alabama had the bodies to prepare two quarterbacks and the hours in which to do so. Shealy said Bryant used to fill three practice fields at once.

Shealy started as a senior in 1979 and, with Don Jacobs and Alan Gray playing behind him, went 12-0 and led the Tide to a second consecutive national championship. That was the same season in which Bobby Bowden, employing high school teammates Jimmy Jordan and Wally Woodham, took upstart Florida State through an 11-0 regular season and an Orange Bowl date against Oklahoma, which beat the Seminoles, 18-17.

The king of playing two quarterbacks during the past generation often beat Florida State while doing so.

"I've always wondered why playing two quarterbacks is something that they just think you can't do," Steve Spurrier said. He still spends a few hours a day in the football office at South Carolina, where he resigned last month.

"Obviously, every coach would love to have one quarterback who we all know is your best player," Spurrier said. "We'd all like to have that. But sometimes you have two that are equal in ability. Maybe they both deserve to play. Maybe one of them is not very good that day and the other guy comes in and he's hot that day.

"Sort of like a baseball pitcher," Spurrier said. "Sometimes you take your best pitcher out in baseball and nobody says anything about it. But you take a quarterback out because he's struggling, 'Oh! Gol-lee! It's going to hurt his confidence!' What's the difference between a baseball pitcher and a quarterback? I don't know. They're both passers or throw the ball."

Spurrier played Terry Dean and Danny Wuerffel in 1993 and 1994. He played Jesse Palmer and Rex Grossman in 2000, inserting one, then the other, and occasionally back again. All three teams won the SEC Championship.

In 1997, Florida didn't contend for the national championship it won a season earlier, but this deserves mention, if only because it seemed at the time that Spurrier did it just to prove it could be done. The No. 10 Gators upset the No. 2 Seminoles 32-29 with Doug Johnson and Noah Brindise alternating on every snap.

"We just had an idea: Why don't we rotate them every play?" Spurrier said. "That way, you can sort of coach them in between plays."

It worked so well that Spurrier tried it against Penn State in the Citrus Bowl. The No. 6 Gators won that one, too, 21-6.

"That was the game where Fred Taylor ran it 43 times [for 234 yards]," Spurrier said. " You could have gone in there and handed off to Fred that game."

Now there's a two-quarterback system for the masses. Spurrier believes coaches may not try to alternate quarterbacks because it would leave them open to media criticism. That never made him blink. Meyer, either. The Ohio State coach has not orchestrated this swap meet out of a defensive crouch.

"So it can be done, and of course, Urban has done an excellent job how he's done it," Spurrier said. "And from what I hear, most of the people up there believe J.T.'s the guy. But they know Cardale is ready also. He was more than ready at the end of last year, that's for sure."

Meyer won't win coach of the year. The coach of the preseason No. 1 team never does. If he succeeds, if the Buckeyes win five more games and a second consecutive College Football Playoff, well, he was expected to succeed. Even if he did so in a wholly unexpected way.