After the playing of the the annual Scarlet and Gray Game on Saturday, Ohio State’s spring practice is now over, and Urban Meyer told the media that the Buckeyes’ quarterback battle is still too close to call. The outcome of this competition obviously has major implications for the 2018 OSU football team, but no member of it will be as acutely impacted by it as rising redshirt junior Joe Burrow, who, if he loses the battle to Dwayne Haskins or Tate Martell, could leave Ohio State and be eligible to play immediately as a graduate transfer.

But in order to make the best decision possible, Burrow would probably rather have better information about the likelihood that he'll be Ohio State's quarterback than is currently available to him.

"He's going to sit down with Ohio State's coaches this week — it could have even happened already, they might even have multiple conversations — to find out where he's at," Bucknuts.com editor Dave Biddle said Tuesday on the 247Sports Morning Blitz. "Are [Burrow and Haskins] really equal in their mind? Is he perhaps the leader, is he not the leader? I think if he hears, 'You still have a chance in preseason camp but Dwayne Haskins is the leader,' I think Joe Burrow will transfer. But if he's told it's equal and he actually buys that, I think he might stick around. I'm not positive about that, but I think he might stick around.

"I thought Urban might have been blowing smoke saying it's too close to call, but when you watch these guys play, it really does look almost too close to call at this point. I think Urban's going to tell him it's equal. He really is torn. You can see it in his face and you can hear it in his words. I think Urban is going to try and get both of these guys to stick around for the fall. I don't know if he'll be able to do that, but I think that's what he's going to try to do."

As quarterback transfers have become a staple of college football, so has concern that coaches are unduly delaying the conclusion of quarterback battles in order to string them along and keep them on campus. But there's one big reason why that's not so likely to be an issue with Burrow.

"Joe Burrow's dad [Jimmy] is a college coach," Biddle said. "He's the defensive coordinator at Ohio University under Frank Solich. Hopefully you wouldn't lie to any parent of any player, but you're certainly not going to mislead a fellow college coach who's the father of one of your players. Urban Meyer even came out and said that he's already had conversations with the Burrow family — and this was a week or two into spring ball. Reading between the lines, you could tell that they'd already had conversations and were going to have more conversations after spring ball."

Biddle thinks Ohio State is in a no-lose situation where the Buckeyes could go on to have a big season, no matter which quarterback wins the job. But the one thing he thinks Meyer should avoid is failing to definitively choose a single quarterback. OSU fans are understandably a bit gun shy after Meyer went into the 2015 season with three quarterbacks that could have started just about anywhere but failed to get what he needed out of the position.

"Hopefully he has learned something from 2015, if you're a Buckeye fan," Biddle said. "I don't know if he has, because he was asked about 2015 and how that played into his decision, and he was pretty defiant. You could tell he didn't like the question and he didn't want to talk about it, and part of that is probably because deep down he knows he did not handle 2015 the best way."

You can listen to the entirety of Biddle's conversation with The Morning Blitz by using the media player embedded in this post. You can also download this episode and subscribe to The Morning Blitz on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever else you listen to podcasts. New episodes of The Morning Blitz come out every weekday morning before the sun comes up, featuring interviews with reporters covering the biggest college football stories of the day, delivered in a concise, 10-15 minute package.