With spring football now underway for Michigan State, perhaps the biggest question mark for the Spartans is who will start at quarterback in 2023. Head coach Mel Tucker has explicitly said that quarterback – and every position on the team – is “open” for competition.
For Payton Thorne, who is entering his fifth season in the program as a redshirt senior in 2023, he looks at competition as a good thing. Thorne has been the starter for the Spartans over the past two seasons, but after an inconsistent 2022 campaign, the job will not be handed to him this year.
Fellow quarterbacks Katin Houser (redshirt freshman) and Noah Kim (redshirt junior) will get an equal chance at the starting position, while true freshman quarterback Sam Leavitt will arrive in the summer and is a likely redshirt candidate.
Thorne is not backing down from the challenge, however, and is actually embracing it. Following the first day of spring practice, Thorne spoke to the media.
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“For me, it's just the same as it’s always been, it's just to compete,” Thorne said about the open starting quarterback role. “I'm not trying to be competing against anybody in my position group, I'm competing against the defense – playing against the defense and breaking down defenses and being as good as I could be, personally. And then being a leader for our team and taking care of the guys around me and helping everybody else get better as well.”
While Thorne has started for the past two seasons, competing for his job is nothing new to him. Thorne won the starting job out of fall camp in 2021 against Temple transfer Anthony Russo. While he entered the 2022 campaign as the unquestioned starter, he never got complacent in that regard.
“(Competition) has been an every year thing,” Thorne said. “Competition's good in every area of life. You look at business and competition makes people better – why are two gas stations right next to each other? Because of competition. If you're continually pushed by others around you every day, that can only help people and get rid of any complacency that anybody may have. So, it's kind of every position (on the team), you know, everyone's getting ready to go and you’ve gotta put your best foot forward, and that's good for everybody.”
Thorne gets this mentality from perhaps the greatest quarterback of all time, Tom Brady. Thorne mentioned that he watched a documentary featuring Brady, likely referring to “Man in the Arena: Tom Brady,” and he took inspiration from the seven-time Super Bowl winner.
“One thing that stuck with me, I heard Tom Brady say something,” Thorne said. “I think it was in that little documentary and he had said that he goes into every year – I mean, he's the greatest of all time, obviously me and him are in very different stages of our careers, quite a bit, but if the greatest of all time is going into every season like the job’s on the line, then why isn't everybody else? So, for me, I'm just trying to prove myself to myself, my coaches and my teammates, and getting better in every area that I can. I’ve got different areas that I’m focused on this year on getting better.”
What are those areas that Thorne hopes to improve upon in 2023? Footwork, maintaining a good base, accuracy and more.
“One of the things, just the past couple weeks I've been working a lot on, I was down in Florida doing some training,” Thorne said. “Working on just kind of some different things with footwork – in terms of drops and stuff, you know, I've been doing that for my whole life and you can always maybe tighten that up a little bit. But just having a good base, getting my back foot underneath my hip, that's a little thing, real little thing, but it helps a ton, and accuracy and getting the ball where it needs to be with the right amount of juice. So that's one thing. Overall, you know, I talk with my quarterback guy quite a bit about different things that we can tune up.”
