COLUMBIA, Mo. — Missouri quarterback Sam Horn is back on the field, perhaps a bit improbably, for the start of the Tigers’ fall camp.
After missing all of the 2024 season while recovering from Tommy John surgery, he’s returned to compete for the starting quarterback job with Penn State transfer Beau Pribula.
“It was definitely tough,” Horn told the Post-Dispatch of his recovery. “Took a little bit longer of a process just because of the whole two-sport deal.”
Oh yeah, the two-sport deal: the thing that might make Horn the most interesting college quarterback in the country.
He’s Sam Horn, the former four-star recruit who played with Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter in high school. He’s Sam Horn, the evergreen source of potential despite just eight career passes thrown in his college career. He’s Sam Horn, the contender in this season’s starting quarterback battle who shouldn’t be counted out of it and might even have a better chance of winning the job than many have acknowledged. He’s Sam Horn, the quarterback who wears No. 21.
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And he’s Sam Horn, the Los Angeles Dodgers pitching prospect. The two-sport deal.
The Los Angeles Dodgers picked Horn late in the MLB draft a few weeks ago, setting up a decision for the strong-armed righty. His agent had made clear to baseball clubs that Horn playing football this fall was non-negotiable, which explains why the top 100 prospect went in the 17th round of the draft.
In the end, he worked out a compromise with the National League powerhouse, signing for nearly $500,000 — some $350,000 of which came above what his draft position would have earned, sweetening the deal quite significantly — and the blessing to hit the gridiron once again, per MLB Pipeline guru Jim Callis.
Horn, talking with reporters just a couple of hours before he signed with the Dodgers, called the MLB draft “a cool process to be a part of.”
“It’s something new every day,” he said.
Really, that’s been Horn’s entire career at Mizzou.
Two-sport athletes, and two-sport quarterbacks more specifically, are rare but not unheard of at the college level — the sporting equivalent of seeing a live armadillo in Missouri, perhaps.
Horn, who hails from Lawrenceville, Georgia, committed to the Tigers in part because he could pursue both football and baseball. He made a cameo against New Mexico State as a true freshman in 2022, throwing two incomplete passes and recording one 10-yard run.
Nonetheless, he competed against Brady Cook and Jake Garcia — more the former than the latter, it must be noted — for the starting job in 2023. That battle came down to the season opener against South Dakota, but Horn didn’t seem to get the same kind of opportunity in that game as Cook did.
Horn went 3 for 5 for 54 yards, a touchdown and an interception in that second-half showing. The touchdown was a silky 31-yard throw over the middle, and the pick was a bobbled pass that wasn’t really his fault. But Cook was the starter, and Horn was relegated to throwing just one more pass during the rest of that season.
“Even when it was Sam and Brady going into ’23, you kind of had some expectations of how Brady was going to play the game and so on and so forth,” coach Eli Drinkwitz said. “Sam had to really go in there (and) beat him out in order to get that job. Just wasn’t able to get over the hump. This (year) will be uniquely different.”
Hang on — not to 2025 quite yet.
Early in 2024, Horn underwent Tommy John surgery to fix a UCL injury in his right elbow. The procedure seemed more geared to prolonging his chances at a baseball career than football, given the nuanced yet significant differences in throwing motion between the two sports.
So Horn missed all of the ’24 season, appearing at practices, games and team meetings but unable to actually throw a football. His time on the shelf wasn’t without learning experiences.
“It was really good being around Brady and just watching Brady, how he works,” Horn said. “And honestly, just missing football: You sit there and you’re just watching. You miss it. It’s good to be back.”
He started working his way back ahead of MU’s Music City Bowl appearance that capped the season, then looked to be good to go at the start of spring practice earlier this year.
While he pitched for the Tigers baseball team later in the spring, Horn was naturally around the football program less than Pribula was, but that doesn’t seem to have discounted the former’s chances at winning the starting QB job all that much.
There’s a noticeable difference, to coaches, in the Horn who’s competing for the starting job this year compared to the 2023 version. His throwing motion is still crisp and powerful, his spirals still impossible to ignore when they’re zipping around the practice field.
After a year of only being able to work on the mental aspects of quarterbacking, that’s where Horn has made his greatest gains.
“Naturally, (he) got a lot more reps within college football and seeing it,” offensive coordinator Kirby Moore said. “The amount of meetings and processing, and you’ve got to be able to play fast. We’re playing in one of the conferences (where) ... a lot of things happen quickly at the line of scrimmage, so you’ve got to make quick decisions and take care of the football within that.”
One of the eventual determinants of which quarterback will start for the Tigers might well be the mental aspect of it. In that regard, Horn’s already in a position to succeed because he battled back to be in this competition — something Moore called “his care factor.”
“Last year was very unfortunate with the injury,” Moore said, “and that was our big thing to Sam: ‘Run your race. It’s still you vs. you.’ We needed to bring in competition with the depth in the (QB) room, but he’s done an awesome job.”
