Clemson's Johnson right: at this point, Miller was better than OSU’s Barrett

Although some will no doubt take it as such, this is no slight to Barrett.

RELATED: Don’t get caught up comparing Ohio State’s 2014 and ‘16 too much

Braxton Miller and J.T. Barrett are both great players. All-time greats, in fact.

By their fourth years in Columbus they can probably claim being underappreciated and taken for granted by a large swath of the Ohio State fan base, too.

Ironically that no doubt helped build the legend of Barrett as a freshman after the mercurial Miller went down with a shoulder injury in 2014.

While fans loved watching No. 5 juke defenders out of their jocks, they also grew frustrated with his ups and downs as a passer, so the ultra-efficient Barrett was a breath of fresh air that season.

Fast forward two years, though, and it’s harder to tell the difference between the two as throwers while Miller remains the more dangerous runner.

That's how we ended up hearing from multiple defensive players this season (Penn State's Evan Schwan was the first) that Miller is a greater threat overall even though Barrett has surpassed him statistically in multiple areas.

The Wayne High School graduate is more likely to rip off an explosive play with his legs, and the advantages Barrett flashed in the passing game as a freshman have dissipated over the past two years with a different receiving corps and offensive line.

Barrett runs the read option better, but the coaches had to resort to calling a lot of direct runs for each of them so is there really much functional difference? No.

In the case of both, Urban Meyer and his staff had to get creative with the running game in part to account for deficiencies in the passing game that were the result of both the quarterback and his supporting cast.

That leaves 2014, when Barrett was magnificent but the same receiving corps (and a running game that actually improved) also helped make Cardale Jones a star in the postseason, an outlier in Meyer’s five years in Columbus.

Of course at the end of the day, arguing about which Big Ten MVP is better presents a nice problem for Buckeye Nation to have.