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发帖数: 3119 | 1 http://cuswordsblog.com/2011/06/09/on-a-five-star-flameout/
The blueprint was so clear, wasn’t it?
Terrelle Pryor would come to Ohio, learn to follow Jim Tressel’s virtues on
and off the field, then leave a star
with the world at his fingertips.
Terrelle Pryor (right, with Corey Brown)
Michigan had the offense that was more appropriate (so it seemed then) and
the depth chart was more
friendly for the player that he was at the moment. Yet he chose Ohio for the
player he wanted to be. He
could have been an instant star at Michigan, but the bigger challenge of
learning Tressel’s ways promised
an even bigger payoff down the line, as it had for recent Heisman Trophy
winner Troy Smith.
An uber-talented but extremely raw prospect, Pryor was probably better off
sitting a year anyway, so the
presence of returning senior starting quarterback Todd Boeckman made Ohio
all the more attractive.
The whole experiment started well enough with Pryor and five of his talented
freshmen teammates debuting
together in the first quarter of a 43-0 win over Youngstown State, but it
didn’t take long for the script to
need major revisions.
First came a foot injury to Beanie Wells in the second half against the
Penguins, then Boeckman and the
entire starting offense was shaky enough in a 26-14 defeat of Ohio in week
two that Pryor did not get as
many snaps as the coaching staff would have liked ahead of a showdown with
USC.
Boeckman’s three turnovers against the Trojans, including a momentous
interception Rey Maualuga
returned for a touchdown to make it 21-3 in the second quarter, then led to
the original plan to be
scrapped entirely.
Pryor was the starter in week four, and though early returns were positive,
one is left to wonder if he had
been better off left to improve mostly behind the scenes than in the
spotlight for the next two and a half
years.
From the beginning, Pryor left no doubt he wanted to get better as a passer,
and he seemed to want to learn
to please those of us in the media, too, but no one ever seemed quite sure
what type of teammate he was
or what kind he wanted to be.
Tressel and quarterbacks coach Nick Siciliano seemed to sense from the
beginning that Pryor had a fragile
psyche. That they prevented him from doing many interviews his freshman year
was not surprising, but that
they sent Siciliano out to act practically as a bodyguard after Pryor’s
fumble opened the door to Penn State’s
comeback victory in 2008 was.
More than one of his teammates, who all had conducted their interviews like
normal and left the room by
the time Pryor was made available, said Pryor had taken the loss hard and
blamed himself for it.
Naturally, that led to his being asked if that was true, and even as Pryor
responded in the affirmative,
Siciliano quickly interjected to comfort the quarterback and assure him it
wasn’t. I found that strange at the
time, and I still can’t quite comprehend it now.
Sometimes we ink-stained wretches can be a bit too carnivorous in our
pursuit of a storyline, but this one
was willfully laid out there by the participants of the contest. No one went
out of their way to pry loose a
claim of blame. It was readily attached by the culprit himself, so why fight
it?
But I suppose now looking back that’s a symbol for the whole way Pryor was
handled.
I understand managing people is no one-size-fits-all exercise, but this took
uniqueness to new heights,
and it seems to have failed.
What are we to think now that we know while Ohio was protecting Pryor from
too many negative outside
influences, he was allegedly doing quite well for himself on a different
open market?
One of the biggest challenges of coaching at a place like OSU is to convince
the players the virtue of
patience.
It’s easy for them to look to the future and see what’s possible as well
as the riches around them and
wonder why they have to wait, but bosses driving luxury cars while the help
toil at the tasks that really
make the company run is nothing unique to college athletics. Most of the
people reading this probably have
felt the same envy toward their own management and wondered when they will
get their share. Of course,
they don’t have athletic gifts that amount to a trust fund ready to be
cashed as early as the age of 21 for
football players, so the comparison is far from perfect. It also makes Pryor
’s alleged misdeeds all the more
difficult to digest.
As for Pryor’s playing career, that’s a bit easier to break down.
He came in with the label – attached not by the media but his high school
coach – of the next Vince Young,
a similarly built if somewhat differently skilled quarterback who led Texas
to victory at Ohio Stadium and
later in the national championship game during the 2005 season.
Although he never reached the nearly impossibly high standards, Pryor had a
productive career at Ohio.
He took over as the starting quarterback as a freshman thanks in part to his
willingness to play the role of
Craig Krenzel even if he wasn’t ready to be the next Smith yet. Although
Pryor’s mix of size and skill
seemed to mesmerize Tressel, it was game management that tipped the scales
in Pryor’s favor when
Boeckman faltered.
The youngster proved his coach’s decision right for most of the rest of
that 2008 campaign, his ill-advised
freelancing against Penn State and a brain-lock interception to open the
Michigan game notwithstanding.
That made the stories for the next spring easy to write. Pryor had
established an easily recognizable
baseline from which to build, leaving the only question how long it would
take him to grow into a complete
player and, inevitably, an unstoppable force.
He responded with a series of somewhat uninspiring practices before closing
with a standout spring game.
Tressel sang Pryor’s praises at any and every opportunity, saying he had
made remarkable progress and
letting anyone who would listen know that he could be expected to do great
things when autumn rolled
around. By then, a 2009 season that was thought to be one for rebuilding had
begun to look like it could
be much more.
For the cover story of the annual Buckeye Sports Bulletin football preview,
I talked to several former Ohio
State quarterbacks as well as former QBs coach Joe Daniels about just what
that would take. The consensus
was Pryor needed to maintain his proclivity to protect the ball and
complement it with a knack for when to
push the limit and create big plays.
Of course he needed to improve in nearly every phase of the game, including
accuracy and decision
making, but all agreed that is the factor that separates the good from the
great in the quarterback
pantheon.
It sounded easy enough, but I don’t think he ever quite made the leap. If
he did, he never pulled himself all
the way up to the next level to where he could stand confidently on it. More
like he managed to grab it from
time to time and fight like hell to stay connected, sometimes more
successfully than others.
He accomplished a lot of good things, thanks in large part to his
athleticism and his talented supporting
cast, but he never seemed to take hold of a team the way great quarterbacks
are expected to do.
The coaching staff spent the past two seasons developing him as the tip of
the spear, but Pryor usually
seemed to perform better as an ancillary part of the offense, and that was
incongruous with the high
expectations he had come to school with, expectations the coaching staff may
have felt as much pressure to
meet as did the player.
Pryor had the ability but not the consistency to lead the way as the focal
point of the attack. Aside from the
starts of the Rose and Sugar Bowls, Pryor often looked like he was trying to
do too much when the game
plan was built around him. Perhaps he was more worried about proving himself
than simply moving the ball
and scoring points, but the moment often looked too big for him.
The coaches had to preach patience with him and convince him to let the game
come to him while his
teammates did their jobs, but I’m not sure that message ever quite got
through. If it did, he hadn’t figure
out how to utilize it on a regular basis as of the last time we saw him in
an Ohio State uniform.
Even his Sugar Bowl MVP performance was fraught with ups and downs,
including a potentially disastrous
fumble that instead resulted in a touchdown thanks to an alert Dane
Sanzenbacher (who also went to the
turf in the end zone to make a difficult catch of a low throw for one of
Pryor’s touchdown passes).
Perhaps that impatience and inconsistency is also what undid Pryor off the
field.
He came to Ohio State with the understanding that Tressel, Daniels and
Siciliano could help him get to a
place where profit awaits around every corner, but Pryor couldn’t wait
until then to start cashing in on his
abilities and accomplishments. As a result, he lost a last chance to make
himself a valuable asset to the
NFL…
There might still be an NFL quarterback trapped somewhere inside Terrelle
Pryor, but at this point I’m not
betting it ever sees the light of day.
Though his accuracy improved by leaps and bounds from his freshman year to
the Sugar Bowl in January,
his consistency still left something to be desired. And an entirely
different level of accuracy is needed to
complete passes in the NFL as opposed to college, where the windows are
wider and stay open longer.
Pryor was almost unimaginably raw when he arrived, probably owing to same
human nature that makes it
hard to convince a talented slasher of why he should shoot 1,000 jump shots
per day when he can just get
to the basket for dunks whenever he feels like it.
That much is understandable, and I’ll admit to being interested to see how
much better he can get, but
recently I came to the realization there was really only one reason I
maintained much optimism he would
change much more as a passer from his junior to his senior season.
After seeing the transformation Troy Smith underwent from 2005 to ’06, I
have been hard-pressed to rule
out anyone’s ability to do the same. Smith had showed in 2004 he was a
dangerous two-way threat when
he carved up Michigan in one of the all-time greatest games in series
history, but who thought he would
ever be as dangerous from the pocket as he was on the run? I certainly didn
’t think it possible for him to
channel Drew Brees for 12 games, but he practically did while leading the
Buckeyes to an undefeated 2006
regular season and an ill-fated berth in a national championship game
fraught with all kinds of other
issues for discussion on another day.
Anyway, the fact Smith did that weighed on my judgement of Pryor… until I
realized that Smith is the
exception to the rule for a reason. Why was a I so blown away by Smith’s
transformation? Because I’ve never
seen anything like it. With that still being the case, I’m not sure why I
should find it altogether realistic that
Pryor or anyone else would follow in his footsteps.
Smith’s NFL career to this point can be informative as well. Once he
harnessed his cannon, Smith threw a
cleaner, more accurate ball in college than Pryor did last season, but I
still heard lack of accuracy as a knock
on Smith last season when he got a shot to start for the 49ers.
Yet even if he could thread a needle with his passes, Pryor’s problems
would still be plentiful.
His maturity is now rightly being questioned, and his decision making, while
not terrible, has never really
been the same since his freshman season ended and the staff entrusted him
with more decisions to make.
It could be a matter of trying to get on top of the learning curve that was
as steep as I have ever seen it for
any quarterback, but Pryor never seemed to process things at the pace of the
game. He could diagnose a
situation, but not always before it had changed. And Tressel said on more
than one occasion that adjusting
to surprises was not a strong suit of his quarterback. That’s certainly not
a good sign in making a
projection for the NFL, where defenses seem to get more exotic by the year.
At the end of the day, it seems to me Terrelle Pryor is a complicated
individual whom potential could still
save, but to this point the “p” word has been more of an albatross. It’s
gotten him into situations he has not
always handled well, and now he’s facing challenges I’m sure he never
envisioned when he ended his
truncated recruitment by signing with Ohio State a little more than three
years ago.
He left Ohio State worse than he found it, and I’m not sure if he is much
better off himself.
So much for the blueprint.
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