Be Like Tike

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Terrelle Pryor just can not help himself. He is enjoying the recruiting process so much that he wants to visit even more schools now, prolonging the agony of both Ohio State and Michigan, the two schools that Pryor had supposedly narrowed his search down to. But wait, Joe Paterno went to see him the other day despite Pryor’s blowing off his official visit to Penn State and now he wants to take an official visit to Oregon even though everybody knows he will not actually go there.

Pryor is like that kid you knew in high school, the one that applied to the school he really wanted to get into and then applied to twenty other schools just in case he happened to not get into that top choice. The process was more fun for him than it was for everyone else, but it was more stressful and, by the end of it, his parents were ready to kill him. In Pryor’s case, he is enjoying himself way more than anyone else, playing national powers against each other and bringing ESPN to Jeanette (well, not anymore after they butchered the town and its reputation in a story about Pryor in ESPN the Magazine). Instead of his parents being ready to kill him, though, the fans of either the Buckeyes or the Wolverines will be.

Let’s be honest. Pryor is not going to pick Penn State. The team just does not have the national profile that it once did, constantly ranking right on the edge of the Top 25 but never making a huge impact in rankings. Pryor is not going to pick Oregon even though he would fit into Mike Bellotti’s offense perfectly. The Ducks are way too far away from home for Pryor and consistently underpreform in the latter part of the season. Pryor has made it very clear that he is not going to choose Pitt, but that he is cool with stringing Dave Wannstedt along because his dad really likes the Panthers. In other words, Pryor’s choice is pretty simple: Columbus or Ann Arbor?

Columbus (and, therefore, Ohio State) would mean that Pryor had picked a program that is a current national power and would be willing to let him play both football and basketball (even though he seems to have given up the basketball dream for now). He would be under the tutelage of Jim Tressel and his coaching staff who had Todd Boeckman drawing comparisons to Tom Brady earlier this season. The Buckeyes produce NFL draft picks better than any other draft team, with the only potential issue being that they have not produced a legitimate NFL quarterback under the Tressel regime. Pryor, however, has the skill to transcend any of these limitations and to become a star at OSU, taking them to the elite level that only USC has been at in this decade.

The advantages to going to Michigan, which is where Pryor will likely end up, outweigh any that any other school can offer. First of all, Michigan is a sleeping giant, a perennial college football power that has underperformed over the last five years and whose fans (and very large alumni base) would love to see the school become a national power again on the field, not only in the polls. Pryor would not be the only key recruit for Michigan, however, as Coach Rich Rodriguez is also coming in to change the direction of the program. Rodriguez is used to working with athletic QBs, having extensive experience with Pat White at WVU. He could turn Pryor into kind of a superman version of Pat White, with faster legs, a stronger arm, and a better team around him than White had at WVU. The experiment in Michigan over the next three years will essentially be what was at WVU on more steroids than Barry Bonds pumped into his body. The spread offense that Rodriguez and Offensive Coordinator Calvin White instituted at WVU is moving to Michigan with them, meaning that Pryor will have an opportunity to showcase his unique skills there better than anywhere else.

Pryor’s only issue with Michigan should be that the spread offense is not really used in the pros, but his skills are enough that Pryor should be trying to win every game and show himself off, nothing more and nothing less. More importantly, he needs to stop acting like that confused high school senior and pick a school as soon as he can because, even though it’s obvious, he will be much better off having made a commitment than leaving everyone else and himself in a state of limbo.

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