Our Honor Defend

December 2007: …and along comes Michigan (and Oregon)

December proved to be a wild month that, at least if you believed everything the recruiting services published, seemingly threw everything in flux.

There was some progress in the Pryor sweepstakes that seemed like logical developments.  Tennessee, who was fast fading from the picture, was formally dropped when David Cutcliffe left Tennessee for the head coaching job at Duke.  Texas was dropped in the middle of December for a variety of reasons.  First and foremost, Terrelle didn’t want to have to deal with the constant Vince Young comparisons that would haunt him if he went to Austin.  Secondly, apparently the Longhorns lost interest in him through his regular season.  Both of these moves are of no real surprise, since it became highly unlikely that Pryor would attend either one of these schools.  These recent updates were, if nothing else, a formality.

Starting with some reports published on December 6, Oregon was suddenly on Terrelle Pryor’s radar.  An early December visit from Mike Bellotti apparently won Terrelle over enough for him to start considering the Ducks.  It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to deduce what the pitch was to Terrelle: spread option offense.  Bellotti was hoping that the success of Dennis Dixon, before he tore his ACL and was trotted out to Tuscon to embarrass the coaching staff with their blatant misuse of him, would parlay into snagging the country’s no. 1 recruit who was interested in running a similar style offense at the collegiate level.  Indeed, the idea was that, if Terrelle could make it to Eugene for an official visit, he could see what Nike’s endowment has done for their facilities, hopefully leading to a commitment.  However, it didn’t occur to me, nor anyone following Pryor’s recruitment closely, that Oregon was anything more than another brief flirtation like USC was earlier in the year.  The University of Oregon, as neat of a place as it is, was just too far removed from his Jeannette home to be any serious player for Terrelle Pryor’s Letter of Intent.  That didn’t stop Buckeye fans from fretting, though.

Buckeye fans probably weren’t fretting the fact that Rich Rodriguez was the leading candidate for the Michigan job.  After all, if he took the Michigan job, WVU would be out of the picture, leaving (basically) only the Buckeyes in the picture.  Michigan, who already had John Wienke and Ryan Mallett, couldn’t possibly reappear in the picture.

However, Michigan did reappear in the picture.  Rich Rodriguez, who already had a very good relationship with Pryor, got his attention by letting him be the first to know that he had accepted the offer from Michigan.  From what I’ve gathered (mostly inferred), Terrelle thought it was rather cool that Rodriguez would let him be the first to know and called writers like Bob Lichtenfels to say simply “add Michigan to my list”.  He later tried to downplay the significance of adding Michigan to the list, saying that it was logical to swap Michigan in for WVU, considering the relationship he enjoyed with Rodriguez.

I’ve not seen this explicitly argued, but I can’t imagine the nature of the pitch for Michigan being anything other than “come in and be the guy on campus”.  Rodriguez was walking into an interesting situation at Michigan.  Chad Henne was leaving; Mike Hart was leaving; Jake Long was leaving and, perhaps, so too were the two star wide receivers that helped the Buckeyes win in November.  Minus Ryan Mallett, Rodriguez was for all intents and purposes starting with a blank slate at Michigan.  There wouldn’t be the kind of inertia encountered by forcing established starters into a new offensive style.  Further, the QB situation at Michigan was leaving little in the way of resistance to a starting job as a freshman, a pitch that just about 100 percent of top-level recruits like to hear.  John Wienke decommitted and gave a verbal to Iowa and the rumors surrounding Ryan Mallett’s probable departure from the program were beginning.  All things considered, Terrelle would have been the guy to build the new Michigan program around, and probably would have had the same kind of fanfare and hero worship follow him at Ann Arbor that Tebow has going for him now.

By the end of December, Ryan Mallett was openly thinking about his future at Michigan, deciding to make a decision one way or the other after their January 1st bowl game.  Further, by December 27, Terrelle Pryor had made plans to visit Michigan¹ at the end of January/early February.  Were the Buckeyes losing their position on Terrelle Pryor? And if so, could the upcoming Army All-American game, where Pryor was tentatively scheduled to be roomed with Michael Brewster, help things?

1. In the same breath, he also talks about subbing in Duke for Tennessee and that he would like to visit Duke.  Parsimony is a virtue, though, and I don’t have time, nor the interest, to elaborate on it. [↩]

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23