Our Honor Defend

February 06 2008: Pryor chooses not to make a choice

It looks like the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review made the correct call.  Slated to make one of the biggest decisions of his young life, Terrelle Pryor opted not to make a choice (video).  ESPN said that the groans from Columbus could be heard all the way from Jeannette.  Tressel, who appeared to have the inside track to Terrelle Pryor’s LOI should be nervous over Terrelle Pryor’s inability to commit to the Buckeyes.  Indeed, I thought he would commit to the Buckeyes and was a little baffled over why he couldn’t make a decision.

That is, of course, until I read the reason why Terrelle couldn’t make a decision.

It was thought Ohio State and Michigan were his leaders, and a number of Pryor’s friends and acquaintances told the Post-Gazette that Ohio State was going to be his choice.

But Pryor acknowledged Penn State has risen in his eyes recently. His father also likes Penn State.

“Me and my Dad had a battle of differences,” Pryor said. “He had a different mind and I had a different mind. He just made me think. He just wants me to go over it and think twice.

“He likes a couple schools. But not the school I was thinking.”

Oh. That’s it?

Reading that it wasn’t the inability to decide between Michigan and Ohio State that caused the delay, rather a new surge from Penn State to convince his dad to convince Terrelle to stay closer to home should’ve had most everyone assured of where Terrelle was going to end up: Ohio State.  After all:

• Terrelle was going to sign on Wednesday until an early morning push convinced him to delay his decision.
• Terrelle had made his decision to sign with Ohio State.  The previous report from the Pitt Post-Gazette that cited friends close to Pryor was 100 percent correct on this.
• Family members and other significant people in his life convinced him to give Penn State one last chance.  Apparently the last minute blitz put on by Penn State, capped off with Joe Paterno’s pre-dead period visit, did the trick.
• However, Terrelle Pryor never felt comfortable on Penn State’s campus.  Simply put, he didn’t want to be there.  He had always expressed that Happy Valley was “too country” for his tastes, and that he wanted more of a city feel.

At this point, it should be apparent that all this did was confirm that Ohio State was his no. 1 choice and that Penn State was, at the most, his no. 2 choice and the beneficiary of a rather low recruiting tactic, in my opinion.  Further, it just didn’t seem plausible, to me at least, that Terrelle Pryor would end up at Penn State.  After all, they weren’t a serious contender for him for the past 5 months.  All of a sudden, a late recruiting blitz by Tom Bradley and Jay Paterno on Pryor’s dad, urging him to reel his son in for them (or, in Michael Brewster’s words, bully him into choosing the instate school), was supposed to stem the tide?  I was reticent to say so on our blog because it would have been glorified rumormongering, but I subscribe to the theory that Julie Posey put forward: delaying the decision was a move out of respect for his father, and probably nothing else.

When the reporters accused him of milking the process for all the attention, he just looked them in the eyes and told them he was doing this for his father. Just because the media proclaims you as the number one player doesn’t mean you have to do what they want, when they want you to do it. It takes a lot of courage for Terrelle to stand up there and say he did it for his dad. For a young man to have that much respect for his dad, that even though Terrelle wanted to sign with Ohio State, he agreed with his dad’s wishes to step back and look at some other schools. The truth is that he played his football season, went straight to San Antonio for the all-star game, and then went right into basketball. He never missed a practice or a game with any team he played for. He never compromised any team he competed for and that tells me a lot about the young man. He had enough guts to tell the entire sporting world that “I need to wait.” When the media isn’t there after things go wrong, it will be his family that’s there for him.

After all, all that was basically revealed from the press conference, and corollary write-ups, is that Terrelle himself in no way wanted to be at Penn State.  His father did.

For the meantime, Buckeye fans can sit back and enjoy as Michigan and Penn State try futilely to change destiny.  He would have until April 1 to sign a letter of intent, but could perceivably delay his decision even further.  All he would need to do is show up on campus sometime in the summer, get a scholarship, and proceed from there.  Whatever the case, that scholarship was coming from Ohio State.  After all, he was already expressing some outrage over Mark May’s comments on him.  I gotta tell you, if hating Mark May for singling you out and needlessly trying to piss you off isn’t the functional proxy for a Buckeye, I don’t know what is.

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