Our Honor Defend

Terrelle Pryor and the coyness problem

God knows you heard this before: Terrelle Pryor is an attention whore.  He’s apparently hard to read, wishy-washy, likes the spotlight and et cetera and et cetera.  Yet after reading just about everything there is about Terrelle Pryor, I feel the need to vindicate him.

First, I can’t imagine why people would say Terrelle Pryor would like the bright glare of the spotlight and video cameras.  After watching a June 16 2007 interview, it became quite apparent to me that he doesn’t like to be interviewed with a camera on him.  When allowed to express himself and feel free and relaxed, he’s quite comfortable, even with a camera in front of him (see: the shoutouts he was doing during his March 19 press conference).  However, when the interviewer imposes questions on him and otherwise dominate the nature of the conversation, he seems very uncomfortable.  Indeed, as I noted earlier with the issue of his verbal to Pitt, Terrelle Pryor was much more interested in playing sports than talking about playing sports.  He comes off better through interviews and recruiting updates where Terrelle is either the one making the call to the journalist or fielding questions in a much less imposing atmosphere.  There’s presumably also a lot of editing that goes into those as well.

Second, I think the Pitt verbal was more of an egg on his face than anyone really bothered to report.  If the Pittsburgh Sports Review is correct, Pryor verbaled to Pitt prematurely for two reasons: one, he got caught up in the moment and made a rash decision and, two, he apparently didn’t have an offer yet.  After the subsequent decommitment to explore his options, Terrelle Pryor was counseled by his godfather and legal guardian to keep a poker face.  He was told to be polite and engage recruiters, but hang up the phone when any college coach tried to pressure him into giving his current top five (a very common practice among college coaches.  See: SEC coaches).  If it came off that he was stringing coaches along, he was doing so because he refused to be suckered again.  He was going to take his time, and be thorough with his decision on where he wanted to go to college.  He may have been accused of being hard to read, but he’d rather have that leveled against him than embarrass himself again.

Third, (and I think this one is key to remember) what Terrelle Pryor said or felt, and what journalists said Terrelle Pryor said or felt, often varied considerably.  Pryor was getting prodded constantly by local Pittsburgh media and the recruiting services.  When Ohio State looked to be the front runner for him, the Ohio press got involved.  When Rodriguez went to Michigan, the Detroit media got involved.  When Terrelle Pryor put on an MVP performance at the US Army All-American Bowl, everyone got involved. The problem, though, is that most regular journalists should not ever deal with recruiting news.  As I noted with the issues of Oregon and LSU, often times journalists would publish reports on Pryor that either greatly exaggerated Terrelle’s comments or were based off tertiary level information that neither cited Pryor directly, or even Ray Reitz.  These reports cited a report that cited another report that had a quote from Pryor that may have even been a few weeks old or understood without any context.

So what was the end result? News outlets publishing reports on Pryor and then crying foul that Terrelle Pryor was not conforming to their reports on him.  Terrelle didn’t ask to be the no. 1 recruit in the country, only getting to that point through his on-field exploits and the prospect of what he was capable of down the road.  The constant reports and obsession about Terrelle Pryor’s decision for a college essentially created a monster persona that lived entirely in print.  Down the stretch, all of the media attention finally wore him down.  It’s generally not an appropriate move to create a monster and then decry it as it acts out against the imposed order of things.  However, this was the case anyways.

So what was Terrelle Pryor guilty of? He did say in October that he liked recruiting and that he thinks everyone should be blessed to go through it.  There might be some coyness to Terrelle, but what was more than likely occurring?

First, Terrelle is the type of guy that apparently likes to make everyone happy.  This was more than apparent during the press conference on March 19, where he admitted that the hardest part was not in saying yes to Ohio State, but saying “no” to Tom Bradley and Rich Rodriguez.  Terrelle isn’t the only guy in the 2008 class that admitted he had some trouble with this part of the recruitment.  Garrett Goebel, whose character no one has really questioned, said that calling up coaches at programs around the country and saying he was no longer considering them was not a fun part of the process.

Second, if a college recruiter called Terrelle, odds are Terrelle would listen to what the coach would have to say.  This can account for why USC all of a sudden appeared on his list, and why Oregon made such a late push.  He would even listen to Farrell and Lichtenfels when they were interested in talking to him.  I don’t know for sure, but I think kids like Terrelle Pryor and Michael Brewster are cut from the same cloth in that they take the attention to be some kind of show of support and they respond positively to it.  Hearing from USC, a national powerhouse, or Mike Farrell, who works for Rivals, was then construed as a show of support for Terrelle and all that he had accomplished to that point.  Thus, Terrelle took time to hear what these people had to say.  It’s not a crime to hear people out, but it took Terrelle a little while to finally realize that sometimes you have to tell people to stop bothering you.

Third, Terrelle just didn’t have that much time to be more open and spend more time deciding on where he wanted to go to school.  With football ongoing, the basketball team didn’t have enough players to field a team (it wasn’t just Pryor, either).  Knowing that a WPIAL AA and PIAA championship run were real possibilities, the basketball team had to create a schedule that got them started several weeks later than most other schools.  Accordingly, Terrelle Pryor was basically playing a double schedule for basketball to account for lost time.  There just wasn’t a lot of free time for Pryor after school, basketball and the necessary downtime with friends to invest a lot of effort and energy into being thorough with his recruitment and, thus, the updates about his recruitment.

So what do I think is going on?  If Terrelle is guilty of anything, it’s a youthful naiveté, indicative of the fact that he was a 17-18 year old kid still learning about people around him.  He was the type of kid that thought that the media attention and the autographs he signs might help the town he lives in.  There’s very little about Terrelle Pryor that suggests he’s an egomaniacal attention whore with an overly inflated sense of self-celebrity.  Rather, he just comes off as a rather quiet kid from a coal mining town in Western Pennsylvania with an incredible knack for athletics.  The recruiting services and journalists followed accordingly.

Besides, what’s the worst we can say about Terrelle Pryor? That he toyed with the recruiting services and the journalists who interviewed him? If I were in his position, I would dick with those guys without mercy.

Wouldn’t you?

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