Redemption for OSU: Pryor plays like a QB

He mentioned his teammates first. In his postgame interview Friday night, he took pains to recognize the big men who blocked in front of him. He thanked them; he praised them. He gave those big men their due.

"It's crazy how well they did," Terrelle Pryor said in the afterglow of the Rose Bowl.

Sharing the praise, Pryor?

Maybe, at last, the manchild has grown up. He can now see success as not just about him, even though most people's eyes and the media attention still tend to focus solely on him.

But such notoriety comes with the territory.

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UM alums: Please stop your blame game

The lunatics have been unloosed across Michigan, which is a wonderful place for them to squat. They fit in nicely among the self-righteous, pretentious men and women who call themselves UM alumni.

Yet even these loonies and alums have reached a nadir when they label solid journalism as muckraking and partisan. They seem to be searching for any excuse they can grasp to deflect attention from an athletic program that has its troubles.

Now, I would be among the last people to call Michigan a "renegade" program. While I have little affinity for the Wolverines – how could I? I’m an Ohio State alumnus – I won’t chuck stones just to chuck 'em. I will say, however, Michigan might have issues today that undermine its holier-than-thou reputation. The journalistic evidence points in that direction.

A lot of the recent evidence comes from the reporting of Jim Schaefer, a man who I befriended while picking up my master’s at Ohio State two decades ago. Like me, Jim bleeds Scarlet and Gray. Unlike me, a sportswriter, Jim has his journalistic principles intact.

In Jim’s world, right trumps partisanship, a comforting thought to hear. He would no more let his affinity for the Buckeyes guide his journalism than I would bungee jump or go deep-sea diving.

Just call me chicken, ‘cause I’m no risk-taker.

Yet here Jim is, having his journalism questioned. No matter that the man has a Pulitzer Prize displayed on his mantel. Forgot about the fact that Jim’s reportial skills took down a corrupt mayor and has sent drug dealers, rapists and stone-cold killers to prison during his two decades in the Detroit media.

None of that meant anything – not to the Michigan loonies, those mindless acolytes who would disgrace their lineage and lie before doing or saying anything that would sully the football program’s reputation, a friend of mine who follows Michigan told me.

He pointed out that the pro-Michigan lobby accused Jim Schaefer and The Free Press of going “above and beyond” to publish negative stories about coach Rich Rodriguez and Michigan football.

Filling the blogosphere with foolishness, the pro-Michigan lobby has alleged that even Lloyd Carr, the former UM coach who was booted on his behind in favor of Rodriguez, has put his Michigan bona fides at risk to help undo the program.

But the Michigan lobby’s most outlandish allegation – if rumors of Carr’s contribution to the stories about Rodriguez’s alleged wrongdoings aren’t outrageous enough – is that Schaefer is investigating Michigan to keep the program from returning to its past glory.

Keep in mind that the journalists behind the initial stories on Rodriguez and the football program were Michigan alums, and what role Schaefer and anybody else at The Free Press have played is to complement what has developed into an intriguing piece of probing journalism.

It would be naïve for people to believe the problems at Michigan are unique to Michigan. I doubt any of the football powerhouses have athletic programs that couldn’t use a steamy bath in Clorex to cleanse things.

But it’s Michigan, not Ohio State or Oklahoma or Florida, that’s under NCAA scrutiny, and the sooner the Wolverine faithful set their program straight the sooner the stories will be about what happens inside the Big House on Saturdays and not on what happens off the football field the rest of the week.

Until that happens, Schaefer, Mike Rosenberg and other journalists will be pouring their investigative energies into stories that might make life a little uncomfortable in Maize and Blue country. They do what they do not because they dislike Michigan; they do it because it is their job: They right wrongs.

Pryor's a long way from a big-time QB

"Athletes” like Terrelle Pryor carry a truckload of expectations with them when they commit to a Division I program.

While their athleticism might go unchallenged, it alone doesn’t ensure they will master the nuances of playing the most demanding position in college football.

After his performance Saturday against Purdue, the athletic Pryor proved two things: No. 1, he isn't improving much; and, No. 2, he isn't ready to quarterback the Buckeyes with the precision and the polish the program needs.

Now, the criticism here isn’t altogether based on the fact the No. 7 Buckeyes lost, 26-18, to an ordinary Purdue team. A week earlier, they won, and the criticism was the same. For in that game, Pryor played as badly as any quarterback could play and still come away with win.

But that performance was against Wisconsin, an unbeaten, though untested team with aspirations of winning a Big Ten title.

Purdue, of course, had no such title hopes tucked away in its locker room. The Boilermakers had been leaking losses, and their 1-5 record suggested they would be fortunate to escape with all hands healthy.

Their record did reflect the quality of the team. What their record didn’t illustrate was how having a capable quarterback like Joey Elliott can keep a game close. He was no Tim Tebow or Sam Bradford; Elliott didn’t have to be. All he needed to be was the best quarterback on the field.

And he was.

That’s the damnable part of it. For Elliott didn’t have the much-hyped credentials of quarterbacks like Pryor, USC freshman Matt Barkley or Notre Dame junior Jimmy Clausen.

Hype can be a player’s undoing. It can lead to inflated expectations that no athlete can live up to, and maybe that’s the problem with Terrelle Pryor: He’s a prisoner of this hype.

In two seasons, he’s developed little. He’s a mechanical passer who locks in on a receiver. He has the touch of a blacksmith, chucking dink-and-dunk passes with helter-skelter accuracy all over the landscape. His pocket presence and awkward footwork resemble a passer who’s in the lineup for his second or third game.

At some point – and that point looks as if it has arrived -- coach Jim Tressel must reevaluate what he has in the underwhelming Pryor, a sophomore. It could be that Tressel entrusted his offense to Pryor too soon. Maybe, just maybe, Pryor’s athleticism works best for Ohio State at a wide receiver and not at quarterback.

For Tressel, a conclusion like the latter might be unthinkable. Dare he bench Pryor? How can he? Ohio State coaches chased Pryor with a dogged determination not used on very many football recruits. It made sense that Tressel go all out to land Pryor, the darling of elite programs from coast to coast.

Could the coach really risk seeing Pryor sign with Michigan?

Two years later, Tressel and the Buckeyes might be better for it had they let Pryor go to Michigan or somewhere else. He has done nothing to show people that he’s capable of greatness. He has shown only mediocrity, which is what frustrates Buckeyes fans.

They longed to see a quarterback who could win championships, a quarterback who could create magic with his legs and with his arms. Buckeyes fans thought they had that magical quarterback in Terrelle Pryor.

They thought wrong.

Hip, hip hooray to Michigan's blues

Pardon me if I need to put my journalistic instincts in mothballs for a four or five minutes. But hearing bad news about the University of Michigan is the reason. It makes me wanna holler: Hallelujah!

Now, I don’t go as far as Woody Hayes in voicing my abhorrence for all-things Michigan. For unlike the late Buckeyes coach, I have no problem saying the school’s name.

On occasion, I do refer to Michigan, as Woody did, as “that school up North,” but then I’ll grudgingly give the school its just due: Michigan is Michigan; fine, I’ll accept it. 

I don’t, however, root for the Wolverines unless they’re playing Notre Dame. I’d have to turn in my two Ohio State degrees if I confessed to wanting Michigan to beat anybody else.

Like the tempestuous Woody, if I had the chance to bury the Wolverines in points, I’d attempt a two-point conversion with a 37-10 lead in the final seconds. I’d go for two only because the rules wouldn’t let me go for three, which is how Woody once put it.

I dislike Michigan as much as anybody else who bleeds Scarlet and Gray, so no one in America could be happier than I am about the controversy that swirls around Michigan football.

Is it picayunish stuff? Perhaps, but any controversy that stains the school’s holier-than-thou reputation is all right in my mind.

Here’s what the controversy is: Coach Rich Rodriguez, the wrong man for Michigan in the first place, has run afoul of NCAA rules by keeping players at football practices longer than allowed, according to The Detroit Free Press. Current and former Michigan players told The Free Press of the abuses, which have put the program under NCAA scrutiny. Rodriguez is denying these allegations.

But I suspect many schools run afoul of arcane NCAA rules -- even my Buckeyes, as a good friend with Michigan ties took pains to point out. But they aren't under the NCAA microscope; the Wolverines are. 

I wish I could say I want the NCAA to find nothing. I wish I could say I want this issue, if it is true, to be much ado about nothing. I would be betraying Woody’s legacy and my own roots if I did.

I would be delighted to learn the integrity-challenged Rodriguez runs a renegade program, one that breaks NCAA rules. If he were to lose seven or eight scholarships, I’d say good. If he turned the Maize and Blue into one of the Big Ten’s bottom-feeders … hooray, even better.

Call my thinking petty or mean-spirited. Right, it is. But people who do don't understand the depth of the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry.

The Yankees and the Reds Sox, the Giants and the Dodgers, the Cowboys and the Redskins, the Celtics and the Lakers or the Hatfields and the McCoys … well, the king-of-all college rivalries is that kind of blood feud. 

So as I wait for The Free Press to reveal more specifics in its Rodriguez-gone-wrong saga, I keep my fingers crossed that the situation in Ann Arbor is worse than it seems.