The Front Row

There isn't an athlete on our current roster with more talent that TP had
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What?

why the down votes, I thought that was for the free bee posters? I simply put out a question, did we underachieve over the last 5 years? No need to get personal, all my posts are question and conversation oriented. I think we are stronger faster and more mentally prepared than any of JT teams from what I have seen so far. It is yet to be seen if we win like JT, but my guess, as long as UFM stays healthy, we are in for a nice ride.

OSU was a top 5 team almost every year over the past half decade that underachieving? How many B10 titles did JT win in a row? There is NO WAY those teams underachieved. They won a Sugar and Rose Bowl and lost to a much higher ranked Texas team in the Fiesta in the last minute of the game. Arent coaches supposed to lean on their best player? Name me one great coach who didnt have a great player.

Tressel did it without Pryor. He didn't just start winning when Pryor stepped on campus. So I'm not so sure attributing Tressel's success to one guy is very fair to the rest of the team who contrubuted. Buckeyes have had great teams which were put together and coached by Jim Tressel. He won a national title with a QB named Craig Krenzel.

Krenzel, Troy Smith, Boeckman, and Pryor all won. None of these guys were the same type of QB. All of them made plays and excelled. Tressel was successfull because Jim Tressel knew what he was doing and knew what it took to win football games. Rest assured that had Tyrelle Pryor chosen to go to another school than Ohio State, we still would've won a lot of football games and still curb stomped Michigan because Jim Tressel IS a great football coach.

Not how I see it, frankly.

I don't think of TP as having a lot of raw "talent" - but that depends on your definition of talent. I don't think he had raw (meaning "natural") football talent. He had a very strong arm but a very un-natural throwing motion, no touch, poor timing. He could wing it out there a long distance, but the receivers had to have enough separation to be the first ones to get to the ball and run under it. Not always - I can remember him throwing a few nice balls too, like back shoulder throws to the sideline, etc - but I never felt like throwing was a natural talent for him. He relied on mechanics that were drilled into him over countless hours of practice, and those mechanics frequently disappeared under pressure.

Same with his running. He had poor vision and no creativity for creating a run. What he had was a 400 hp V-10 turbocharged engine inside a Hummer body. And a great stiff-arm. I never saw him elude anyone with a move. I never saw him hit anyone at the end of a run - when he was finally corraled, he went down in a fetal position.

Same with his leadership skills. Never saw him rally the troops. Never saw the team respond to him. He acted like a petulant little brat if something didn't go his way.

What TP had was not talent in the way I think of talent. I know some will think I'm splitting hairs here, but I think there is a difference. Cam Newton was Terrelle Pryor with "talent". Pryor had a once-in-a-generation body with size and strength and straight-line speed. From a pure athletic standpoint, he was a man amongst boys - particularly in the talent-challenged Big Ten. He was like a star HS athlete playing for the middle-school lightweight team. This is why he wil NOT start in the NFL unless some offensive coordinator can find a place to use his physical gifts without relying on true football "talent".

I just gave you a down vote for caring about down votes.