OSU football: Boren's TD breaks fullback drought
Freshman first to catch scoring pass since '07, only second since 2001
Friday, October 9, 2009
By Ken Gordon
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
The third and final touchdown pass that Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor threw last week was, from start to finish, as unlikely a play as the Buckeyes have run in a long time.
First, Pryor said he should not even have thrown the pass. He was rolling to his right, and threw back a bit toward the middle of the field, which sets off warning lights in coaches' heads.
"I get in trouble for throwing behind my body," Pryor said sheepishly. "But (the intended receiver) was open, from what I saw."
The second oddity about the play was that Pryor was targeting a fullback near the goal line. Only once in the previous eight years had OSU thrown a touchdown pass to a fullback: Trevor Robinson against Youngstown State in 2007. Before that, it was Jamar Martin in 2001.
And the third and most unlikely aspect of it was that the receiver was Zach Boren, a true freshman who nine months ago arrived at OSU as a linebacker with a shredded knee.
Yet, there he was, hauling in an 8-yard pass for a score that gave the Buckeyes a 24-7 lead over Indiana just before halftime. OSU went on to win 33-14.
"It was so exciting, I can't even put it into words," Boren said. "I couldn't even tell you what the play was like. It's a blur to me."
Boren was a running back and linebacker at Pickerington Central High School who committed to OSU in April 2008, not long after his older brother Justin, a guard, had transferred from Michigan.
On Nov. 22, the Tigers were playing Cincinnati Elder in a Division I state semifinal. Late in the first half, Pickerington was closing in on a score when Boren took a handoff and was hit on the side of the knee.
Two ligaments ripped: the anterior cruciate and medial collateral.
"It was a nasty one," Tigers coach Jay Sharrett said. "But he was out there in the second half coaching from the sidelines. We had to take his helmet away."
Surgery followed, then rehabilitation. He enrolled at OSU early, for winter quarter, and that's when coach Jim Tressel first realized that Boren might have a chance to play right away despite the injury.
"When we saw that first two or three weeks of rehab, there wasn't much question in our minds" that he would recover in time," Tressel said. "In fact, I'm sure he felt like he could play in the spring. That's just his mentality."
Boren was held out of spring drills, and over the summer he was asked to switch to fullback.
"He never put his head down, nothing like that," guard Bryant Browning said. "He took it as a challenge, and now he's excelling at it."
Let's crumble the Hawkeyes, and then 'all-in' against Meatchicken.
