Terrelle Pryor hasn't met high expectations: Bill Livingston
By Bill Livingston
October 16, 2009
Bill Livingston
By now, I thought Terrelle Pryor would show signs of pushing Troy Smith and Joe Germaine as the best quarterbacks I have seen in my 25 years around Ohio State football. Hasn't happened. Not even close.
Instead, the most ballyhooed quarterback in Buckeyes history is becoming another Craig Krenzel, a game manager, a guy who doesn't lose the game and lets the defense and special teams win it. Actually, since Krenzel was the quarterback for the white-knuckled national championship season of 2002, he has a card that trumps anything Pryor can play.
Pryor was better last season, when he was thrown in as a true freshman, when he started from the fourth game until Todd Boeckman took the opening snap in the Fiesta Bowl. He threw for 12 touchdowns against four interceptions with a 60.6 percent completion rate last year. This year, his stats show nine TD passes and six picks, 56.3 percent completions.
Nobody is really putting up big stats among the preseason Heisman Trophy hopefuls. Pryor had the chance to leap-frog the more established names and play like the (clearly premature) Big Ten Offensive Player of the Year he was forecast to be before the season began. He says he is correcting footwork problems that have skewed his aim. Perhaps that is why a breakout game hasn't happened. Not even close.
Sweeping judgments from the recent Wisconsin game are tough to make because the Badgers played keep-away with their ground game. But when the game was still tight, Pryor threw a telegraphed pass, on which he locked onto his receiver. The Badgers dropped it, or it would have been a pick-six interception.
Pryor's only shining moment came when he led a beat-the-clock drive at the end of the first half. That was a Germaine staple, and Smith, who won the Heisman, was good at it, too. Even then, there was an asterisk. The drive began with Pryor making one of those hully-gully plays that you can't diagram, reversing field and running 27 yards from his own 12 on third-and-15. It was a huge play. But, when he gets into the open field, if he really runs a 4.33 40-yard dash, when does he hit a home run? When does he unleash the warp-speed burst Vince Young had? Hasn't happened, although he has been close.
I guess it has become a prerequisite to be a complete douchebag when writing sports for the PD. He is trying to compare Pryor to Germain and Smith, yet fails to recognize that both Smith and Germain had a couple years more in the program than Pryor has to date to become those great QBs. 
