• Follow us on Twitter @buckeyeplanet and @bp_recruiting, like us on Facebook! Enjoy a post or article, recommend it to others! BP is only as strong as its community, and we only promote by word of mouth, so share away!
  • Consider registering! Fewer and higher quality ads, no emails you don't want, access to all the forums, download game torrents, private messages, polls, Sportsbook, etc. Even if you just want to lurk, there are a lot of good reasons to register!

S Donte Whitner (Official Thread)

Jump to latest Follow Reply
Sort by date Sort by votes
DDN

12/15

Whitner picked OSU over ND

By Doug Harris
Dayton Daily News
COLUMBUS | Donte Whitner liked his first tour of Notre Dame so much, he decided to take another.
<!--endtext-->

<!-- inset --> <!--begintext--> The Ohio State junior safety traveled twice to South Bend as a high school prospect, once paying his own way. The site of that storied stadium and Golden Dome and the Irish's unmatched tradition were almost enough to get the former Cleveland Glenville star to commit.
"It's like a different country when you go to Notre Dame," Whitner said. "Everything seems cleaner. And they've got one of the biggest locker rooms.
"All that stuff is nice. You have a different feeling walking in that stadium than you do any other stadium. And I loved that sign that says, 'Play like a champion today.' "
But the first-team All-Big Ten selection decided OSU offered everything he needed.
"I wanted to play for my home-state school," Whitner said. "I didn't want to go anywhere else and win a national championship because it wouldn't mean as much as it would here."
Whitner is one of a few juniors at OSU considering a jump to the pros. He has taken advantage of an NCAA rule that allows players to get draft feedback from the NFL without losing eligibility.
"I'm seriously going to look at it," he said. "I'm going to sit down with coach (Jim) Tressel and my family and weigh out both sides, the pros and cons, shortly after the bowl."
 
Upvote 0
I think that most, if not all, of JT's players are probably supposed to sit down adn talk to JT before making a decision like that. I don't think that phrase points in either direction.

Perhaps other rumblings suggest that donte will go, but I read nothing from that sentence.
 
Upvote 0
jwinslow said:
I think that most, if not all, of JT's players are probably supposed to sit down adn talk to JT before making a decision like that. I don't think that phrase points in either direction.

Perhaps other rumblings suggest that donte will go, but I read nothing from that sentence.
Click to expand...

When you decide to leave a place, ANY place, there may be a standing policy of "meeting with the boss man" before leaving; but you only actually have the meeting for one of two reasons:
  1. Out of respect for "the boss man" or
  2. So as not to burn bridges that you might need later.
In the business world, reason #2 is almost always the primary reason that you meet with your boss face to face before you leave. In college football, reason #2 has very little to do with it. Donte will meet with Tressel on the way out only out of respect for him.

I concede that it is entirely possible that Donte respects Tressel enough to seek his counsel on this momentous decision. I hope that's the case here.
 
Upvote 0
LINK

12/20/05


OSU safety loves being mama's boy
By Jon Spencer
News Journal

<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR><TD vAlign=top><!-- ARTICLE BODYTEXT --><!--ARTICLE TEXT-->
COLUMBUS -- Unless he suddenly turns into Martha Stewart, Ohio State strong safety Donte Whitner will have a tough act to follow as Nate Salley's bunk mate at the Fiesta Bowl.
Salley, the Buckeyes' senior free safety, shared a two-bedroom apartment this season with his mom, Pat. She gave up her job cleaning homes in Fort Lauderdale to move in with her youngest son and savor his final season.

She brought it up but didn't think I'd be for it," Salley said. "Being a college kid, who wants their mom around? But I was all for it. It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing, so why not come up and enjoy it with me? She saw I was sincere, so she came up." Pat Salley calls the experience a dream come true.


"I've had a lot of fun traveling and going to the games, but Senior Day was tough," she said of her son's final home game. "He was crying; I was crying. My husband cried, too ... sometimes he cries more than me. But Nate's the one who gets it started. He's more emotional than us."

Salley, arguably the fiercest hitter on the OSU defense, proudly claims to be a mama's boy. Tease him at your own peril.

"Oh, yeah, I'm a mama's boy all the way ... but I think I'm a daddy's boy at the same time," Salley said, grinning. "I'm a parents' boy."

While her husband Nate Sr., stayed back in Florida, where he works as a roofer and disc jockey, Pat Salley made herself at home in Columbus, serving as the unofficial team mom when she wasn't sprucing up her son's dwelling.

"I made it look like a Buckeye home," she said. "I decorated it in a lot of scarlet and gray, just like I have my house. Back home we have an Ohio State flag flying and a 'Block O' stuck in the grass. We have a red couch in the den and a gray couch in the living room."

It wasn't long before Salley didn't recognize his place.

"I'll come home every day and she'll say, 'See anything new?' " he said. "She spoils me a lot. She's always cooking and cleaning. I have to tell her not to do so much. We're very cool, very close, so it's not like she's crowding my space."

With most of her son's day occupied by class and practice, Pat Salley found herself reading and watching a lot of sports to pass the hours. She has become quite Internet savvy.

"There was a time I could have cared less," she said. "Now my husband says I'm a junkie. I'm just into the Buckeyes because of Nate. I didn't start to understand football until he was a junior in high school. I figured I might as well learn about it since he's serious about it.

"I've always been his greatest fan, but now I'm one of the loudest fans, too."

Salley's dream is to strike it rich in the NFL and open a restaurant in his mom's name that will feature all types of cuisine, including island-style cooking. A native of the Bahamas, Pat Salley considers curry chicken and lobster two of her specialties.

"He's going to name it after me and use my recipes," she said. "He said he wanted to make his dream and mine come true."

Another dream for Salley is beating Notre Dame in the Jan. 2 Fiesta Bowl.
That would make him part of the first senior class to win four bowl games and would give this class 43 victories, matching the school-record total achieved by the class that played from 1995-98.

To achieve that goal, Salley and the rest of the OSU secondary will have to put the clamps on one of the nation's most prolific passing attacks. Junior quarterback Brady Quinn has become the first Irish quarterback to throw for more than 3,000 yards. His two favorite targets are 6-foot-5 bookends Maurice Stovall and Jeff Samardzija.

Samardzija, a junior, has 71 catches for 1,190 yards and a nation's best 15 touchdowns. Stovall has 60 catches for 1,023 yards and 11 TDs -- including 10 in the last five games. "You see them on film and they make play after play," Salley said. "Those guys go up and get it. I don't think we've seen two receivers like that all year. It's like they've got two Braylon Edwards out there. It's going to be a great challenge for us."

</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Click to expand...
 
Upvote 0
tsteele316 said:
i'm pretty sure lyons would be filling salley's spot, not whitner's.
Click to expand...

I'm not thinking as much in terms of specific spots as I am receivers vs defensive backs. The Lyons move tells us one of two things:

1. He's a better safety prospect than the other guys that are vying for position in the defensive backfield. There isn't any reason to move him to defense if he is going to be buried on the depth chart there as well.

unless...

2. Something is happening that will cause us to rearrange our DB's so significantly, that we are desperate for depth. (Youboty and Whitner leaving, along with Salley and Everett).
 
Upvote 0
Let's look at the current depth chart at safety (seniors in red):

1st string
Salley (Sr)
Whitner (Jr)

2nd string
Mitchell (Jr)
O'Neal (Fr)

Reserves
Harley (Sr)
Smith, A. (Jr)
Welch (So)
Lukens (So)

We lose one starter and one reserve to graduation. Know Tressel's habit of starting seniors, I'd guess Mitchell takes over for Salley. So the question is, who joins O'Neal as 2nd stringer? I've seen both Smith and Welch in the secondary in garbage time, so you'd have to guess they're in the mix. Maybe the staff has seen something in Lyons that would warrant him making the two-deep at safety over Smith, Welch, and Lukens.
 
Upvote 0
Maybe Lyons wasn't panning out as a WR for whatever reason. Time for plan B

Welch is listed as a CB here on BP, is that correct?

Milli you forgot Russel, Washington, Patterson and incoming Schwartz. There are plenty of candidates to play safety. I guess Underwood is still listed as a CB or is he?
 
Upvote 0
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top