Midweek Mierda: From the Bad Omen Department
Orson Charles, a Tampa area recruit, shattered the Florida's 2006 Championship crystal trophy while touring the football stadium. Charles was posing for a picture with Tim Tebow’s Heisman and bumped the table holding the trophy.
A couple of Florida coaches, including Urban Meyer, joked that Charles had to commit to the Gators to pay them. Apparently, “you break it, you buy it” applies to SEC football. Insert Albert Means joke here.
The best line, however, belongs to Plant High School coach Robert Weiner. Before Charles broke the trophy, Weiner said Meyer asked him to describe Charles. Weiner told Meyer that Charles was a “physical specimen” but sometimes a “bull in a china shop.”
“After what happened,” Weiner said, “I'm sure Urban now thinks I'm an excellent evaluator of talent.”
Know thy enemy: Mark Sanchez has secured the starting quarterback job for USC.
Obviously, the season is a long way off and many things can change, but judging from Gary Klein’s piece today, it sounds like we will be seeing Sanchez under center on September 13th.
For all of his talk about competition, the Trojans under Carroll have never gone into a summer without a designated starting quarterback who ultimately started the season opener. Carroll inherited Carson Palmer before the 2001 season, and he and former offensive coordinator Norm Chow selected Matt Leinart as the starter on the eve of the season-ending spring scrimmage in 2003. Booty missed nearly all of spring practice in 2006 because of back surgery, but he was regarded as the starter going into the summer. Now, Sanchez will have the responsibility of organizing and running summer workouts as USC prepares for training camp and its opener at Virginia.
Quarterback Competition?: Tressel touted Boeckman’s performance in the jersey scrimmage above those of Henton and Bauserman in the scrimmage. This seems strange to me. Wasn’t Beanie just espousing the skills and progress of Henton? I guess the head coach and star offensive player see things a little differently.
I think this is a case of Tressel trying to pick up the senior signal caller after his fall from grace late in the year. All Boeckman has heard over the last five months is how he stumbled in the final three games and that the best QB recruit in the country is coming to campus. That weighs on the oldest of college quarterbacks.
Decision time: Will Kosta Koufos head to the league after one season at Ohio State? Down the stretch it seemed unlikely that the NBA Draft was a realistic option for the freshman, but now the prognosticators seem to be split on it. Some think he is a first round pick, while Jay Bilas says he needs more time.
“He's got to get stronger, improve his lower base and not get moved around as easily. I think he's got to become a better rebounder and defender. If you're coming out early, you'd better be ready to make an impact on that league, and he's not prepared to do that yet.''
With B.J. Mullens and William Buford coming in it is hard to tell if Koufos production and stock would go up if he stays another year.
Koufos still has some time. The deadline for college underclassmen to enter the NBA draft is April 27.
