Collier: Blame adults at Ohio State
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Having only watched it about 16 times in maybe two plus hours worth of ESPN coverage, clearly I can't be certain, but I believe we may have a fourth alleged moving violation against Terrelle Pryor.
Did you see it?
He is driving a dark Nissan sports coupe -- car eight or nine according to this week's allegations -- away from the meeting at which Ohio State players learned that head coach Jim Tressel had just resigned in disgrace, when Tressel's quarterback quickly makes a right turn on red without stopping, without signaling.
Must have been late for a night class.
These little rules and regulations, see, they're not for Terrelle. He does what he wants. The NCAA Manual, the Ohio motor vehicle code, doesn't much matter. He does what he wants.
After throttling Penn State's too-country Nittany Lions in November, Terrelle did not make himself available for postgame queries. I'll bet he just didn't want to. He does what he wants.
According to Sports Illustrated's devastating investigation, when a tattoo shop employee asked how Terrelle was able to get so much Buckeye equipment -- game-worn shoulder pads? -- to trade for ink, Pryor said simply, "I get whatever I want."
And that's pretty much where you can stop tsk-tsking about Pryor, because you know where he got this idea, this malignant notion that the pure accident of being in the top 1 percent of the population for gross motor skills entitles someone to go through life grabbing things with both hands, those things to include, in plenty of cases, footballmatic immunity.
He got that from adults.
Got it from car salesmen and tattoo vendors and football coaches.
When Pitt's Jason Douglas was arrested for allegedly hitting a pedestrian with a car he was driving under the influence last fall, he didn't ask police about the health of the guy he had hospitalized, he said, "Hey I play for Pitt football. Please don't arrest me."
All Pryor has done to this point is demonstrate with spectacular consistency that he understands the dark streets of college football's establishment. Somewhere along the line, he got educated to the fact that as long as he could go, oh, let's say 31-4 as Ohio State's starting quarterback, there wasn't a so-called adult anywhere from the Columbus tattoo parlors to the most exalted ivory towers of THE Ohio State University who would say boo about Pryor's failure to respond to what Tressel called his players' "little sensor."
First Published June 1, 2011 12:00 am
