Stop me if you’ve heard this one.
Three Brian O’Neills go into a bar. One’s a teacher. One’s a football player. One’s a newspaper columnist.
The one who plays football is less than half my age and nearly twice my size. If you’re any kind of a college football fan, you’ve heard of this 6-foot-6, 305-pound Pitt Panther offensive lineman. He’s the Piesman Trophy winner.
That’s really a thing in the world. Brian went up to New York to collect the Piesman from SB Nation last December as his reward for making the best non-lineman play by a lineman. The right tackle made a 24-yard catch-and-run for a touchdown against Georgia Tech last October.
It was one of two touchdowns he made on trick plays last year, scoring another on an end-around against Virginia Tech later the same month. Both TDs rocked Heinz Field and have now been watched tens of thousands more times on YouTube.
Sportswriters and readers long suggested I interview the new and improved Brian O’Neill, and I finally made some calls to Pitt. Soon enough the two of us were on the phone bonding over how often that last consonant in our surname gets dropped. Someone’s always knocking the L out of us.
Brian had heard about me because a clueless friend of his once sent him something I wrote and asked if he’d written it. I suggested a Pirates game to carry our conversation along, and invited Brian O’Neill of Brookline to the pre-game dinner at Atria’s on Federal Street. He’s a teacher at Banksville Elementary who hails from Cork, Ireland, and carries one of Pittsburgh’s best mustaches with him wherever he goes.
We ate and talked about the family legend of the red hand, which emblazons the O’Neill coat of arms. The story is told different ways but the way I heard it, a couple of O’Neill boys were racing in boats toward Ireland, with the winner to claim it for his own. Just as the younger brother was about to lose, he whipped out his sword, cut off his hand, threw it ashore, and won.
Talk about a trick play. Anyway, we’d all heard the tale from our kin. We went back to our entrees.
After we bid goodbye to the teacher, footballer Brian and I found our seats in the left field stands and I learned more about this kid who has made quite the name for himself in the stadium down the street.
The red-shirt junior came to Pitt in 2014 out of an all-boys Catholic high school in Wilmington, Del., where he’d been a wide receiver and Delaware’s Player of the Year as a basketball center. He thought he’d be a 265-pound tight end at Pitt, but after redshirting as a freshman, O’Neill was approached by a coach after the regular right tackle tore up his knee in summer workouts.
Yeah, O’Neill got the old can-you-put-on-50-pounds-in-a-couple-of-months-and-switch-positions question. He didn’t hesitate.
“It was an opportunity to play and our team really didn’t have any other options,” he said.
He began eating. And eating. And eating some more. He’d set his alarm for 3:30 a.m. to wolf down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk he’d leave in a bedside fridge, go back to sleep, awaken and eat, work out, eat again and then eat at 2, 4 and 9 p.m. He put on 35 pounds in two months and played tackle in all 13 games, starting the final 12.
He’s now started the past 25 games. He’d told his three older siblings before the Georgia Tech game that he’d be thrown a pass if the ball ever was snapped at the left hash mark between the 20- and 25-yard lines.
When the ball reached the spot, quarterback Nathan Peterman said, “I can’t believe we’re going to do this,” but it played out like a dream. O’Neill was glad it was behind him and he could concentrate on his primary job.
A man in front of us at the game turned about this time and said offensive linemen get hit a lot, and O’Neill responded, “You get hit a lot but you do a lot of hitting, too.”
His greatest satisfaction is “when the defense is lined up and they know what’s coming and they can’t do anything about it.” After Pitt shocked powerhouse Clemson in its own “Death Valley” 43-42 last November, Clemson players told him and his mates during the post-game handshakes, “We’ve played the best of the best and you guys as an offensive line are right there.”
O’Neill, switching to left tackle this year, is eligible for two more seasons, even after he graduates in December and pursues a master’s degree in business administration at Pitt’s Katz Business School. He keeps tabs on 20 old teammates in the NFL, but he’s not letting himself think that far ahead.
His coaches say “be where your feet are,” and that’s how he approaches his life. “I’ve been able to get where I am by doing what I’m doing and not worrying about it.”
He’s only 21, but already his full story could no more fit in this column than he could fit in his old Salesianum High uniform. I liked everything about this man who’s the furthest thing from a braggart. It wasn’t until the seventh inning that he let slip that his mother’s brother, his Uncle John Carney, is the governor of Delaware.
Hey, it’s a small state, he said.
Our ancestral homeland is legendary for its wee people, but this Brian is all “we’’ when he talks about almost anything.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: July 2, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
