I was lucky enough to get a seat at Tressel’s table during Tuesday’s round of interviews, and at just about the time he was starting to talk again about Terrelle Pryor’s improvement as a quarterback. Timing was great, because Tressel was not really under any real time constraints, and all of the reporters at the table were relatively new at that time. He was relaxed and gave us all a lesson in situational coaching and how it related to Pryor.

Tressel has repeated a thousand times over the past two years how no one expected Pryor to start during his freshman season. I know, I know; you’re asking ‘why did he then?’ Regardless, with all of Pryor’s playing time as a freshman, Tressel said that Pryor had no “down time” to step back and look at his game.

“If you don’t have down time as a freshman,” Tressel said, “you don’t have much improvement.”
There was improvement during the summer of Pryor’s upcoming sophomore season. You could see brief flashes of it during the spring game in 2009. Still, it was not enough improvement to win over SoCal or avoid the Purdue train wreck.  As a coaching staff, Tressel said they were still trying to find out how much the offense could handle with a constantly changing offensive line. He took the blame as a coaching staff for the Purdue debacle, saying Ohio State wasn’t out-played, but that they were out-coached.

Interestingly enough, Tress said the O-line was just missing assignments and not communicating. He managed to single out Justin Boren in that department. Of course, the rest of the season played itself out successfully even, though Pryor was hampered the final three games by an injury.
As the season ended, the QB got his down time... according to Coach Tressel. He heeled and got the opportunity to work on his game — it obviously showed in the Rose Bowl.

The future? If Pryor was throwing the ball 15 times a game and upped it to 38 times in the Rose Bowl, should we expect 35 to 40 throws a game? Well, that quote you hear getting tossed around about the possibility of 30 passes a game came from Tressel himself. Yes, 30 was a possibility... but 40 passes? When a reporter asked that, we got the look from Tressel…’are you kidding me?’.

And there’s your ‘sort of’.