Tressel Surprises Team With Guest Speakers

Credit Doug Lesmerises of the PD for this one–

Ohio State coach has been known to bring in coaches, or former players to help inspire the Buckeyes to reach new heights. He may have out done himself this time. The would-be-governor of Ohio used his friendship with former 49ers owner Ed DeBartolo Jr. to bring in former 49ers Jerry Rice, Joe Montana, Ronnie Lott and Roger Craig.

As Lesmerises pointed out, that’s 14 Super Bowl rings worth of street cred. Perhaps just as important to the Buckeyes as the championships won, are the number of title losses that those players bounced back from.

Those four players collected 14 Super Bowl rings in San Francisco. But while the 49ers won five Super Bowls between 1981 and 1994, they also lost in the NFC Championship four times, solace for the losers of consecutive national title games.

“They said they couldn’t remember how many times they lost in the championship game. So they’ve been through it all,” OSU linebacker James Laurinaitis said.

It seems the players were quite impressed. I think a lot of NFL teams would too.

ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg was covering the Big Ten media circus in Chicago. The Buckeyes were picked by the Big Ten media as the favorite to win the conference- no surprise there, and LB James Laurinaitis and RB Beanie Wells were named as the preseason players of the year on their respective sides of the ball. It was the first time that a team has swept the awards.

Rittenberg wrote about Jim Tressel’s comments concerning Terrelle Pryor, and the misunderstanding about Tressel’s ‘gentlemen’ comment from earlier this year. I thought this was interesting regarding Pryor-

“He wants to please everybody,” Tressel said. “He wants to make sure he’s answering the question right or throwing the ball to the right place. … I don’t think you can disregard all the attention that he’s got. He wants to come though. That’s the kind of kid he is.”

Training camp will largely determine the Buckeyes’ course of action, but Pryor won’t wait long to get on the field. “Especially in the early season, we’ve always tried to use multiple quarterbacks, just because over the course of the season, you never know how health is going to go and so forth,” Tressel said. “Any time you can maximize the talent that you have. It’s not unlike using some other receivers at different times. Absolutely, (using two quarterbacks) can happen.”