After spring's worth of growth, Pryor ready to utilize all his gifts

In fewer than four seconds, Terrelle Pryor saw all this ...

"I saw a Cover Two with a strongside rotation," the Ohio State quarterback said minutes after the Buckeyes' April 25 spring game. "They stayed on top. I saw Ray. He made a good move. He snuck right behind the corner. I saw the corner right there, and I was like, all right, I'm going to throw this in there."

And that's exactly what the sophomore did. With a spring-game record 95,722 watching, Pryor stepped up in the pocket and fired a laser beam over the right sideline and into the teeth of a 24-mph wind. The throw whistled past cornerback Andre Amos' earhole and into the hands of a sprinting Ray Small, who juked two defenders to finish off a 42-yard touchdown connection.

Pryor probably could have thrown that ball six months ago. But could he have made that read? "No," he admitted. "I jumped right into camp. Coaches didn't really teach me all that, because we didn't really have time. We had to go. With the spring, you go through a whole process."

That process has produced a true quarterback ready to begin utilizing all of his physical gifts. The sophomore from Jeanette, Pa., stands 6-foot-6 and weighs 235 pounds. He's almost as thick as Florida's Tim Tebow, but faster. Pryor can make the same throws as Oklahoma's Sam Bradford, but remains a threat to run. In fact, only a handful of Football Bowl Subdivision quarterbacks could have made the throw Pryor completed to Small in the spring game, and even fewer could reproduce the throw Pryor made moments earlier -- a 44-yard bomb that sliced through the gale and landed in Taurian Washington's hands in the end zone.

After a showing like that, it's no wonder Pryor bristles when he reads on the Internet that he can't throw. "The media and all, whoever, said that I couldn't throw the ball," Pryor said. "But you saw today. The world saw today. I can throw the ball."

Can't imagine where Pryor might have read such a harsh assessment. Oh, wait. Maybe he saw it on this very site. Early in 2008, when Rivals.com and Scout.com ranked Pryor as the nation's top recruit, I was asked to write a story explaining why Pryor ranked just 16th in the SI/Takkle.com rankings. The rankings came from a respected company called Offense-Defense, which used a composite opinion from several scouts.

One of those scouts, a former college (Wake Forest) and pro (Bengals, Raiders) assistant named Bill Urbanik, explained dual-threat quarterbacks are notoriously tough to assess. Then Urbanik invoked the name of one of the biggest recruiting busts of the past 10 years. "Remember a guy named Xavier Lee?" he asked. Lee was a big-armed quarterback from Daytona Beach, Fla., who never could establish himself as the No. 1 quarterback at Florida State. As a freshman, Pryor established himself as Ohio State's quarterback after the Buckeyes' third game. He started the final 10 games and finished the season with 1,311 passing yards, 12 touchdowns, four interceptions and 631 rushing yards.

In that same story, Offense-Defense recruiting director Dan Licursi said the company's scouts believed Florida State-bound quarterback E.J. Manuel had a better arm and a better pocket presence than Pryor. Manuel, who dislocated a finger and missed most of this year's spring practice, probably will spend his redshirt freshman season as Christian Ponder's backup for the Seminoles.

To be fair, the scouts probably correctly accessed Pryor's pocket presence at the time. That much was obvious during Pryor's freshman season, when he racked up double-digit rushing attempts in six of his nine starts but failed to crack 20 pass attempts in all but one game, a loss to Penn State. Pryor would be the first to admit that unless conditions were perfect for a pass last year, he scrambled.