What Would Have Happened If Terrelle Pryor Had Signed With Michigan?

When Terrelle Pryor signed his letter of intent to come play football for Ohio State back in 2008,
he did so knowing full well that his entire college career was about to be put under a microscope.

Pryor, who hails from Jeannette, Pennsylvania, arrived in Columbus as one of the most hyped and publicized football recruits of all time.

The young prodigy was viewed as the type of athletic quarterback who was practically built to star in a spread offense.

Pryor, however, obviously had other plans.

When it came time for him to pick a school, the young quarterback was thinking along the same exact lines as every other elite recruit in America.

Pryor based his college decision on which program he felt would best mold him into a legitimate NFL prospect.

He even admitted after his announcement that one of the key factors for choosing Ohio State was Pryor’s desire to learn a pro offense so he would be prepared for the NFL.

So Pryor chose to make the unwise move of spurning suitors such as Oregon and Michigan, two teams that happen to use the spread offense that Pryor is so perfectly equipped to run. And instead, he opted for the square peg in the old round hole fit.

After three seasons, it’s hard to look back and say Pryor has been a failure at Ohio State, considering the senior quarterback has won back-to-back BCS bowl game MVPs and guided the Buckeyes to a combined 23-3 record over the last two seasons.

With the latest scandals looming, however, it looks as if Pryor, who is already suspended for the first five games of the 2011 season, may never step foot on a college football field again.

If Pryor never plays another down again at the Shoe, he’ll leave college football without a national title ring and without a Heisman Trophy, two pieces of hardware many expected him to take home when he initially signed with the Buckeyes.

His resume is no doubt a strong one, but because he never won a national championship and he never really matured into the type of guy that fans could really like and support, Pryor will probably be most remembered as just another star-recruit letdown. 

That will be his legacy.

Pryor will get drafted and he will play in the NFL, but there’s very little chance he’ll crack the first round after all that’s gone down over the last six months.

So it seems that in the end, Pryor made a poor decision, choosing the Buckeyes so he could become a star NFL quarterback prospect.

It makes you wonder what would happen if we could just take a time machine back to 2008 and send Terrelle Pryor to Michigan instead of Ohio State.

Back then, it was Rich Rodriguez’s first year at Michigan and it was obvious he wanted Pryor to come to Ann Arbor and be the leader of his spread option offensive attack.

Rodriguez’s specialty offense had just made a star out of QB Pat White, a relatively unheralded recruit. So there was no telling what it could have done for a player the caliber of Pryor.

It looked like almost too perfect of a match.

The only problem being that the NFL has a tendency to look down quarterbacks who play in a spread offense, even though it didn’t seem to hurt White, who was extremely overdrafted by the Dolphins, all that much.

Pryor realized that if he really wanted to wow the pro scouts, he needed to show them he could  play in a pro system.

So he made the foolish move of trying to sacrifice the present for the future and in the end, it backfired.

You have to wonder, now with the mess he’s gotten himself into, do you think Terrelle Pryor sometimes just sits back and wonders what could have been.

Pryor’s legacy as a Buckeye is forever tarnished and it looks as though he most likely won’t get an opportunity to salvage it.

Sports produces such definitive answers at such a rapid rate that many times we are simply left to wonder, what if?

What if that winning three-pointer didn’t go down?

What if that team never drafted that player?

What if that star quarterback recruit had just picked the most obvious choice?

There is no grey area in sports, you either win or you lose, and you either make the right move or the wrong move.

In Terrelle Pryor’s case, he must live the rest of his football career with the realization that he made the wrong move and he made it for all the wrong reasons.

Now, all he’s left with are far too many "what ifs".

Terrelle Pryor, oh what you could have been.