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Pryor show coming to Washington
Terrelle Pryor hasn’t even graduated high school and, already, he’s the stuff of WPIAL legend.
One Washington County football team won’t soon forget a play Pryor perpetrated on them a year ago. Five yards from the goalline, Pryor posterized a hapless defender attempting a tackle. The Jeannette High School senior leaped over the defender and landed safely, three yards deep in the end zone.
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“He has everything you could want in a football player,” McGuffey coach Derek Bochna said. “He has speed, athletic ability. You just can’t match up with it. He has all the intangibles.
“This is the fourth straight year we’ll face him. I’m not going to be sad when he’s gone.”
McGuffey, 14-13 winners over Yough last week, doesn’t face Jeannette, the defending WPIAL Class AA champion, until Sept. 28.
Tonight, Washington faces the unenviable task of slowing Pryor, rated by rivals.com and CSTV.com as the nation’s top high school football player and by most other services as the top quarterback.
“You can see the development he’s made as a quarterback,” Washington coach Bill Britton said.
“As a sophomore, he mostly ran around like crazy. As a junior, he started to pass more but his tendency was to run. Now, he’s settled down a little more and it’s not because he’s lost a step. He has the ability, with no effort at all, to flick the ball a long way. We saw this one pass where he threw it 55 yards the opposite way, and he made it look easy.”
This key Class AA Interstate Conference game – both teams are 1-0 – takes place at Wash High, and it’s unlikely there’s been a player this highly regarded to play there since the Prexies’ Brian Davis dominated from 1982-84.
Yep, Pryor is that good.
“Being from right here in Washington County, the first person who comes to mind is Brian Davis,” Britton said. “I saw him play when I was in high school and I played against him in basketball. He had that ability to dominate. Some of the coaches on are staff said Pryor reminds him of another Jeannette quarterback. And Donte Wiley went on to play at Michigan.”
Pryor has yet to decide where he’ll play. The 6-6, 225-pounder, who played defensive end as a freshman, is also one of the nation’s top basketball recruits and he wants to play both sports in college.
Before the year, Pryor listed 11 finalists and it is believed he’ll chose between Ohio State, West Virginia, Michigan and Penn State. As the nation’s most prized recruit, he draws a crowd wherever he plays – and a lot of attention.
The game will be televised live on the Pennsylvania Cable News Channel (channel 48 on most local cable lineups) at 7:30 p.m. It will also be broadcast Saturday on the FYI channel at 7 p.m. and will be available on Comcast On Demand by Monday. It’s one of four Jeannette games to be televised this year, including a national broadcast of the Jeannette-Yough game on ESPNU.
“I know it’s a cliché, but he really is a man among boys,” Britton said. “He just towers over everybody, and he’s just a punishing player. It only takes him three strides to cover six or seven yards and, with that, he’ll just stop on a dime and make a cut. He is tremendous. I can see why every school wants him.”
Pryor guided Jeannette to its seventh WPIAL championship, a 24-14 win over arch-rival Greensburg Central Catholic, and the PIAA title game, a heartbreaking 29-28 loss to Wilson.
He put up astonishing statistics along the way. The 6-6, 225-pound quarterback passed for 1,732 yards, rushed for 1,636 yards and accounted for 29 touchdowns.
It’s arguably the finest offensive season in WPIAL history.
And he backed it up during a 60-0 drubbing of Brownsville last week. On Jeannette’s first play from scrimmage, Pryor went 53 yards for a touchdown. His night was over before halftime.
“I though we played them real well the last couple years but he breaks through the line and it looks like our guys are standing still,” Bochna said. “When he’s moving, you just don’t realize the speed he’s moving at.”
The worst part for Washington is that Jeannette is far from a one-player team. The Jayhawks simply have that perception.
Nine defensive and seven offensive starters are back from last year’s team, including tailback Jordan Hall, fullbacks Mike Matt and James Derry, receiver Jerry Harris and punishing lineman Jason Marquis.
“It’s going to take quite a team to slow them down. I don’t see anybody stopping them,” Britton said. “In my opinion, they’re a better team than they were last year.”
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