Last week we told you that Naples (FL) Collier TE Jeff Heuerman verbally committed to the Buckeyes, becoming the tenth member of the class of 2011 to do so. This was big news as the Buckeyes were in hot recruiting battles for Westerville Central's Nick Vannett and Oil City's (PA) Ben Koyack, and were only expected to take two tight ends in the class. A day after Heuerman committed to the Bucks, Koyack pledged his services to Brian Kelly and the Irish, leaving Nick Vannett as the only undecided player left out of the trio.
While OSU may still land the local product, landing the big man from the "sunshine state" was monumental as it alleviated the pressure of possibly missing out on an elite tight end in this class. Heuerman, whose father played basketball for Michigan, instantly fell in love with Columbus upon his visit last week and knew Ohio State was the right place for him.
The 6-5/230 tight end is a rare breed at the position these days, as many of the up-and-coming high school tight ends in this generation only care about their reception numbers at the end of the season. Heuerman, on the other hand, likes blocking just as much as he does hauling in passes, making him the ideal guy for the job in Jim Tressel's system. Heuerman discusses his love for blocking, what he liked about Columbus, when he hopes to enroll at OSU, and more with 11W in this segment of "Catching Up".
You just visited Ohio State and committed shortly after. Can you briefly take us through your visit and what lead to your commitment to Ohio State?
Coach Johnson and I were real close before I even got up to OSU, and up there I became close with all the coaches. I felt the most comfortable at OSU, which was the main thing. They have the best coaching staff in the country and playing under them I know I’ll be able to develop into the best player I can be.
What did Coach Tressel say when he got the news that you were going to become a Buckeye?
Actually when I called Coach Tressel he was with Archie Griffin and Gene Smith at a function. He said they had just got done talking about me. When I told him I wanted to be a Buckeye he told me how phenomenal it was and how excited he was. He also told my dad and head coach that I would be in good hands up there.
Did the use of Jake Stoneburner in the spring game have any impact on your decision?
Yeah actually it did. All the coaches said they're going to throw to the tight end more and they proved it in the spring game.
Your dad obviously played for Michigan and after your visit there, the perception, at least in Buckeye Nation, was that this could come down to OSU and UM, with the Wolverines having a slight advantage. What was your thinking after the trip to Ann Arbor (before you got to OSU) and what made OSU stand out over Michigan and the other schools you were considering?
My dad playing for Michigan didn't have any impact on my decision. I visited UM and it is a great school, and I also visited OSU and committed a few days later, so that pretty much speaks for itself and how comfortable and incredible Ohio State is.
Do you plan on helping the coaches fill out the rest of this class? What current other recruits have you met and do you plan to talk to any of them to try and get them to Columbus? What was the vibe with the other Florida kids at the spring game?
Jeremy Cash and I are real close. Also, Wayne Lyons and Jabari Gorman were also up there with us. They both would be a great fit at OSU and of course Jeremy and I will do whatever it takes to make OSU the best it can be.
Speaking of your senior season, what are your goals from an individual stand point heading into your final year at Collier?
To be a leader for my team and to play some football because that’s what I love to do. I want my teammates to know that they can lean on me whenever they need to. We're going to have a solid team this year and I want to make the best of it.
What do you think are your greatest strengths as a player?
My greatest strength that stands out from all other tight ends is my blocking. Tight ends that can catch are almost a dime a dozen. Some players want to just catch the ball, but I love to block and can do both. I get just as big of a thrill putting someone on his backside as I do catching the ball.
Any plans to enroll early at Ohio State (winter or spring) or will you be coming next June?
Yeah I plan to enroll early since they are on quarters. I’m not sure when yet, but Coach Tressel said enrolling in March is also a possibility. I want to get up there as soon as possible so probably January.
Any chance your dad is going to become a Buckeye fan now? What were his feelings on your commitment to OSU?
My dad is behind me 100%. We are real close and he will be supporting me in scarlet and gray no matter what anyone has to say about it. He'll be one of the Buckeye's biggest fans. We both loved it at OSU and he knew that it was 100% the right place for us.
If you could tell Buckeye Nation one thing, what would it be?
I will give my all for Ohio State every day. Being part of the Buckeye family is one of the greatest things on the planet. I cannot be more excited to get up there and become a part of it all, and bring them what they want.
Comments
A tight end who enjoys blocking.
Welcome to The Ohio State University young man.
am i missing something w/ the Good Shizzy link to BHGP? I feel dumber having read that post. please tell me there is some joke behind that post that i'm not picking up on and that the guy who wrote that isn't as retarded as i think he is.
"I get just as big of a thrill putting someone on his backside as I do catching the ball." Awesome. I love this kid already.
This kid is great. "I visited UM and it is a great school, and I also visited OSU and committed a few days later, so that pretty much speaks for itself". Suck it scUM.
OT, but this is about good shizzy also. What the hell is Freekbass doing a ND propaganda song for? Maybe this question is for Cincy-area Buckeyes more than anyone. Freekbass is a Cincy musician who kind of fancies himself as a P-Funk kind of dude. So what is the ND connection? Did he get close with BK when he was back in Hamilton County? What gives?
Seems like a great kid and great person, welcome to the family
Cincy has quite a few Domer fans in my experience. Moreso than any other city in Ohio save Dublin
I thought the exact same thing as well. It was like a bunch of jibberish. My IQ went down about 10 points having read that article.
He got an offer from Alabama, so we know that the defending NCers saw something in him. He also thought the Gators would come through with an offer.
I will forgive Freekbass if he can organize a SHAG! reunion concert....in Columbus, on a home football Saturday night. And he has to bring Bootsy Collins with him too.
ND has that weak $hit...THE Ohio State University has this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Sit down, you golden-domed posers.
On the "Seriously Santonio?" story for the good shizzy, I read it thinking that it said "Seriously Sabino?
Way to scare the hell out of me.
Man, that gives me goosebumps every time.
Great attitude and perfect disposition for the Buckeyes
This kid is a ball player with a bit of nasty.
RUMORS OF EXPANSION TO 16 TEAMS. CONFERENCE "PLAYOFFS?"
Des Moines Register 07:58 AM ET 04.30 | A 16-team Big Ten could have four "pods" and include Nebraska -- and Tom Osborne's blessing. The Huskers are a football giant, the school is an AAU member in good standing, and from a television perspective, the Big Ten could lock up Omaha and Lincoln while even extending its reach into the Kansas City and Denver markets. In fact, if the league could lure Kansas into the equation along with Missouri, it'd own the Kansas City and Wichita markets as well.
Comments:
JRM74
Ashburn, VA
But what's with this new twist of 4 "pods"? Does that mean their conference championship is a two-game playoff?
F J J
I saw an interesting number yesterday that said if Tx went to the B10 they would get approx. $40 million per based on a number of things including the BTN getting into all of the Tx households. They currently get $12 million from the B12.
ESPN was reporting yesterday that Mizzou to the B10 is all but done.
GoldenDoopBox
Nashville , TN
Oh, the future of Mega divisions of football. Let's say there are 4 confrences with 16 teams....that's 64 teams. What about all the other 60 schools?
river1075
Las Vegas , NV
This will be very big. If the Big 10 captures the Texas market and the New York market, they could double their current revenues, not to mention increased interest from the football-crazy states like Pennsylvania and Nebraska/Missouri. As for the conference name, the "Big 10" is a brand and doesn't need to reflect a number accurately, so it will stay with that name.
I have to admit the school presidents are thinking way ahead and even though it is money motivated they have the ability to by-pass a playoff system by doing something that hasn't been talked about yet. If the Big 10 goes to 16 teams abd four "pods" this likely means a 2-game playoff and mo' money! If the other conferences do the same, then we have a playoff before the BCS Bowl games. Look, 64 of the top programs would have whittled themselves down to 4 teams. It would be much easier for the BCS to accurately (and fairly) select the 2 teams to play for the championship or itself have a 2-game playoff.
YAHOO - Mon Apr 26, 2010 7:58 pm EDT
Nebraska will still take that expansion call, if anyone's interested
By Matt Hinton
For the rest of the offseason, last week's BCS mini-convention in Arizona will probably stand as the high point of hypothetical conference expansion buzz and the moment the speculation began to wane: By now, all of the potential scenarios for Big Ten and Pac-10 growth have been explored ad nauseum, and both conference's commissioners went out of their way to pour cold water on the runaway gossip, Larry Scott by openly questioning the need for Pac-10 expansion and Jim Delany by denying reports that the Big Ten was accelerating the timetable for announcing its plans (or lack thereof). As it stands, the Big Ten probably won't move until December, if it decides to move at all.
One school apparently willing to keep its doors open, though, is Nebraska, which made clear in February via athletic director Tom Osborne that it was willing to listen to overtures from other conferences trying to lure the Huskers away from the Big 12. Chancellor Harvey Perlman reiterated to the Omaha World Herald over the weekend that the Huskers are "in the swirl of things," and the door is still wide open to, you know, whoever:
Perlman wants Husker fans to know one thing — the first hat he wears in any conversation about conference realignment will be red and white with an N on it. He and Nebraska Athletic Director Tom Osborne are solidly together on potential courses of action. “My instinct and Tom's instinct isn't just to sit around and wait to see what bad things happen to you," the chancellor said. “We're certainly talking about what options we have."
Perlman said he wants the Big 12 to succeed. But that doesn't mean a move by Nebraska to any other power conference has been ruled out.
"I don't think anyone can dismiss anything out of hand," he said. "If you take the wildest predictions about mega-conferences — 16 is the number you see most, but 24 has been floated though not publicly — we certainly have to act in the interest of Nebraska."
(Note that, yes, the notion of a 24-team conference has been raised -- publicly -- by a directly interested power broker, and lay there like a bomb waiting to blow all previous assumptions to smithereens. I'm not going anywhere near it.)
In this case, "what's right for Nebraska" may almost certainly be translated as "whatever makes the most money for Nebraska." On that front, the Big Ten seems like the obvious winner, offering to potentially double the Huskers' annual conference take-home from roughly $11 million in the Big 12 to $22 million or more in the Big Ten, just like that.
Perlman insists there are other considerations -- academic fit, travel costs of sending the field hockey team to Penn State, or even to Rutgers if the conference expands to the East Coast, etc. -- but the general impression is that only a strong backlash by "the American public and forbearance of the congressional folk" re: a colossal superconference could keep him from leaping into Delany's arms if the Big Ten extends a formal offer at some point in the not-too-distant future. When it comes down to the bottom line, Nebraska couldn't afford not to leap at Big Ten money -- and that's even more true for potential expansion targets Missouri, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, et al, which stand to gain even more from a move than Nebraska.
That, in a nutshell, demonstrates the wild success of the Big Ten Network, beyond what anyone outside the conference imagined when the idea was floated in 2006 -- the general reaction then, if I recall, ran along the lines of "Who wants to add 60 cents to their cable bill to watch Purdue volleyball?" Less than four years later, the BTN is already the giant in the room in the Expansion Chronicles, without which the likes of Nebraska and Missouri (and Notre Dame, to the extent the Irish even remain in the discussion at all) would have no practical incentive to abandon their century-old rivalries in the Big 8/12.
In fact, the BTN is in all likelihood the catalyst for the Expansion Chronicles, because a growing beast must be fed new cable markets to ensure its annual allowance of revenue. Whether or not it was founded with imperialist ambitions, the network was a farsighted, far-reaching stroke that has already put the Big East essentially at the Big Ten's feet and cast much longer shadows than anyone could have imagined across the Big 12, a demographic lightweight when it comes to potential television audiences. Talk about exploiting a natural resource.
Of course, with the glacial pace of the "investigation" process and Delany's studied refusal to toss the media any scrap of news, rumor or speculation, the exact reach of the Big Ten's imperialist push is uncertain, potentially vastly overblown and possibly, in the end, much ado about nothing. But it is safe to assume that we wouldn't be reading Nebraska's top brass so insistent on keeping its options open, or Missouri's head coach describing his conference's uneven television plan as "staggering" and "a problem" five years ago.
i don't know how credible all of that is, but i think expanding to 16 teams is way too unwieldy and would wreck havoc on scheduling. 24 just seems absurd and more or less pointless.
another thing is that this has to be approved by the presidents, and i'm wondering why no one seems to have tried to get their opinions on this (unless they already have and just gotten back a stream of "no comment"s)
Where there is smoke there is fire. Notre Dame is peeing down their leg at this moment. You can almost bank on it - Missouri, Nebraska, Pitt, Syracuse, Rutguers. The Big 16. What will Texs and ND do now?
the lastest rumors (and i stress "rumors" because they are exactly that) is that the big east is using ND as a bargaining chip to the Big Ten in the hopes that they won't want to poach anyone else if they get their big fish.
i don't know, really. the 16 team rumors are persistent enough for me to consider them credible but i think that'd be a pretty bad idea. ND, Nebraska, and Pitt are the only teams i think would work on any real level (historically and academically, not in terms of profits) and pretty much the only ones I would get excited about.
as usual, ND could've saved everyone a lot of grief by getting their head out of their asses ten or fifteen years ago buuuuttt they are ND
im from cincy, and i could give a shit what freekbass does.
the connection is probably that there are a ton of ND fans around the world who will know who he is now.
I think ppl have to get historical arguments out of the picture, that will only be a mild consideration at best.
Second, the NCAA will have their two sense to say about this, especially if it gets to 16 (or God help us, 24), because then we are talking about a whole mess of realignments. We SHOULD just say ok, there will be 8 conferences, championship games in every one. Conference champs go to an 8 team playoff, all sponsered and held in bowls. That way you have set conference bowl games for the first round at least. We'd get a playoff, a conference championship game, a true NC.
The only problem with that is it eliminates the need for the polls entirely. No polls means the media is pissed because now ESPN/ABC/Disney can't market the top ten match-ups each week. And well it might be a small problem that the conferences would be pretty big, but I solve that by demoting some teams to other divisions. Make divisions based on talent instead of purely on school size. If Mt. Union, Grand Valley State and Wofford can compete with the bottom of the big boys, let em, I say.
16 teams would be like a college football AFC. I'll be content as long as Michigan and Ohio State still play every year, and we get a championship game.
[...] elevenwarriors.com Catching Up With Jeff Heuerman........................... [...]
Divisions are not based on school size at all. The difference in divisions is the amount of athletic scholarships they offer. For instance, Mt. Union (DIII) does not offer athletic scholarships (we all know they get around this somehow, but for arguments sake). I'm not sure how many scholarships makes teams DII or FCS. For instance, Davidson is DI in basketball but only has an enrollment of like 5,000 students I believe. There are DIII schools that have enrollment figures close to that.
I lied. Davidson actually only enrolls 1,667 students. My alma mater, Baldwin-Wallace, is DIII and has an enrollment of 3,302.
While divisions are not based on school size, they are based in part by attendance for football games, which needs to be more than 15k every other year to be FBS. FBS gets 85 schollies and FCS gets 63.
Thanks Pam. Had no idea about the attendance issue.