Featuring Photos by Jim Davidson with text by John Porentas.
Reserve Your Copy of Glory Years Now!
Football
OSU's Red-headed Stepchild Quarterback is the Apple of His Coaches Eye
By John Porentas
Joe Bauserman
Photo by Jim DavidsonJoe Bauserman's hair is somewhere between blond and red. His beard is about the same. When it comes to public perception however, Joe Bauserman is definitely OSU's red-headed stepchild quarterback.
That was abundantly clear on media day this week. If you wanted to talk to Joe Bauserman you just walked up and talked to him. There was no crowd around him, no TV cameras to be careful not to get in front of, no crush of reporters.
It was a bit of a different story for the other two scholarship quarterbacks on the OSU roster. Todd Boeckman is the incumbent returning starter. Everybody wanted to talk to Todd. Terrell Pryor is like a magnet attracting cast iron reporters. They are drawn to him and stick to him like there is some sort of invisible force holding them there. Terrell got plenty of attention on media day too.
So while Todd and Terrell were being swamped, Joe kind of stood off in the background, not that that wasn't to be expected. What might be a little unexpected is Bauserman's reaction. It just didn't matter to him.
"I don't look into it too much," said Bauserman. "I'm a simple guy. The media is the media, you do what you do. I just try and sit back and do what I can do."
Photo by Jim Davidson.
Joe Bauserman? Not so much.
Photo by Jim DavidsonWhatever Bauserman lacks in in public notoriety he has made up for by making an impression on the one guy that matters, OSU Head Coach Jim Tressel. Tressel's eyes light up when he talks about Bauserman because public fanfare or not, Tressel likes what he sees in the red/blond-head originally from Virginia who played most of his high school football in Florida.
"To me the thing that Joe Bauserman has impacted on our team and our team understands is that he loves to compete. Joe Bauserman took the team basketball tournament championship single-handedly. The guys were looking around and here's this six foot, one and a half inch guy fighting it in to these 295 pounders and going up and blocking shots," Tressel said recently.
Bauserman was offered a scholarship by the Buckeyes when he came out of high school four years ago but elected to try his hand at professional baseball first. After three years as a pitcher in the minors he decided to give up baseball and come back to Columbus to give football a try. The OSU coaching staff honored their scholarship offer and Bauserman joined the Buckeyes last year and redshirted while he tried to knock off his football rust, a process that he seems to be completing successfully.
"You see him shaking the rust off technique-wise for a year," said Tressel.
"This spring I was a little disappointed at the beginning but all of a sudden about midway through things started clicking as to why he's doing what he's doing. Add his competitiveness to it, I would like to think that in Joe's case his improvement from April to August will be significant," Tressel said.
Bauserman was impressive in the spring game. He moved the football team when the other backups, Antonio Henton and Robby Schoenhoft, could not. His performance impressed Tressel and has also impressed the rest of his teammates.
"He went out and had a good spring, and the guys were like 'Whoa!' Really, at the end of the spring he was number two," said Tressel.
That fact at least in part helped prompt the transfer of both those other players. Tressel is obviously pleased with Bauserman's on field success. He also isn't at all surprised at Bauserman's reaction to the lack of attention he might be getting. As a matter of fact, while in Chicago at the Big Ten Media meetings Tressel successfully predicted Bauserman's reaction.
"He will not be affected one bit, if we were at our media day now and there are 60 people around Todd and 47 around Terrell and two around him, that won't phase him because of his maturity level," Tressel correctly said in Chicago.
Bauserman's age and experience have wizened him as to what's important and given him a mature level of confidence that he doesn't flaunt but is recognized by his coach and teammates. Those qualities, combined with his maniacal competitiveness and some bona fide talent, have left his head coach optimistic about what he can bring to the Buckeyes as a quarterback. In Chicago a reported asked Tressel if Terrell Pryor was going to give him a certain comfort level about his depth at quarterback. In his answer Tressel made sure that Bauserman was included in the conversation about quarterbacks.
"I think he (Terrell Pryor) and Joe Bauserman are going to give us a little more depth than we've had at quarterback the last couple of years," said Tressel.
Bauserman's recruitment process eerily mirrors his present status as a little-known talent that has caught his coaches eye. It was almost the same situation coming out of high school.
"He came to our summer camp because he had an aunt that lived in Columbus. That's the only reason, because he had a place to stay," recollected Tressel.
"We were like 'Whoa, this guy is good.'"
Now that he has shaken off his football rust Tressel is having that same reaction again with Bauserman, and he just loves his competitiveness and confidence.
"He's not going to sit there and say 'No one is going to be talking about me at the end of the year. I'll show everybody that I'm going to help this team as well,'" said Tressel.
"He's ridden the buses to the minor league baseball fields and slept in motels with no air conditioning and cockroaches the size of rats running around. His competitiveness, his confidence, I think he has a very quick release, that's why we recruited him back the year after we recruited Todd."
The public may may not be showering Bauserman with adoration and the media may not be giving him much hype, but after sleeping in those hotels with no air conditioning and coping with the cockroaches the size of rats Bauserman feels like he has stepped into a different world.
"I miss the game (of baseball), but the minor league life, not so much," he said.
"There's more love here. Everybody loves you. You're on the football team and its great."
Words spoken by a man who has learned to appreciate what he has.
Return to the-OZone Front Page
(c) 2008 The O-Zone, O-Zone
Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, rebroadcast,rewritten, or redistributed.