re: Jerrard Randall - How did I not see this guys highlights?

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Posted by Ditolla
Best QB at LSU right now.

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you don't know that..

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lets calm down

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i still think he should be redshirted.. let magee take the option snaps, and let shep do it when he's eligible again

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Randall told me he chose the Ducks because “I like the style of offense and Chip Kelly. He sounds like he is a real coach with his players. I just wanted to go to Oregon, and I wanted to get away from Florida. Real far away.”

Tyrrell will be in his third season at Chaminade this fall. A former tight end who played for Jim Tressel at Youngstown State and coached there for four years, Tyrell said he “left college coaching to get into helping kids.”

He is doing it at a school with 600 students, with “100 percent graduation rate and 100 percent of the kids going on to college,” the coach said.

Randall, Tyrrell said, “has thrived, he really has. He has distanced himself from anything and anybody he has hung out with in the past. His grades have gone up tremendously, from a 2.0 to 2.6 in the year and a half he has been with us. His mom has done an unbelievable job at home to keep him out of trouble. The kid hasn’t been in any trouble.

“The kid has his head on straight now — not that he didn’t before,” Tyrrell said. “He just had a lot of outside influences pushing him toward the wrong thing. At Chaminade, he has fit in with a lot of good kids, kids who thrive.”

Tyrrell said Randall was voted by the school’s teachers to be one of 40 seniors to serve as “house leaders” for the 2010-11 academic year.

“That’s a huge thing for a kid coming from an inner-city atmosphere,” the coach said. “It shows where he has come from and where he’s going.”

Tyrrell said members of his coaching staff talk about Randall’s story.

“When he is — knock on wood — in the NFL some day, and ESPN is doing one of those stories about a kid from a not-great neighborhood who makes a life change and hits it big, it’ll be Jerrard,” Tyrrell said. “He’ll be one of those guys who goes into the grade schools and lets kids know you can get out of bad living situations. He has left all of that behind. He is planning to start a new life away from south Florida. If you only knew where he was from ...”

Tyrrell said he gives a lot of credit to Randall’s mother, “who has busted her butt to get her kid to our school. I’ve never met a mother like her. She’s a mom who loves him, who looks out for him.”

Randall passed for 1,700 yards and 14 touchdowns and rushed for 1,074 yards and 18 scores as a junior. Because of his athletic ability, scouts have typecast him as a player who will eventually wind up as a receiver or defensive back.

“But he’s a quarterback, and he works at it,” Tyrrell said. “He is one of those kids who loves watching (video). He has studied the quarterback position more than most kids. Your typical kid likes to go out there and play seven-on-seven. He’d rather get on the board and go over coverages.

“For us, he has been a pro-style quarterback in a spread offense. We kind of unleashed him in the playoffs last year, but he is really a pocket passer who happens to run the 40 in 4.4 and has a 40-inch vertical. He’s a smart kid who doesn’t make a lot of bad decisions. In the regular season, he had only three interceptions.”

Duck coaches can’t comment on recruits. Sources say they weren’t aware of Randall’s Myspace page until Monday night, and were told it was posted when the youngster was in eighth grade, citing the references to his size as evidence.

Perhaps. But the photo was current, and the age atop the page was listed as 18.

At some point, Randall posted the information, which is not a good reflection on him even at this point in his life.

By 9 p.m. Monday, Randall’s MySpace page had basically been taken down. Funny how fast things like that can happen with the proper motivation.

The social media — Myspace, Facebook, Twitter et al. — is a growing problem for college coaches and for their athletes, who must live with the consequences.

“It’s a big thing,” Kelly told me Monday night. “We try to monitor it and find out where everybody sits and where they’re coming from.”

Randall is going from a very bad spot in life to, according to his coach, a very good one. Chalk this one up as a learning experience for the player who could be the Ducks’ quarterback of the future.

“I tell people all the time, I’m never going to coach a kid like him again in my life,” Tyrrell said. “One day we’ll be saying it was unbelievable we got to have him in our program.”

LINK

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