| 17 February 2010
We are seeing new offers every day. The Buckeyes have made two more offers in the last 48 hours.
Center Brian Bobek was offered after visiting this past weekend. He is a rising star after leading the national junior combine in bench press reps and in vertical jump. That shows a strong explosive player. His family has connections to Iowa, both parents being grads, but I have some real insight into this one. I have reason to believe the Buckeyes are going to be hard to beat on this one. I think we see a verbal sooner rather than later. He is an impressive drive blocker on film. Stays low, fires out and keeps his feet. Plays to the whistle. His offer list is going to cause some questions to arise. I don't know if there is anyone who has been more critical of Bollman than me but I have to give him credit for being really good at finding and developing centers.
The other offer caught me off guard. Athlete Derjuan Gambrell from Toledo Rogers is a relative unknown. I had never heard of him until I learned of the offer. I like what I see on film. He is a classic free safety. He has a safety body. He is long and lean at 6-2 and 180 with very long arms. I call him an athlete but the offer is as a safety. He is so impressive on the ball and after the catch that I could see him being given a shot at receiver. I do not have him in my top five defensive backs right now but this is not a reach. He is a nice player. I don't expect him to wait too long to verbal either.
I am surprised to see that Nick Vannett is more open than I thought he was on first blush. He is talking about other schools. I have been trying to tell fans that we would not use one of the elite tight ends in a way that is going to draw one of them here. It is not what we do in our offense anymore than Dave is part of the Florida offense. It is not what they do. We don't feature the tight end. Losing a player like Vannett would be very disturbing. He is not just another tight end that would be a lineman in another system, but he would not fall into the elite athletic tight end category. We need to nail down kids like this. It is not a matter of not getting an elite tight end prospect. It is a bigger deal than that. The talent level at tight end is really falling off, and I don't know what can be done about it. You can say we could throw to the tight end more. It is not that simple. Our passing offense is designed to go down the field to the wide receivers. Throwing to the tight end more changes the offense. We are going to give the tight end 25 catches or so every year. When you say throw to the tight end more that means making the tight end the primary on some plays. You need to keep in mind that means not throwing the ball to one of our wide outs. The staff needs to find a way to get this one done.
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