Aug. 28, 2008
(9:27 a.m.): Here’s one downside of in-city recruiting, one byproduct of signing the best players in your area to continue performing in the place where his friends and family can watch him any time they want.
If the guys you grew up with – the buddies you’ve known for a lifetime – take the wrong path, there’s a chance you’ll go along for the ride. It could be mindless fun. It also could be illegal and could be the moment that destroys your college – and a potentially professional – career.
Simply put: you can’t get away from the people you’ve cared about your entire life. And that’s what senior defensive tackle Terrill Byrd, by his own admission, has struggled with during his UC career.
Byrd will miss the first game of the season tonight as a punishment for an offseason citation and a missed court date. He missed the first game of last season for breaking team rules.
It wasn’t a big deal on the scoreboard. The Bearcats smashed Southeast Missouri State in 2007, and they probably will do the same against the Colonels this year. But the suspensions have had a big impact on Byrd himself.
He knows he has to be perfect for the rest of his UC career.
“I think I’ve grown a lot since the last incident,” Byrd said recently after practice. “I’ve been trying to keep my mind straight on what I have to do – on the field and off the field. Just trying to keep a straight head. I had to change who I hang around with in order to do the right things. I think I wasn’t hanging around the right people who weren’t on the same page I was. I learned from that. I had to make a change, and I think it was for the good.”
Can’t be easy, though. These are friends with whom the Colerain High School product spent his biggest triumphs and his darkest moments. They’ve been there for each other. No longer.
Byrd had to get away from the people he knows best.
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“It was real tough,” Byrd said. “Most of my friends that I hang around with, I grew up with since I was 10 or 11 years old. It’s real hard to tell a friend that, ‘I have to go do this’ or ‘I can’t hang out with you’ or ‘Why are you doing that?’ That comes with maturity – saying no to somebody you care about a lot. I’m on the right path, doing what I have to do this year to succeed and help this team win a Big East championship.”
Make no mistake, if UC has designs on winning the conference title and playing in a BCS bowl this season, it’ll need Byrd’s contributions. He was such a big part of last year’s 10-3 squad, earning All America status while making a team-high 17 tackles for a loss and contributing eight sacks.
He’s exciting. He’s fun to watch. He’s struggled to mature.
“He has to be, for us, perfect,” coach Brian Kelly said. “He has been. He has done all the things we’ve asked him to do since he made that poor decision. We’re hoping he continues to do the right things. He has no room for error. A lot of that is simply being able to say no.”
Defensive backs coach Kerry Coombs knows all about it. He coached Byrd at Colerain, and he watched an undersized Byrd – who’s listed generously at 6-foot-1 but probably is closer to 5-10 – who wasn’t heavily recruited transform himself into one of the best defensive tackles in the country.
He’s seen Byrd improve himself since he was cited for marijuana possession last March, collecting, according to Coombs, a 4.0 grade point average during summer school. Coombs believes Byrd will play in the NFL. He believes Byrd is a better person.
“I’m very proud of him as a young man,” Coombs said. “Kids make mistakes, and he’s made his share of them. But he’s never turned and run from any of them. He takes his punishment without blame. We’re really glad to see, going into his senior season, that he’s matured into a person we could be proud of.”
A person who can say no to the people he loves. A person who took his punishment without complaint and continues to mature. A person who is just doing the best he can.
