By: Joe Juliano (Philly.com) -

The question stopped Ohio State coach Jim Tressel in his tracks for a few seconds.

“Have you been asked more questions about Terrelle Pryor than anyone you’ve ever coached?” someone asked on this week’s Big Ten coaches’ conference call of Tressel, in his 24th season as a college head coach.

After acknowledging that interest in an offensive lineman isn’t as great as with a quarterback, Tressel said Pryor, one of the nation’s top high school QBs as a senior at Jeannette (Pa.) High, “is a fun guy to ask questions about.”

“He got thrust into the situation early” as a freshman, the coach said. “He was on a good football team and had to take over for a captain, which is difficult. He got thrown into the fire from an X-and-O standpoint. Then he had to retool this year with a whole new group of people around him. He’s done a good job.”

Still, no one in college football has been more analyzed and criticized, scrutinized and chastised, than Pryor. The 6-foot-6, 235-pound sophomore is a gifted athlete - he is the team’s leading rusher with 554 yards - but one who struggles at times at his position, particularly in the passing game.

Pryor has completed only 54.6 percent of his passes and has thrown nine interceptions. Nine other conference quarterbacks have a better completion percentage. Four other conference quarterbacks have thrown less interceptions, five of them more.

The criticism of Pryor reached a crescendo in Columbus three weeks ago after he turned the ball over four times (two interceptions, two fumbles) in an upset loss at Purdue. He has bounced back since then, and Tressel attributes that to hard work, including film study and practice habits.

Now Pryor again must break out the ear plugs tomorrow for his first trip to Beaver Stadium since he declined Penn State’s scholarship offer because Happy Valley was “too country.”

The 108,000-plus in attendance will let Pryor know that they remember the snub. But they won’t be wearing T-shirts emblazoned “Terrelle Cryer,” a reference to cameras finding Pryor on the bench with tears in his eyes late in the Nittany Lions’ 13-6 win last year at Columbus, because they were pulled off the market yesterday.

Pryor, who wasn’t made available for telephone interviews this week, has said he feels Lions fans would “tear me up . . . giving me a lot of stuff, maybe throwing stuff, saying a lot of things. But I won’t be hearing any of it.”

Sophomore wideout DeVier Posey, the Buckeyes’ leading receiver, said Pryor will be fine, and that his teammates have his back.

“That’s our guy, we love him,” Posey said. “We know he’s been through a lot but for him, it’s more about trying to work on things, getting better. We try not to pay attention [to the critics]. The only thing that matters is what happens Saturday.”

Both Posey and Tressel said no one cares more about the team and his teammates than Pryor.

“He cares about everything that happens,” Posey said. “It really bothers him to not have things go great. As the quarterback, he doesn’t settle for mediocrity. He wants to be great and that reflects on the team.”

Said Tressel, “He’s one of the most compassionate, caring people I’ve ever been around. He really doesn’t like to disappoint people. So when that does happen, for whatever reason, he really feels bad about it and we work very hard on getting ready for the next play or the next day.”

Pryor may have disappointed Nittany Nation in his college choice, but Penn State coach Joe Paterno said he didn’t think he had a decent chance of landing him.

“I think he felt from the beginning that maybe Ohio State was a better place for him,” he said.

Paterno said he got to speak with Pryor at length at a dinner hosted by Pryor’s high school coach and was “very, very impressed.”

“He had tremendous poise,” Paterno said. “For all the attention he was getting, he handled it very, very well. It didn’t take much of a brain to realize how good an athlete he was if you watched him. He was a great basketball player and a great guy on the football field - a dominant, dominant player.”

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