Willie Parker Pt 2
Ask, and thou shalt receive. Here's a timely story from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review with thoughts from Parker as well as UNC running backs coach Andre' Powell on what went wrong for the Steelers tailback at Chapel Hill.
An excerpt:
Bunting wanted Parker to gain weight and become more of a power back. Parker, who was 200 pounds at the time, wanted nothing to do with Bunting's plan.
"He said to me, 'If Willie ain't going to do it, it's my way or Willie's going to hit the highway,' " Parker said of a conversation he had with Bunting.
And from Powell:
"In retrospect, we probably could have done some things differently with Willie," Powell said Monday. "But we were trying to develop our own style. When we got there, North Carolina was a finesse team, but we were bound and determined to be a (physical) running team. We wanted things done a certain way. We have more 1,000-yard rushers in our history than any other program. We hadn't had one since 1997. We wanted to get back to that."
Parker, though, never bought into the new staff's power-ball philosophy.
Comments (1)
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This is misleading. Parker wasn't productive in college, at any size, period. And he wasn't productive largely because he wouldn't run where he was supposed to run. The coaching staff told him over and over to run between the tackles, but he kept running to the outside or wherever else he improvised. Then he got to the Steelers and Jerome Bettis told him to run between the tackles, and what do you know, it works... Parker is talented but somewhat one-dimensional and the one dimension is speed. His yards-per-carry is higher partly because of some long breakaway runs, and it remains to be seen whether his stats will stay as high now that teams know to seal up the long runs. (Seattle didn't, for whatever reason, but it was a clear defensive mistake.)
If Parker had been super-productive as-is, running the exact same way he'd run out of high school, he would have gotten more PT (under both Torbush and Bunting). Not rocket science. But because of the way it turned out, it makes for a great Cinderella story.
This UNC staff and many prior ones have done a great job with a lot of running backs. Parker slipped through the cracks (and he is partly to blame) but luckily he popped back up again.
Posted on February 11, 2006 3:32 AM