STILLWATER, Okla. (AP) -Standing just in front of his All-American wide receiver, Oklahoma State offensive coordinator Gunter Brewer tried to quantify the size of Dez Bryant’s hands.
After a few moments, Brewer found the simplest way was to press his right palm against Bryant’s left and show the receiver had more than a knuckle to spare on his extended digits.
“I don’t know what it was,” Brewer said. “Big? Extra large? Double-X?”
The combination of arguably the nation’s top receiver with playmakers Zac Robinson at quarterback and Kendall Hunter at tailback gives Oklahoma State one of the most potent offenses in the country and has the Cowboys on unfamiliar terrain. For the first time in school history, the ninth-ranked Pokes find themselves in the preseason top 10.
oring days of the late 1980s.
Those days have returned with last year’s 40.8-point scoring averaged, the ninth-highest in the country, and a third straight bowl trip – albeit a 42-31 Holiday Bowl loss to Oregon that Bryant hobbled through with a knee that needed surgery weeks later.
“We’re not where we want to be, as far as just getting to a bowl game,” said Bryant, who’s entering his junior season and didn’t have the chance to jump to the NFL like fellow Biletnikoff Award finalists Michael Crabtree and Jeremy Maclin.
“We don’t just want to be at any bowl game. We want to be in a BCS bowl game,” he said. “So, we feel like we’re still fighting to get to that point.”
Bryant bought in long ago to the Cowboys’ potential. When his dreams of going to LSU were dashed, he settled on a comfortable consolation prize in Stillwater – but not until after he’d asked Brewer an important question.
Sitting at his east Texas home, Bryant asked point-blank: “Can we win a national championship?” And Brewer, at the time the Cowboys’ receivers coach, said yes, if he could get enough of the right kind of players.
“I believed them,” Bryant said. “Even though I was hearing kind of the same things (at other schools), just I believed them – just how they was, how their personality was.”
et to the top of their own division. And the Longhorns and Sooners are lined up right behind Florida at Nos. 2 and 3 in the preseason Top 25.
But life is full of surprises, and Bryant knows that.
He was one of the smaller kids in his fifth-grade class, and soaking in highlights of Minnesota Vikings stars Randy Moss and Cris Carter, when he asked his mom to sign him up for a Pop Warner football league.
“I used to imitate those things when I was younger and I felt like if they can do it, I can go out and do it,” Bryant said. “And this is before I even had a football in my hands.”
Once he got the pigskin, there was no stopping him.
“I was doing some moves I didn’t know I had. From then on, everything just worked out,” Bryant said.
Over time, Bryant’s natural talents started showing up. In the sixth grade, he discovered he was already able to palm a basketball and he dunked for the first time the summer after. As he was making the transition from Lufkin Middle to Lufkin High, his growth spurt finally hit.
Instead of a mere 5-foot-7 – “All the girls were taller than me,” he recalls – Bryant headed to ninth grade at nearly 6 feet tall.
on which he catches a screen pass inside the 10-yard line, sidesteps a couple defenders, stiff-arms another at midfield and zooms the rest of the way for a score.
Bryant, too, can make defenders miss after the catch, although he’s just as likely to out-jump them for a lob in the end zone. Brewer, who once saw Moss get quadruple-teamed – he thinks at least one player missed his assignment – admits there are some similarities between his two prominent pupils.
“Now, Randy has obviously has proved it in the NFL and that’s yet to be seen, and it’s hard to judge,” Brewer said. “But what’s he’s done in college and what the other guy’s been able to do in college, I think he brings the same thing to the game: A lot of electricity and a lot of big-time playmaking.”
Add A Comment