Brandon Weeden — the best quarterback in OSU football history, and I will hear no other argument to the contrary! — made an appearance this week on OSU’s “Pokes Pod” to talk about his back story, his baseball beginnings and Bedlam football.
The interview was great — you can check that here — so I pulled a few of the highlights from the interview below centered mainly about his thoughts from 2011 Bedlam and the special Big 12 title-winning season.
On coming back to school and picking OSU: I wanted to be close. I wanted to be in the Big 12. Robert Allen called me, it was within a short amount of time of me being home after spring training, and he was like ‘Hey, I hear you have aspirations of playing college football.’ I said ‘absolutely.’ Probably within a week or so I was up here, I met with Larry Fedora. I knew right away. . . I reached out to OU, at the time I think they had like six quarterbacks, they had Bradford, I thought it probably wasn’t the best thing for me if I wanted to play. I was the fourth guy [at OSU].”
On the process of growing at OSU: “Zac and Bobby were athletic guys. Could do some zone read stuff. The system we ran was completely different. The best year for me football wise was my redshirt freshman year and my freshman year. The scout team days. Could throw as many interceptions as I needed to. Could work on timing and technique. It took time to understand coverages. I was able to knock the rust off with no pressure. The first few years my head was spinning but I knew if I was going to be the starter we’d have to change what we were doing.”
Dana Holgorsen enters the picture and the 2011 mindset: We knew we left some meat on the bone after the 2010 season. I really think it got us where we needed to go with the guys we had in place. I had this feeling in my gut that there was so much meat left on the bone. I thought if we could keep Blackmon, and that was the deal, I was worried about Blackmon leaving, I thought it had the potential to be a special season in 2011. I knew what we had. There was a feel around here that you can’t put into words.”
Weeden on 2011 Bedlam: I remember thinking the only chance we had to get to where we wanted to go was to beat OU and to beat them the way we did. I remember guys were pissed [going into Bedlam]. That week of practice ahead of OU was different. Our guys up front, they singlehandedly won us that OU game. Those guys took it personal. That attitude they brought, especially in practice, pads were popping a little bit louder, guys coming off the ball faster. They looked fresh. They played well. I remember during the game, Tracy Moore came to the sideline, we ran outside zone, he blocked his guy, pancaked him, and the guy got up and said ‘come on man, we’re just trying to get out of here.’ We were the more physical team. We played with a chip on our shoulder. We ran the football.”
Read this original article at Pistols Firing Blog.