After winning the Sugar Bowl, Michael Thomas sat inside Ohio State’s locker room on a chair in front of his cubby trying to undress before a throng of reporters duly swarmed the up-and-coming wide receiver for postgame interviews.
Attention like this isn’t new, but Thomas appears more comfortable talking to strangers and cameras than he did at the beginning of a season that’ll come to an end in the National Championship Game against Oregon Monday night.
In that time, Thomas, a redshirt sophomore, has also emerged as Ohio State’s most-complete wide receiver. He leads the team with 50 catches (at least 17 more than any other member of the team) and his 746 yards and nine touchdowns are second to only senior Devin Smith, the team’s deep ball wide receiver extraordinaire.
Before that, head coach Urban Meyer called Thomas, who sat out last season after playing as a true freshman, “a mistake guy.”
“Every third play, he’d screw it up,” Meyer said earlier this year, “and that’s why last year he wasn’t ready to play and that was really hard for him last year.”
It was also difficult for him to watch his fellow wide receivers — a middling, underachieving group in 2013 — do little to help the Buckeyes in a postseason collapse that dashed their conference and national championship hopes. It made him so sick, in fact, that Thomas took to social media to blast his teammates, saying, “Is it throwing people under the bus? Or is it telling it how it is? You watch tv you see the same stuff... You just sugar coat it..”
A year later, a lot has changed, including Thomas, who said the outburst was "fuel to the fire."
"Our position group, we could have contributed more," he said. "So I felt like if I got my opportunity, I was going to do my job. I was going to get on the field and contribute."
It's why Thomas now spends Saturday afternoons and evenings living up to his Twitter handle, @cantguardmike, which is more of a statement than it is a suggestion lately.
Thomas is a quiet, confident workman for the fourth-ranked Buckeyes, but he makes the extraordinary look average. You’re not necessarily going to find him chasing a 75-yard bomb from Cardale Jones like Smith, but Thomas makes catches that have a simple elegance about them, whether it’s a seven-yard grab over the middle or a one-handed haul along the sideline or the kind he made against Alabama last week.The latter of the three made Sportscenter's top plays.
“It's up there, but I wouldn't consider it the best,” he said. “I wouldn't say any catch was my best catch. That's to be continued.”
But they’re the kind of plays that might make him a NFL player someday like his uncle, Keyshawn Johnson, a former Pro-Bowl wide receiver and first-overall draft pick in 1996.
“He was impressed with it,” Thomas said, before hesitating. His mind jumped back to Oregon,
“But that play won't win this game,” he said. “So I've got to make more plays."
