NFL Draft Skull Session: Joey Bosa's Social Media Exile, Interviewing with Urban Meyer, and Buckeye Draftees Play 60

By D.J. Byrnes on April 28, 2016 at 4:59 am
Joey Bosa is throwing it back for the April 28th 2016 Skull Session
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Welcome to the 2016 NFL Draft Session, where unlike Michigan, we don't need Photoshop to envision our favorite players shaking hands with Roger Goodell. Tonight, we'll see 30 men realize their dreams while one condemned soul deals with the ramifications of playing for the Cleveland Browns. (Beer we go, Brownies, beer we go!)

Joey Bosa, Ezekiel Elliott, Taylor Decker, Darron Lee, and Eli Apple are in Chicago, but guys like Vonn Bell or Mike Thomas (or maybe even Braxton Miller) could see their names called as well.

Let the commercial commence... at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN and NFL Network.

P.S. — If the Browns draft Connor Cook, tomorrow's Skull Session will wash ashore early Friday morning carrying my bloated corpse. Please bury me with both my Tim Couch jerseys.

 JOEY BOSA QUITS SOCIAL MEDIA. Social media connects athletes to fans like never before, but it also means an emotionally-stunted man with an egg avatar can abuse you without consequence. (No, social media is... like, cool and good, bro, I swear...)

Joey Bosa is over social media, though. Both his Twitter (192K followers) and Instagram (183K) profiles remain active, but Bosa deleted all his tweets and hasn't posted to Instagram in 11 weeks.

NFL teams asked about his social media hiatus, but it seems they were more interested in his mafioso grandfather, an (alleged!) Al Capone lieutenant nicknamed "Joey Bats."

From rollingstone.com:

We hear so much about the kinds of questions players get asked at the Combine – what was the weirdest thing an NFL team asked you?
It's actually been pretty predictable and straightforward. I guess when teams ask me about my great-grandfather, that doesn't really make much sense to me. But mostly, it's been talking to head coaches and D-Line coaches, which is awesome. I could sit down and talk about football for hours.

[...]

There was an incident when you lashed out at your critics on Twitter – do you regret that?
It was dumb. I was a little stressed at the time, and now I'm off Twitter and Instagram. It's nothing but trouble and a bunch of people who want to see you fail, so they mess with you on social media. A few teams asked me about it and I told them it was stupid and I deleted it, so now I'm off Twitter. With MetRx and all that, I'll be tweeting every once in a while, but overall, it's a really negative thing – there's no positive to it whatsoever.

Bosa is referring to a February incident that left him telling Twitter trolls he'd be retired at 35 while they were "slaving away" to pay back student loan debt. Though Bosa probably wasn't far from the mark either way, he left with mud on his hands.

My advice to athletes? Turn your profiles over to professionals and let them monetize it. Get paid and avoid egg-people. That's called a troll finisher.

 D.J. DURKIN HAS SEEN HEAVEN AND HELL. Former Michigan DC and current Maryland coach D.J. Durkin is unique among Big Ten head coaches in that he's worked under both Urban Meyer and Jim Harbaugh. 

He talked about both men in an extended interview with campusrush.com, but he started with a tale about Bowling Green coach Urban Meyer hiring him as a graduate assistant:

The first time I went in there, he ripped me up and down for 30 minutes. He tried to talk me out of it, made sure I wanted to do it. So then he was like, "Well, you need to think about this. Come back and see me in two days."

So I came back and he's sitting behind his desk and he looked away from me when I walked in. The secretary told him I was here, so he looked when I walked in, but then never looked again. He was looking at his computer, doing something and was talking to me. "Are you sure?" "Yeah, coach, I'm sure."

Then he suddenly [jumped up] and got this far from me. "ARE YOU SURE?" I didn't even know the guy at the time. I was like, "Uhhhh, yeah, O.K." I walked out of his office like, What the heck did I just do?

Even back then it seems everything was a test with Urban Meyer. He wasn't tearing down Durkin to be an asshole, he was doing it to see if how he'd react because who goes into an interview expecting to get shit-talked?

That's awesome.

As for Harbaugh, Durkin says Michigan's coach is smart man who does everything for a reason but "he loves chaos." He had a helluva ready too:

Durkin: It was a random day in the office. We were meeting, talking about something, and he was dribbling a basketball. We were talking about something—recruiting or something—and the conversation somehow got to, "Hey, let's go out and play."

So we went to play one-on-one. First to seven. Great. So we're playing. I went up for a layup or something, he fouled—I mean, hacked me. And I didn't call it. I didn't expect him to call foul. No, we're good. Check up.

Then it became, O.K., if that's not a foul, there are no fouls. So the game went on for—the reason it became epic—it was over an hour-long game. To seven. And people are up there watching. No one wanted to lose, and no one would call a foul. So it was, if the guy got a step on you, chuck him in the back, lose the ball. Nope, no foul. Good, your ball. So it went on. It was well over an hour. A game to seven.

I take it Durkin didn't win because he didn't mention who was the first to seven. Still, fair play to Harbaugh for bringing prison rules to the court.

 BUCKS GIVE BACK. Ohio State's entire draft contingent stopped by the NFL Play 60 event in Chicago yesterday.

It gave us visuals like Joey Bosa, hipster QB:

 

Ezekiel Elliott running while carrying a small child, which actually might be a fair handicap for him at the next level: 

 

Darron Lee doing the #RunningManChallenge: 

 

Taylor Decker picking off Jared Goff (have fun, Rams fans!): 

 

Goff posing with small children and the man that will haunt his dreams: 

 

The NFL's account billed this as Eli Apple teaching proper technique, but PFT Commenter disagreed with a #strong #take. 

My take? All those guys were awesome in the Scarlet and Gray.

 SPENCE CHAIN FORWARDING DRUG TEST RESULTS. In another universe, perhaps where Ohio State is two-time defending national champs, Noah Spence, former Ohio State DE, frolicked with his teammates and children at yesterday's event.

In this one, however, he's forwarding a year's worth of drug tests to NFL teams.

From espn.com:

Eastern Kentucky LB Noah Spence, whom the Big Ten banned in November 2014 after a few positive drug tests at Ohio State, this week sent each of the 32 NFL teams the past 20 drug tests he has taken since May, per league sources.

Spence is attempting to prove to NFL teams that he has turned around his life since his troubles at Ohio State, and he wanted them to see all the clean test results.

Spence had Eastern Kentucky conduct five drug tests from May through December, then an independent drug-testing company conduct 15 more each week from January until this week. All of the results were sent via FedEx to all NFL teams this week to review before Thursday night's draft.

I don't think any of these teams give a shit about past tests unless he popped for meth. They're worried the tests that happen after they hand him a winning lottery ticket.

Smart people learn from the mistakes of others, so hopefully Spence got good, hard look at Josh Gordon as they crossed paths with Spence entering and Gordon exiting.

 OHIO STATE LOVED TO BULLY. Yesterday I shared an Ohio State Archives picture from 1932 featuring upperclassmen forcing freshmen to sweep the Oval walkway. 

Apparently freshmen were nothing but fodder for upperclassmen going all the way back to at least 1926:

The wild thing? This is the Bucket & Dipper we know today, from bucketanddipper.org:

Bucket & Dipper (B&D), the second oldest honorary on campus (and in our opinion, the coolest and most fun as well), recognizes outstanding members of the junior class based on the three pillars of the honorary system: scholarship, leadership, and service. Originally an all male honorary, B&D is currently a group of thirty outstanding male and female undergraduates. The organization has a long history of giving back to Ohio State and developing some of the best student leaders on campus. 

Bucket & Dipper is active in many areas throughout the university. B&D is a member of the Association of Ohio State Class Honoraries (AOSCH), the self-governing body of the class honorary community at Ohio State. The most notable event, however, is the Illibuck pass, a football tradition dating back to 1925. In addition, B&D members regularly perform community service around the Columbus area. Service projects for the 108th Class will be discussed and executed in the following Autumn 2015 term. Its members also meet often for social events and participate in activities with the other honoraries.

Time and change, I suppose.

 THOSE WMDs. John Daly on turning 50... Ultra high definition view of Earth... Ride along with the cow police... How a disabled veteran conquered Mt. Kilimanjaro... RoboCup China looks lit.

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Prognosticating: Indiana

Dry Goods Contest

Across The Field: Indiana Beat Writer Zach Osterman Says This Might Be the Hoosiers’ Most Important Regular Season Game Ever and QB Kurtis Rourke Has Played Well Under Pressure

Kurtis Rourke
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