O’Brien sees Wilson’s future in baseball

O'Brien sees Wilson's future in baseball

North Carolina State coach Tom O'Brien believes his sophomore starting quarterback, Russell Wilson, prefers baseball over football. Moreover, O'Brien doubts Wilson will stick around for his senior season, instead opting to graduate and play professional baseball.

Wilson, a Collegiate School graduate and two-time Times-Dispatch player of the year, is entering his third year at State and his second as the Wolfpack's starting quarterback. Last season, he threw for 177.7 yards a game and had 17 touchdowns and one interception. He was named ACC rookie of the year and made first-team all-ACC.

This baseball season, he played in 27 of State's 56 games, starting 19 at second base. He missed the first 22 games because of a knee injury he suffered in the Papajohns.com Bowl. Wilson hit just .236 for State and .205 this summer for the Coastal Plain League's Gastonia Grizzlies.

He will be eligible for the Major League Baseball draft next spring, so this fall could be his last football season, depending on how he plays next baseball season.

As far as football is concerned, O'Brien said Wilson must continue to grow. "He's got a lot to improve upon," O'Brien said. "He would look for one [receiver] and then take off and run. He took one or two sacks or things in crucial situations last year instead of getting rid of the ball. That I think won't happen this year. All that's part of growing up and playing."

Clemson touting Spiller for Heisman

Running back C.J. Spiller is not shying away from Clemson's campaign to promote him as a Heisman Trophy candidate. Spiller appears on a life-sized (5-11) poster that the school is distributing to the media.

He said teammates already are giving him a hard time about the toothy grin he flashes on the poster. But they are surely happy to have a player like Spiller on their team. He needs 921 yards to break the ACC's career record for all-purpose yards, 5,828, set by North Carolina's Leon Johnson during 1993-96.

Spiller, a senior, said Clemson officials consulted with him before designing the poster, and he thought it would be a good idea. After all, he said he would have considered himself a Heisman candidate even without the campaign.

But he realizes Heismans aren't won on marketing alone. Just ask Oregon, which in 2001 put a "Joey Heisman" billboard in New York's Times Square to promote quarterback Joey Harrington, who ended up finishing fourth.

"It's just a campaign," Spiller said. "It doesn't mean anything until we start the season."

For now, Spiller saved a few posters for his mom and has one hanging in his apartment, in his 3-year-old daughter's room.

Bowden has formula for league's rise

The ACC is not viewed as a particularly strong football conference, certainly not when compared to the SEC, Big 12 or Pac-10. Florida State coach Bobby Bowden has an idea on what has to happen to change that.

Virginia Tech, Boston College and other teams need to continue to perform at high levels, Bowden said.

And Miami and Florida State need "to get back to where we were," Bowden said. "Miami and us have not been the elite teams we were the previous 20 years. We haven't been the team in the 2000s that we were in the 1990s.

"It's not that we've gotten that bad. It's that everybody has gotten better. It's tougher to get there [the top] now than it was when we first got into the conference." -- Darryl Slater and Paul Woody