Pryor turns down offer by CFL

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

The next step may be the most important one for former Ohio State quarterback Terrelle Pryor.

Done with college football and through with talking to the NCAA, now he’ll have to convince NFL teams he can fully realize the potential that he has shown since he was a high school quarterback in Pennsylvania.

Pryor attorney Larry James said Thursday that the QB turned down a chance to play in the Canadian Football League and is now focusing his energies on being selected by an NFL team later this summer.

“He’s definitely looking at the supplemental draft,” James said.

Pryor, considered the nation’s No. 1 quarterback recruit when he signed with Ohio State in 2008, had already been suspended for the first five games of the 2011 season for trading autographs and memorabilia for cash and discounted tattoos. The NCAA also is looking into the cars Pryor has owned or was loaned while at Ohio State. Investigators left campus last week, Ohio State President Gordon Gee says, but the probe will continue ahead of an Aug. 12 meeting between OSU officials and the NCAA’s committee on infractions.

The NCAA will get no more answers from Pryor.

James said Thursday that, since Pryor is no longer a student, he felt no compunction to speak with investigators anymore.

“They’re not going to give him or any other student-athlete any due process rights to speak of, so he’s moved on,” James said.

The Saskatchewan Roughriders, who held Pryor’s Canadian Football League negotiating rights, made a play for him Wednesday night.