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Austintown’s Price enjoying Sugar trip
NEW ORLEANS
Billy Price sat in a folding chair along the 5-yard line of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome turf in New Orleans Tuesday afternoon.
The redshirt freshman had a smile as wide as his 6-foot-4, 312-pound frame would allow. Price grew up in Austintown and never ventured too far outside the Youngstown suburb until he became a member of the Ohio State football team last fall.
New Orleans isn’t like many Big Ten campuses.
“You go from a small pond to a big ole’ ocean down here,” Price said with a laugh. “It’s cool. It’s a lot of fun down here. Just really a great opportunity.”
The Buckeyes play top-seeded Alabama in the Allstate Sugar Bowl on Thursday as part of the inaugural College Football Playoff. Price has started every game this year along the Buckeyes’ much-improved offensive line and is now about to play in the biggest game of his young career.
“This is pretty cool,” he said, gazing at the upper deck and arched roof of the Superdome. “I didn’t realize how big this place really is until you look up and you’re like ‘wow’.”
The 72,003-seat dome stadium will have a crowd the size of an Ohio State spring game on Thursday night, but the spotlight will be brighter than ever on the Buckeyes’ left guard. Price is one of four freshman starting for Ohio State against an experienced Alabama team.
If you ask his teammates, the former Associated Press Division I co-defensive player of the year from Austintown Fitch High School is right where they expected him to be.
It’s just how he got there that may surprise some.
“Billy’s always had the physical capabilities — that’s never been the question,” Buckeyes left tackle Taylor Decker said. “He’s, overall, the strongest guy on the team.
“He can run, he’s flexible, he can bend — I mean he’s a good athlete — but I just think the biggest thing for him was having confidence in himself and that’s huge out there.”
It’s not a particularly experienced group up front with one senior, two juniors and a sophomore along side Price. In fact, three of the four were making their first career start to open the season and Pat Elflein had just one start as a freshman last year.
Price’s teammates saw the potential in the converted defensive lineman and did everything they could to guide him to this point.
“We welcomed him in, definitely,” Elflein said. “We are a very close unit, we always hang out, we have our own culture. Even over this trip I’ve noticed we are getting closer and closer.”
That was the first step in getting the most out of who they consider their most-physically gifted player. The next was the toughest, according to Elflein.
For some people, confidence comes easily and is hard to miss. That’s not Price. His teammates took notice and embraced his laid-back demeanor.
“The game’s very mental,” said Elflein. “For an outside fan, it may not seem like that, but we have meetings everyday, which is like a class where you try to learn the mental part of the game.
“Being able to harness that part of the game, and excel at that, has really changed [Price’s] game.”
Young players often have a moment where everything clicks. Price felt his came in a win at Michigan State. Decker saw it before then.
“You’d always see flashes of it, but I think it [came at] Penn State against Anthony Zettel,” Decker said. “He was an All-Big Ten guy who’s a really good player in their three technique for them. There were some plays where [Price] was just throwing him outta there.
“Not to take anything away from [Zettel], because he’s a good player, but he would just dominate him.
“I think that kind of got his confidence rolling and make him believe in himself, because we’ve believed in him,” Decker said. “Just getting him to believe in himself was huge.”
Center Jacoby Boren admitted he was probably the hardest on Price, just because of his nature and how heated things can get during a game. But he also said that was largely because he saw the potential and felt Price could handle it.
Sounds typical of a Youngstown boy.
“You gotta have tough skin to be part of those, I’ll tell you that right now,” Price said, talking about the team’s offensive line meetings. “You can ask any of those young guys.
“They feel it, trust me. But it is a lot of bonding and you get to understand people better.”
Thirteen games into the season and it’s safe to say Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer has an offensive line unit that has a pretty good understanding of one another. That was accentuated in their Big Ten championship performance against Wisconsin. The Buckeyes played a near-flawless game, which is why they have an opportunity to play for a spot in the first college football playoff championship.
“Once that starts clicking, you see what you can do and you know what the heck’s going on and then you start building confidence,” Price said. “That’s what’s helped me, because game-by-game you start piecing things together and you start really feeling confident about yourself.
“You’re like ‘hey, I can actually do this — I can compete. I’m not the weak link on the team anymore.’ It’s a pretty good feeling.”
His smile on Tuesday proved it.