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Jeff Rice
Jared Odrick’s is not an expressive face.
CDT/Nabil K. Mark
Jared Odrick chases Juice Williams in the fourth quarter of the game. Penn State vs. Illinois football game September 27, 2008. CDT/Nabil K. Mark
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Penn State’s 6-foot-5, 300-pound defensive tackle looks like the quintessential straight man. He rarely changes expression and maintains a persistent sense of calm.
Put him around a group of his defensive linemates, though, and the straight man becomes the comic.
“We’re on each other a lot,” senior defensive end Josh Gaines said. “We have fun ... some guys you can’t really joke with, they’re a little sensitive. But Jared jokes around all the time. He can get serious, but he’s never really serious a lot. He just likes to be himself.”
Odrick is quick to point out that he can take the joking as well as dish it out. He can’t help it that he’s more skilled at dishing.
“I rag on the guys a lot. Some more than others,” Odrick said, a sly smile tugging at his mouth. “But they know what kind of guy I am. I cut on people, and people cut back. I guess you could say I joke on people more than most guys on the D-line.”
The laughter stops when Odrick takes the field. He has become one of the defensive line’s most important players, seeing increased playing time during the three-game suspension of Abe Koroma and starting four of Penn State’s five games. He leads all Penn State defensive tackles and is 12th on the team with 10 tackles.
Starting games or coming off the bench in the Nittany Lions’ constant defensive line rotation isn’t important to Odrick. How he produces when he is in the game is.
“That’s just kind of my personality. If I’m gonna show any type of leadership it’s gonna be on the field, just getting stuff done,” he said. “Working hard and going hard, that’s been my main mindset, my key to try to be successful here.”
Odrick has been big since he was born. He was already 6-2 as a seventh grader. His early athletic dreams involved a round ball.
“I wanted to be 7-foot for so long when I was young,” he said. “I really thought I was going to be a basketball player. I still love basketball.”
Odrick continued to get wider as he got taller, though, and the football field beckoned. Mail from major Division I colleges began finding its way into his mailbox during his freshman year at Lebanon High School. It wasn’t from basketball coaches.
“I thought everybody got it. It didn’t really turn out that way,” he said. “I realized what I could do with football, and that’s when it became an infatuation of mine.”
A Parade Magazine and U.S. Army All-American, Odrick chose the Nittany Lions over Virginia, Virginia Tech, Georgia and Florida. He saw a handful of playing time as a defensive end as a true freshman in 2006. The development of Gaines and Maurice Evans at end and the departures of tackles Jay Alford and Ed Johnson led to Odrick’s move inside the following season.
“I like tackle better because I feel I can make more of an impact there,” Odrick said. “When you make more of an impact in the game, you’re gonna have more fun.”
It didn’t take him long to make an impact in 2007. Odrick started the first seven games, making 16 tackles, including four for losses, and a pair of sacks. He broke two bones in his left hand during the Wisconsin game but returned a week later against Indiana, only to suffer a broken right ankle that prematurely ended his season.
Odrick couldn’t participate fully during spring practice while his ankle healed, but he used the preseason to begin improving his technique. He already had plenty of natural tools to work with. As his knowledge of the college game expanded, the physical part became easier as well.
“Having long arms and getting an extension is a definite plus on my part,” he said. “The one thing I improved on from last year to this year was being able to lock up those long arms. Last year my main focus was getting off the ball, because I wasn’t reading things as good as I am this year.” The best way opponents have found to stop Odrick this season has been holding him — if they can get away with it. He has the explosion of a defensive end but the center of gravity of a defensive tackle.
“He’s so good with his hands, plays low to the ground,” center A.Q. Shipley said. “He reminds me of (former Penn State defensive tackle) Scott Paxson, the way he keeps his pad level down. He does a great job keeping leverage to the outside, and keeping his outside arm free. He’s very strong and very quick ... he does a lot of different things in the pass rush game you don’t see too many big guys able to do.”
Several of those big guys on his own team, so often the butt of an Odrick joke, have found themselves in trouble off the field in recent months. Tackles Chris Baker and Phil Taylor, who spent much of the offseason dealing with legal issues, were thrown off the team in late July. Koroma and Evans were suspended three games after police found marijuana in their campus apartment in early September.
Odrick said he has learned from those situations, and credits his position coach, Larry Johnson, with stressing to the linemen the relationship between football and life.
“Everything’s linked together,” he said. “If you’re doing something else off the field, it may affect football. It’s all connected. He’s a real good teacher of how different aspects of your life can really affect your play on the field. Not only is he teaching us this as far as play on the field, but when you become older and you’re a grown man with a family, all this stuff will be second nature to you.”
Odrick’s future plans are hazy. He hopes to follow Alford and Ed Johnson into the NFL, but he doesn’t know what might follow. The sociology major enjoyed his classes on gender and women’s studies and social demography but isn’t sure what sort of profession that interest might lead to when his football career winds down.
“I’m trying to figure that out now as school’s going on,” he said. “It kind of scares you but you ask everybody else, a regular student, and they have no idea either.”
