Sports Information Blog #30
The past year has been filled with many an anxious moment for former Rock football standout
Brandon Fusco. Tops among them: Waits for the official invitation to participate in the Under Armour Senior Bowl and the NFL Scouting Combine, followed by the numerous tryouts with National Football League teams.
Those tense moments didn’t come close to matching the level of anxiety the 6-foot-4, 305-pounds Cranberry Township native felt during the three days of the 2011 NFL Draft, though.
And all those nerve-wracking experiences were just blips on the radar screen of a potential professional football player’s life compared to the tick … tick … tick of the clock the last few days.
Today could be the most important day in Fusco’s life, the day he finds out once and for all if the top NCAA Division II offensive lineman in the nation actually measures up to and earns a spot among “the big boys,” the guys who make a living and rootin’ around in the trenches of the NFL.
Fusco expects to play at least half of the Minnesota Vikings’ final 2011 preseason game, a home date tonight with the Houston Texans.
All the sweat and hard work in four seasons at Slippery Rock, four months at the IMG Performance Institute in Bradenton, Fla., a week of practice leading up to the Senior Bowl Game in Mobile, Ala., a week of auditions at the NFL Combine in Indianapolis, a summer filled with daily conditioning workouts and the past four weeks of training camp in Mankato, Minn. has led up to this day.
As Fusco so aptly put it in an interview with Butler Eagle sports editor
John Enrietto, “If you want to stick around, you have to play well in this game.”
“(Vikings head coach Leslie Frazier) told us this game is for the rookies and younger players,” Fusco said in a story that appeared in Wednesday’s Eagle.
Fusco, who has primarily seen time as the third-team center during training camp, said he thinks he’s “part of a group of four or five guys who are on the bubble right now. It could go either way.”
But, he added, “You can’t think about. Just go out and play.”
“No one’s going to feel sorry for you,” Fusco said later in the article. “It’s up to you to make the team. All they (Vikings) want to do is win.”
Fusco said he’s happy with the way he’s performed in training camp.
“I’m pleased so far,” he told Enrietto, “but I know the biggest step is yet to come.”
A sixth-round pick of the Vikings in last April’s NFL Draft, Fusco has played in the third quarter of each of the first three preseason games and, in his words, has “graded out well in all three games and I’ve improved my play in all three.”
“It’s hard to figure out where you stand,” Fusco added. “So my focus is just on working hard and improving as an NFL player every day. If I’m good enough, I’ll make it.”
The Vikings are expected to keep eight or nine offensive linemen on their final roster.
One thing seems certain. Regardless of which side of the final cuts Fusco lands, he doesn’t seem overly concerned about it. He told Enrietto he “wouldn’t object” to landing on the Vikings’ practice squad. But he also said he’s talked to his agent “and a lot of teams are looking for centers.”
If Fusco doesn’t make the Vikings’ final roster, don’t be surprised to see him immediately claimed off the waiver wire by the Cincinnati Bengals – the staff that tutored the North squad of which Fusco was a member at the Senior Bowl. Bengals assistant head coach and O-line mentor Paul Alexander had a lot of good things to say about Fusco during the week of workouts leading up to the all-star game.
Which begs the question:
Why didn’t the Bengals select Fusco in one of the first five rounds, before the Vikings found him available in Round 6?
Some questions never really get answered. Right now, though, the only one we’re interested in is:
Will Brandon Fusco become the first Rock player to make a regular-season NFL roster since 1989, when Greg Paterra was a member of the Atlanta Falcons?
We’ll soon find out.
In other notes about former Rock student athletes:
• Ex-Rock spiker
Stacey Domer enters her first full season as head girls volleyball coach at Connellsville High School. Domer, a 2010 Rock graduate, took over the reins midway through the 2010 season.
•
Dave Sansom, a member of The Rock’s 2000 and 2003 regional championship teams, is the new head baseball coach at Tampa Armwood High School in Florida. He served as an assistant baseball and women’s basketball coach at Armwood during the 2010-11 school year.
That’s all for now. Until next time …
GO ROCK!!
Bob McComas
Sports Information Director
