Last month, news came out of State College that Penn State Nittany Lions backup quarterback Michael O’Connor was transferring, and the former 4-star recruit was interested in Syracuse University as a landing spot. Well, turns out the Canada native decided that Central New York wasn’t quite close enough to home, and has decided to head north of the border to play out his college career.
O’Connor will be slinging it for the University of British Columbia, where he’ll try to help the Thunderbirds improve on their record of 2-6 last season. UBC competes as a member of the NAIA for some sports, but they do play by Canadian football rules as a member of the Canada West Universities Athletic Association. The Thunderbirds finished dead last in the Canada West standings last season, but hey, adding a big time quarterback like O’Connor certainly has to help them improve on their season scoring average of just 21.9 points-per-game last season, and it absolutely has to help the team’s mediocre at best touchdown to interception ratio of 9-to-8 from a year ago.
So, John O’Korn is headed to Michigan, and the other high profile quarterback transfer that Syracuse was briefly mentioned in connection to is headed to play Canadian rules football at the University of British Columbia. I’m going to go ahead and guess that no one saw that coming. Clearly, not even the folks up in Canada:
QB Michael O'Connor, formerly of Penn State has signed with #UBCFootball. Best Cdn QB prospect since Jesse Palmer. HUGE coup for Blake Nill!
— Farhan Lalji (@FarhanLaljiTSN) February 12, 2015
