#88 Days Until Pitt Football: Oderick Turner

If you spend any time on Twitter, you no doubt have seen people posting certain Pitt players wearing uniform numbers that correspond with the number of days left until the football season kicks off. Jim did it last year and this year, Pat Narduzzi has been doing it.

I know we have a lot of younger readers here and also some folks that may not have spent their entire lives following Pitt sports. For that reason, I thought it would be cool to not only do the countdown here, but also give a brief writeup on the player to potentially help fans connect a little more with some of the all-time greats.

Quick disclaimer - this isn't necessarily about picking the best player for each number. Not only is that disputable in many instances, but it's not really the point of the exercise. So don't be offended if your favorite player doesn't make the list here. I'll probably mirror Narduzzi's list for the most part but may go off the board in a few instances.

These will also be brief, folks. It's the offseason and we all use this time to wind down a bit. These won't be theses or anything, but we'll cobble together a few facts for each guy.

Finally, feel free to add on to a player's accomplishments in the comments section. Some I'll leave out due to space/time and some I may not even know about. But this will be a good learning exercise for all of us.

Continuing our countdown today is Oderick Turner.

Turner's career was an interesting one in that he had his better seasons early. As a true freshman, he racked up 660 receiving yards and a team-best eight touchdown receptions, making Rivals' Freshman All-American Second Team. His future seemed incredibly bright but things would go mostly downhill from there. His sophomore season wasn't too bad with 36 catches and team-highs in receiving yards (496) and receiving touchdowns (five), but it was underwhelming considering his big rookie campaign.

Part of the reason for the dip in production? Pitt found a guy named Lesean McCoy and ran the ball a combined 461 times - nearly 100 times more than they did in Turner's freshman year. Pitt continued to rely on the run in 2008 with even more carries (483) behind McCoy's monster 1,488-yard season and in 2009 behind Dion Lewis' 1,799 yards. In his final two seasons, Turner's numbers took a massive hit as he also fell behind with the emergence of former NFL First-Round Draft Pick Jonathan Baldwin. After two promising years as an underclassman, Turner had only a combined 42 receptions for 525 yards and two receiving touchdowns in his junior and senior seasons.

After those somewhat down years, Turner mostly fell off the NFL radar and didn't get his shot to play there. But he did later play professionally. After signing with the Trenton Steel in the Indoor Football League in 2011, he also resurfaced in the Arena Football League with the local Pittsburgh Power in 2012 and 2013. Turner had a strong first year with the Power scoring 12 touchdowns.

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