Parker just "hanging out" and waiting on June 7th |
CLEMSON – Clemson fans are filling message boards with observations and gleaning every scrap of information they can about the possible draft status of the Tigers’ Kyle Parker. Will he be here in the fall, directing the football team from his quarterback spot, or will be at the end of his first weeks of a professional baseball career? Several publications have recently put Parker among the Top 50 picks in the draft, and as more and more predictions come out, Clemson fans get more and more anxious. Clemson fans want to know, and it turns out that Parker himself wants to know as well, and he said on Monday that he was looking forward to next Monday’s baseball draft, if only because it might mean an end to the endless questions he gets. “I get asked every day,” Parker said. “But I am just like everybody else – I am ready to know, too. But right now, I just don’t know. I hear a lot of things, and I hear people say ‘well this could happen.’ But we don’t really know what will happen until after it is over. I just have to wait until something is said to me or told to me. Until then, I am just hanging out and waiting to see what happens.” Parker said he spoke with Clemson head football coach Dabo Swinney recently, but obviously had nothing to tell him. “There was just nothing to tell him yet,” Parker said. “I told him I still don’t know what will happen, or what decisions I will want or have to make. I was just talking to him. It’s not like we could come to an agreement or anything – it’s always good to just sit down and talk football with him.” I asked Parker if he had a “perfect scenario” in mind, and he said that no, he will think about those situations once the draft is over. “I honestly just don’t know yet, but whatever decision I have to make is going to be a tough decision for me,” he said. “I am really not in a situation where I know it is going to be a no-brainer for me on whether I am going or staying. I am just going to have to sit down and pray about it. But, hopefully the draft will make it easy on me to make a decision.” Parker then said that the reason many athletes come to a school like Clemson is because it gives them the opportunity to play a professional sport. “The biggest thing is that you come to college, and especially a place like Clemson, and you hope to be able to play a pro sport,” he said. “That is why I am here, and if a team is saying that I can be a major leaguer, then that is something that I have to think about. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens on the 7th.” Parker said he would love another crack at quarterbacking the Tigers, but if it doesn’t happen, he knows the team will be in good hands. “The biggest thing about a program like Clemson is that players come and go,” he said. “Clemson is built in a way that no matter if they lose one player, the program isn’t going anywhere. It will be here, and they recruit here to be able to reload. This program will be in great shape no matter what happens.”
Kyle Parker audio, Windows Media, (1:46)
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