OSU football: Wes Lunt and family trying to keep life as normal as possible

Yet the day Lunt found out he had won the starting job, he called his mother, Jane. She was on the road on her way to pick her son up in Stillwater. They packed up the dorm room and drove back to Wes' hometown of Rochester, Ill., where he'll stay for a few weeks until returning to Stillwater for summer workouts.

Saturday night, Wes participated in a typical rite of passage for any 18-year-old: attending his senior prom.

On second thought, perhaps things have stayed quite normal.

Of course, Wes will again be the big guy around Rochester this summer.

Rochester is a football-crazed town near Springfield with a population of around 3,000. And Wes is the guy who led Rochester High to back-to-back state championships while putting up eye-popping stats (3,650 yards, 31 touchdowns, four interceptions his senior season) along the way. When word got back to Rochester that he would start for OSU in 2012, cellphones that belonged to members of the Lunt family were flooded with calls and messages. It became a local news story.

Within the Lunt family, however, it's a bit different. Wes and his older brother, Wil, who plays quarterback for Western Illinois, have always been able to talk football. But it's never been a common topic with his parents.

“I don't understand football to the degree and to the level that he's playing,” Wes' father, Andy, said, “which makes it great, because we can't talk about it and I can't be critical of him. He's way beyond my level of knowledge.