Riley Announces 2012 Team Captains
June 8, 2012
CORVALLIS, Ore. -
Oregon State football head coach Mike Riley announced the selections of four team captains – Jordan Poyer, Andrew Seumalo, Markus Wheaton and Sean Mannion – for the 2012 season Friday.
While Poyer, Seumalo and Wheaton are seniors, Mannion is the first sophomore in program history to be named as a team captain. Mannion, who started 10 games for the Beavers, as a redshirt freshman in 2011 finished the year with 3,328 yards passing including 16 for scores and completed 64.5 percent (305 out of 473) of his passes. He was named to the Freshman All-America team by the Football Writers Association of America.
Wheaton, the other offensive captain, just missed the first 1,000-yard receiving season of his career with 986 yards last year (the 10th-most in OSU single season history) on 73 receptions including a career-long 69-yard connection from Mannion. Wheaton currently has 1,750 receiving yards in his career, just outside OSU’s career top 10.
Poyer, one of the top senior cornerbacks in the nation, started all 12 games of 2012 when he led the Beavers with four interceptions and 12 passes broken up earning All-Pac-12 second team honors. Poyer is also one of the top kickoff and punt returners in the conference. As a sophomore in 2011, Poyer returned 33 kickoffs averaging 27.8 yards per return, the seventh-best mark in single season history at OSU.
Seumalo, the son of OSU defensive line coach Joe Seumalo and the brother of incoming recruit Isaac Seumalo, started 11 games at defensive tackle in 2011. Andrew had been part of the defensive line rotation for most of the previous two seasons before moving into the starting lineup last year. He finished the year with 34 tackles, including 4.5 tackles-for-loss and 2.5 sacks. Also a standout special teams player, Andrew blocked two kicks against UCLA last year.
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