COLUMBUS - Ohio State's Austin Spitler remembers the first thought he had upon hearing that the guy in front of him at linebacker, James Laurinaitis, was coming back for his senior season.

"Oh crap," Spitler said.

Spitler later looked at Laurinaitis' return as a positive, another chance to learn something from the finest collegiate linebacker in the country. He tried not to think of another year spent on the sideline, watching No. 33 roam the field making tackles.

Almost everyone figured Laurinaitis, who was tabbed as a top-10 or even top-5 pick in this spring's draft, would take the money and run. But the junior said the decision to stay for his fourth season as a Buckeye wasn't all that troubling.

"I just prayed hard on it and once you pray on something, you get a sign and you run with it and you don't have to worry about it anymore," he said Friday. "I took advice from the people closest to me and they were all kind of telling me, 'Hey, come back.' I took that as a sign."

It isn't often these days that a young athlete walks away from a promise of Lamborghinis, diamonds and million-dollar homes to hang around with his buddies for another year. A player's stock rises and falls according to the fickleness of the experts before a draft.