First off, we have to watch bragging up Pittsburgh too much. Remember that most of America thinks that Pittsburgh — as much as Cleveland or Detroit — is a rusted-out, half-abandoned, polluted, depressing, terrible place to live. Pittsburgh is still a joke at the national level. While visiting my little cousins last week, I overheard a Pittsburgh joke on “The Fairly Odd Parents,” a Nickelodeon cartoon of fairly recent vintage.

And you know what? Most of Pittsburgh IS rusted-out, half-abandoned, and somewhat depressing. Who could say that the Mon Valley, the South Side, or even the North Side is an uplifting, cheery place? Look at all the grey hairs. Look at all of the young people moving away. Didn’t Maxim or some magazine like that just rank Pittsburgh as the worst place in America for young, single people to live? We have to be realistic here. Pittsburgh, and all of Western Pennsylvania, has some serious long-term problems.

Columbus, on the other hand, is new, clean, post-war, demographically young, and the fastest growing city in the Northeast quadrant of the United States. Does it necessarily have the character or architecture of Pittsburgh? Of course not. But I can understand why so many people, including both my own fiance, do prefer it to Pittsburgh. Oh, and does everybody remember Richard Florida? He ranked Columbus way over Pittsburgh.

Now I’m not really sure how to respond to you guys’s definitions of what really is a city, as opposed to a sprawling suburb. But Columbus is classified as a Metropolitan Statistical Area by the Department of Commerce. Ergo, it is a city.

And it does have a skyline, a dense urban core, and suburbs. Yes, the suburbs make up a larger proportion of the MSA than Pittsburgh’s suburbs do. But that’s mostly because most of Columbus was built after World War II. And not everything about post-war development is bad. Don’t each of you want a driveway and a garage? Personally, I would never want to live where Pat lives. I could never have a nice car there. Hell, I don’t like parking my mediocre-at-best Pontiac there now.

I would suggest that what makes a university urban is the physical campus itself and where it is located within a city. Pat seems to suggest that what makes a school urban is who attends it. I would suggest that everybody look up the word “urban” in Webster and see if it refers more to physical geography or demographics.

But arguments about America’s Rust Bucket vs. A City That People Actually Move To aside, this is allegedly a sports blog. So lets compare Pitt and Ohio State on the football field. Win a national championship or actually sell out your stadium this side of the Ford Administration, losers.

Hail to Cities, Regardless of their Style

Columbus is Washington DC minus the DC, Tampa minus the beach, Dayton plus a few hundred thousand more suburbanites, Boise minus the urban funk.

If the blackouts had occurred in Columbus, nobody anywhere else in the country would have bothered to turn the lights back on. What would be the point? Does anything ever happen in Columbus? Has anything ever happened since the day it was founded in 1976? You would think that something, sometime would have happened in a place that so many humanoids clustered in their pod-like housing tracts call home, for lack of a better word. (Sorry, I’m excluding that exciting period when they built all the malls.) The local newspaper is an excellent reflection of this homogenous suburban wasteland.

Columbus is not a city. Granted, it is a region. It is an economic enterprise zone. It is a humongous planned community for active adults. But it is NOT a city. Cleveland, a place I truly hate, is ten times the city that Columbus is.

On the plus side, Columbus is not Morgantown. But as bad as it is, when you’re driving into Morgantown, at least you know you’re in Morgantown. If you woke up in Columbus with no knowledge of how you got there, you’d need a Global Positioning System to tell where you were. You certainly couldn’t tell from any local dialect, topography, architectural characteristics, etc.

But Columbus does have Ohio State (little-known fact: when TOSU was founded in 1982, it was called Penn State-Columbus). And Columbus is growing, spreading ever larger. But so is the irregularly shaped black mole on my ass. And, as with the mole, more Columbus is not a good thing.

First of all, I have been on TOSU’s campus (it sucked, by the way), and I have dined at a restaurant that featured one of Archie Griffin’s Heisman trophy’s.

And since I have seen Columbus from both the ground and the air, I can assure you that in MY universe, a giant suburb-of-itself is not a city. If Pittsburgh were to somehow waive a magic wand and annex Mt. Lebanon and Upper St. Clair, they would still be suburbs – they would happen to pay taxes to the city, but they would still be suburbs. Any city who has gained such a large percentage in its population since 1980, consisting of quarter-acre-per-lot house farms and melrose-place apartment complexes called Hampden this or Summerglen That or Orchard the-Other-thing, is not a city. Phoenix at least gets our homeless people in the summer time – what does Columbus get (other than the tax dollars of the rest of Ohio)?

As for the second largest county spewing TOSU students being Cuyahoga, NO S**T! Once you clear the post-apocalyptic wasteland that is Cleveland, the rest of that county is suburbs (which I included in my rant, if you read closely). And for the record, the fact that a land grant school is more than a regional school in its enrollment patterns DOES make it less urban. Shit, you might as well call BC a city school (granted it is across the city lines in Newton) or Case Western. They may be technically in the city limits of large cities, but are they as urban as Pitt, Temple, Cleveland State, etc? No.

As for most of us attending HS outside of the metropolitan statistical area of Pittsburgh, I suggest to you that we are freaks – the products of a recent aggressive attempt to make Pitt less of an urban commuter school and more like a big 10 school (by the way, I was born and lived in the City before moving to Indiana, PA). We all hung out with each other because we had those connections to each other that non-townies tend to have at colleges – we weren’t going home to do laundry at mom’s house each Friday night, and we tended not to drink at our hometown bar with our friends from HS. A lot of our fellow Pitt students, many of whom we rarely encountered because they were taking night classes or CGS courses, were on a different cultural schedule than we were.

Naturally, I would not want anyone to go to a big ten school, especially myself. I chose Pitt because it is a city school without the rah-rah-sis-boom-bah bullshit of the big ten. I like the fact that there are few fraternities, and the favorite pastime is not seeing how many frat boys we can stuff into a phone booth. I like the fact that our football fans are foul mouthed, demanding, and bitter. Better than sitting in a Nuremburg like stadium singing the good-ol’-college cheer the same way my grandfather did along with the other 80,000 drones. Pitt doesn’t have an annual battle for “Ye olde Crusty Puke Buckette” like all those big ten schools do, and I’m glad of it.

But lets face facts – Columbus is a backwater state capital with a HUGE state university in it, which only experienced economic growth in the post-urban office-park-ization-of-America era that we are unfortunately experiencing right now. It is NOT a city. It is certainly more populous than State College, but IT IS A SUBURB!

[By the way, if you realized that English and Scottish teams played each other, why did you cry out for Celtic to beat Man U just once? I guess you assumed, incorrectly, that in all the past meetings of these teams, that Manchester United won or tied in all those games?]

Lee mentioned how much we miss the old Pitt unis. It’s a sad loss. Pitt abandoned the old colors that you couldn’t really identify. The blue was kind of a darker, dingier royal/medium blue, while the yellow was a mustardy but not quite yellow. Even in our banner at the top, it is just a rough approximation using HTML colors of Mediumblue and Gold. I’m lucky, in that I have an old color jersey (#20 – Billy West) that I got just before the color shift in ’97.

The new colors are boring, corporate, and commonplace. It reminds me of the San Diego Chargers present colors (Navy/dark blue and gold), versus their old baby/powder blue and light yellow. They now break them out once a year as throwbacks, and they just look so much cooler. That’s all we would want at this point. Just once a year. Preferably at the Backyard Brawl.

Here’s what a couple college kids who decided to evaluate college football jerseys had to say:

It all went to pot for Pittsburgh when they made a big deal of changing the name of the school to “Pittsburgh” because “Pitt” sounded too negative. College boards have too much time to think, I guess. When they were Pitt, their mascot was always mentioned with the name. Panthers was the official mascot, but for all intents and purposes, the mascot was the Pitt-Panthers, like the Nittany Lions. Pitt-Panthers was cool. Panthers, by itself, is lame. The corresponding uniform change was one of the worst uni changes ever seen in collegiate sports. They used to have a late-70’s early-80’s kinda funky, kinda ugly, off-blue, off-yellow affair going on. The “Pitt” on the side of the helmet was done in a charming Comic Sans bold meets cursive font. It is important to realize that just like tough doesn’t make a good mascot, ugly does not make bad uniforms. The new uniforms are amazingly bad. Gold and black are not cool if you come to these colors late in the game, and the panther-head thing on the helmet looks like Beowulf’s Grendel as drawn by the troubled comic book fan at the back of the class.

Ouch. They also make a point in noting that the Big East teams may have the worst collection of uniforms of any conference. They have a point.