Let me be clear about my feelings on the new co-branded, content splitting Fox Sports/Sporting News websites. Who the f**k got drunk and high when this was approved?

The whole system is keeping both foxsports.com and sportingnews.com urls, but you never actually know when you will be shifting from one to the other. The most immediate and noticeable effect — the reduction of interesting content on team pages. There’s a lot more reliance on the Fox junk. This means video and crap from the local Fox Sports affiliate.

The whole thing seems harder to navigate and in a moment of sheer, inspired brilliance, you still have separate sign-ins for the Fox Sports and the Sporting News sites. Great, work.

The first game of the season also means shaking the cobwebs and rust loose for tailgating. None of us have Steeler season tickets, so there was no exhibition season to start working on our preparation and get everything organized. So, there is a lot of false starts and hitches. A good example would be Pat after we got to the lot, and set up the table and some chairs. He cracked open his beer and put it in the cup holder in the arm of the chair — one of those metal and nylon ones that you stuff into a nylon sack — only to realize the rest of us had set up on the other side of the table and cars. So, he lifts the chair in the air and lets it collapse inward to carry it around the table and car. He hears a sloshing sound above his head and tips the chair to peak — sploosh! His beer had popped out of the holder into the seat, the beer pooling, then pouring right onto him. Simple first game jitters. We’re sure he’ll be better as the season goes on.

Now one of the aspects of tailgating in the city, are the people who come by. Rather than just drunk fans, we get panhandlers, peddlers and bit players. People looking to hit up the drunks one way or the other. So, we’ve settled in and are talking — Pat’s using ice to clean his chair — when a guy rides up on a mountain bike, pops off it, and plops himself amongst us.

Before we can even react he has thrown down three cards face up on the ground. 10 of Spades, 10 of Clubs and the 10 of Hearts. He wants to do a little 3 Card Monty! Keep in mind that our tailgating crew has a large contingent of lawyers who work or worked for the Public Defenders Office. The guy starts his patter. He starts sweeping up the well worn, length-wise folded cards then throwing them down with practiced ease trying to get us interested. Trying to get us to put a little action on it. One of our group — “Timmy Gates” starts talking with him a little, letting him do his spiel. Free entertainment.

Our new friend, looks at him and says, “You look familiar. Do I know you?”

Timmy responds, “I may have represented you at some point.”

Pause, then, “Oh, s**t! Gates!”

You can’t make this stuff up. He still took Timmy for about $25.

Well, what can I say. A convincing win. Either Pitt’s offense is a lot better than I thought, or Kent St. is even worse than I believed. Last week, Kent St. won against Akron in a shootout — 52-48. Even if Akron also sucks, any team that could put up that many points has to have some weapons and will at least be able to score and cover the spread of 29 to 30. Not even close in a 43-3 rout.

Did you ever wonder what local coverage is for patsy teams? I mean the teams that are bad, will almost always be bad, and their athletic department’s budget is based on being paid 6 figures just to do a roadie to be beaten up. Teams like Louisiana Tech, Akron, McNeese St. and Kent St. Here’s a sample.

Kent State’s 15 minutes lasted exactly that long.

After a quarter of level-headed football, it looked as if the Golden Flashes were genuinely going to put together some sort of upset bid against Pittsburgh on Saturday night at Heinz Field.

Then it came unraveled mentally and physically — and did so quickly. It was as if the two parties seemed all too happy to settle into the anticipated roles and the Panthers ended up getting some fun for their $300,000 in a 43-3 victory.

Honest reporting. Got to love it.

Speaking of honest reporting, the Rod Rutherford misdemeanor assault charge is still fodder. Actually, Harris’s handling of it is more the issue. Either he should have benched Rutherford or played him, period. His half-ass “punishment” of not letting him play the 1st quarter was idiocy.

Of course, as we’ve been saying, this is not a major incident regarding Rutherford, but that won’t stop some from trying to make it bigger. Take this from the Palm Beach Post who seems to link Adrian McPherson (the disgraced former Florida State QB who bet on games and may have bet on/against his own team) with Marcus Vick and Rutherford.

Rutherford was charged with kicking out a car window and assaulting a 19-year-old woman outside a nightclub early Monday. Vick, the younger brother of Michael, was one of two Hokies suspended this week after violating unspecified team policies.

While Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer held out Vick the entire game, Pitt’s Walt Harris showed a silly little incident like punching a woman and displaying a violent temper isn’t going to get in the way of a football game.

Harris believed the way to penalize his quarterback was to sit him… for the first quarter of the season opener against Kent State. Rutherford threw four touchdown passes in a 43-3 victory after being “punished.” Rutherford should have been sitting on the sidelines for Saturday’s game and probably a few more.

Punched? Violent temper? The alleged assault was that he grabbed her arm, through an open window leading her to strike her head on the inside of the car. There was never a punch. Of course that would interfere with a good story.

Nice to see that reporters are looking closely at the facts.

Back to the game. The dark cloud, was that it is clear that Getsy is a tremendous drop-off from Rutherford. Getsy got the start (because they still hope to be able to redshirt Palko) and it was ugly. Getsy was 0-4 passing in the 1st quarter, and 3-11 overall with some mop-up duty. The stats show Rutherford to be the key. This worries the hell out of me. As I’ve said, before, one of Harris’s weaknesses is his focus on one of his QBs to the exclusion and bad development of the others. Looks like the trend is continuing. Or Pitt better blow out Toledo and Ball State early to give Getsy lots of mop up time.

Last Tuesday, I briefly discussed the three games of this past week that most interested me as a Pitt fan. Then, I picked those games against the spread. I went 1-2, dropping my season record to 4-3. What went wrong, well…

Jeez, Penn State… You Really DO Suck
(Boston College 27, PSU 14) The sad thing is, I don’t enjoy watching Penn State getting beat — even by a 10 point underdog — nearly as much as I used to. For one thing, it’s getting old. Second, I’m afraid that if they lose too often, they’ll let Paterno go before he has a chance to pull a Woody Hayes incident and scar that program’s tradition forever. Plus, if they let Joe go now — before he runs Penn State football too far into the ground — it will be much less work for his successors to rebuild it.

…not that I didn’t enjoy Penn State’s loss a little…

After watching this game, the only thing that seems more laughable than my picking Penn State to cover the spread is my reason for doing so: I liked Penn State’s offensive line and secondary. Saturday afternoon, both of these alleged advantages were especially pathetic. The offensive line had quarterback Zack Mills running for his life all day — so much so that the kid who was once supposed to be the next Kerry Collins got benched in favor of his much more mobile backup, Michael Robinson. Meanwhile, the secondary got torched for 206 total yards in the first quarter alone.

Really, Penn State’s defense in general was pathetic. They had literally no pass rush, even when they were blitzing. They repeatedly couldn’t make simple tackles, and allowed Boston College to run the ball down their throat.

We all knew that this was going to be a rebuilding year for Penn State, and I went so far as to say in August that this might be their worst team in decades. But I never suspected that they could be this bad.

Of course, part of the problem was that I never suspected that Boston College (and the Wake Forest team that upset them the previous week) could be that good. But then again, I often don’t give Big East teams enough credit.

Who Are You and What Did You Do With My Panthers?
(Pitt 43, Kent State 3) I didn’t think that our Panthers would cover this week because (1) 30.5 points is a @#%*@! of a spread, (2) starting quarterback Rod Rutherford’s legal troubles would be a distraction, and most importantly, (3) Pitt NEVER, EVER, starts the season strong.

And on our first three possessions, my prediction seemed dead on as redshirt-freshman quarterback Luke Getsy proved largely ineffective. But then, Walt Harris, quarterback genius, gave up the moral high ground and put in the legally embattled Rutherford. And Kent State’s wheels just fell off. Of course, Kent State’s decision to use one-on-one coverage on Larry Fitzgerald all damn day didn’t help.

On one hand, I’m sure that Neil Rudel and his ilk will have a field day with Walt Harris’s (quarterback genius) decision to play Rutherford. On the other hand, Rod hasn’t been convicted of anything yet. Besides, didn’t Joe Paterno play accused rapist Anwar Phillips in the Captial One Bowl, only to have Phillips exonerated last month?

Perhaps this team will be the one that breaks the mold of Panther football that we longtime fans with our deeply entrenched pessimism hold dear.

Fire Ron Zook Now
(Miami of Florida 38, Florida of Florida 33) How the hell do you let your archrival out of a 23 point hole? It’s freakish games like this one, with no defense apparently on the field, that make me pray that I never have to relocate to the pancake-flat, insect-riddled, high-crime sauna of a state that is America’s Wang. You suck, Florida. And by that, I mean the whole damn state.

But you, Florida Gators, especially suck. If I were Brock Berlin, I would have given you the Gator chomp salute too. I hope you enjoyed every humiliating moment of it. I don’t root for you bastards very often, but when I do, I expect you to at least try past halftime.

By the way, I picked this game right.

Hail to Well Done Hebrew National Hot Dogs Dropped At Least Six Freakin’ Times on the Ridge Avenue Parking Lot