Sporting News/Fox Sports’s Matt Hayes always has a great mailbag during college football season, now it looks like I have a favorite mailbag for college basketball Gregg Doyel‘s over at Sportsline. This week:

Regarding your article “Big O called on to be temporary superhero,” you are
way off base regarding the current status of the University of Cincinnati’s
basketball program. The intestinal fortitude of Bob Huggins will only make the
UC basketball program stronger at this juncture. Successful participants in
sports step up and perform better during difficult times and are true winners.
Those that can’t successfully handle adversity are only able to write about
sports.

Ask the inside of Huggins’ car about his “intestinal
fortitude.”
…
Why do you have to bash Bob Knight? How about just praising Mike
Davis? No doubt Davis took over a tough situation, but he took over from a guy
who never cheated.

I’ll take your sentences in order: It’s fun; I could, but I’d also
like to bash Knight; and Knight’s crimes against humanity are as shameful as
some cheaters’ crimes against the NCAA.

There is also a great fill-in-the-blank form for hate mail suggested by one of the readers. For a more serious story, check out his latest about when coaches pull scholarship offers.

Lee’s provided the meat in today’s postings. I’m here for the fluff. Back in February, Pitt filed a lawsuit to get out of a deal with Nike to supply football uniforms and football related merchandise. Here is a comment I made around time of the lawsuit.

Idle thought: wonder whether Addidas, Pitt’s b-ball outfitter, whispered
some numbers in AD Long’s ear.

Looks like I called that one.

One of America’s top collegiate athletic programs will team up with one of the world’s leading sports footwear and apparel companies with the announcement of a new partnership between the University of Pittsburgh and adidas.

Beginning this fall, each of the Panthers’ 19 intercollegiate sports teams will wear adidas footwear, uniforms and apparel, Pittsburgh athletic director Jeff Long announced today. The Panthers join an outstanding group of schools that have similar agreements with adidas, including Notre Dame, Tennessee, UCLA and Wisconsin. In addition, adidas has a multi-tiered marketing partnership with Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees.

The Panthers’ uniforms, practice gear and footwear will all be provided by adidas. In the
past, the Panthers have had as many as five different suppliers fill the needs that adidas will now exclusively meet. Whereas past Pittsburgh-adidas associations have focused on football and basketball, this new partnership will benefit the Panthers’ entire athletic program.

It’s a 5-year deal, that includes “sponsorship components, product and cash.” The new gear arrives in stores all this month.

UPDATE: The newspapers have the story now. They have a few extra details. It looks like it will be about $1 million in cash per year plus shoes and apparel for the 19 sports programs.

No real explanation, but apparently the Nike lawsuit was settled out of court. Also, there will be slight changes to the football uniforms. According to AD Long, ” there are some subtle changes and the numbers are easier to read from afar.” We’ll see.

It isn’t every Monday that I find so much blog-worthy material on the web…

Well, like Ron Bracken’s call for the resumption of the Pitt-Penn State series, Eric Moneypenny’s ranking of Five Teams That Will Bother Me by how bad they’re going to be (on FoxSports.com) is required reading… if for no other reason, for this epic blast at Dear Old State (#1 on his list)…

Since Joe Paterno is now practically delusional and incapable of running a major college football program, then at the very least, can somebody please put this school in the now-awful Big East? Penn State is so bad right now that it needs to go back to what put it on the college football map from the 1960s to the 1980s. And that is beating the absolute hell out of Rutgers, Temple, and Boston College. The problem is simple, too. Penn State can not recruit like it used to, and it’s killing the program. The best kids in Pennsylvania aren’t going to Happy Valley, they’re going to Michigan, Virginia, Ohio State, and Virginia Tech. So, JoePa should be canned. Oops, I mean “retire.” And it should happen soon, before he tries to turn everyone around him into a linebacker.

Dude, I don’t even know where to start agreeing with that quote.

Finally, Hail to Larry Fitzgerald for allegedly pulling down the most lucrative contract ever for a rookie. The kid deserves it. Now just don’t forget all of your old fans back in Pittsburgh, Larry. Stop by and see us some Saturday when you have a bye week.

Ron Bracken, the Sports Editor of the Centre Daily Times (State College’s newspaper, for those of you who don’t know), is one of my favorite Penn State sportswriters. He generally makes much more sense than your typical Nittany Lion fan, and he DEFINITELY makes more sense than the Altoona Mirror‘s Neil Rudel.

In this Sunday’s CDT, Bracken makes perhaps the best argument for restarting the Pitt-Penn State series that I’ve ever heard coming out of Centre County. Given that Bracken is one of the most respected Penn State writers, I see this as a solid case of your-own-man-says-so.

However, I think his idea of permanently rotating Pitt, Syracuse, and West Virginia on Penn State’s schedule is a little half-baked. I don’t think anybody — in State College, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, or Morgantown — holds Penn State-Syracuse or Penn State-West Virginia in the same regard as Pitt-Penn State. Very few high school kids wind up making their final decision on college between Penn State, Syracuse, and West Virginia. But thousands of us, myself and Chas included, made our final decision between Pitt and Penn State. Besides, didn’t WVU only beat PSU just once in the past half century or something?

So hail to just restarting Pitt-Penn State already. Rotate the Mountaineers and Orangemen on Penn State’s schedule on some other Saturday.