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.