Well, the Walt Harris press conference selected transcript is up. Fairly interesting in that read-between-the-lines kind of way. Especially the comments after the question about the way the team has grown this year. It was about as close as Coach Harris could come to calling out the media for questioning his judgment and decisions.
For the last few days I’ve been mentioning how important this USF game should be for Pitt. And how important it should be to Coach Harris, after the 2001 debacle. Looks like Harris isn’t shying away from that.
What do the past events of the weekend mean to you and your team?
“I don’t think we’ve talked much about that stuff yet until we’re done honestly. Maybe I’m not smart or maybe I just like to do it step by step. I don’t really want to talk about all that stuff. I want our players to focus on what we have to do to get it done against South Florida. I think if we start pumping ourselves up, I think we’ll get our eye off the bull’s-eye. It’s not that I don’t trust our players; I think it’s a natural tendency when some good things have happened to start feeling too good. We don’t want to put too much air up our dresses so to speak. (Laughs) Let’s just focus on South Florida. Obviously, it’s a big game for our team and it’s a big game for our seniors. It’s a big game for all those who were here in 2001. It’s a big game and it’s on the road against a team that would like nothing more than to spoil our opportunity that we have built for ourselves in the past ten games.”
Will you use the 2001 South Florida game as motivation?
“Yes, I talked to our team yesterday and we spoke a little bit about that. Quite honestly, they were one of the better teams that we have played here. They were really good. They had a lot of good football players and they had a lot of Division I-A bounce backs and a lot of non-qualifiers; they had some guys that could play. Their quarterback played outstanding in that game and we beat ourselves a bit. A lot of our players weren’t there except for most of the seniors and juniors and of course the coaches.”
Just what I hoped to read.
Harris’ opening statement gave a lot of the credit to individual players. In fact he didn’t take much personal credit for the game. He did give the defense as a whole credit but I still found this interesting, “I thought our defense played their best game this year, maybe their best game in a couple of years.” Now I’m not disagreeing with that, but in the subtext of it, you have to wonder if he was really tired of having to pretend the defense was simply just a couple blown assignments and some missed tackles. Not just a group that has not played well at all. Something that goes back to the coach, especially Defensive Coordinator Paul Rhoads.
Coach Harris was also on ESPNRadio for Gamenight. You can here the interview here (I hope. If not, got the Pitt page and you will find an audio link.). He apparently has a past with Utah Coach Urban Meyer. He wouldn’t speculate much beyond USF. As for the Big East in the BCS, he makes the dubious claim that the Big East has been highly competitive as indicated by the logjam at the top. Not the greatest defenses.
By the way, according to the newest BCS Rankings, Pitt is now #23.
