Just the press releases for Fiesta Bowl. This is the official site. Jennie Finch will be the Grand Marshal for the Fiesta Parade. No photos. Bummer. Pitt and Utah have never played each other. The “Fiesta Bowl Block Party” will be headlined by Smash Mouth. That may have okay… 5 years ago. What? Hootie and the Blowfish were booked? (That was an uncalled for cheap shot.)

Pitt ticket info here.

Pitt’s press release accepting the invitation. Here’s Utah’s.

More interestingly, the press release from Utah explaining how Coach Urban Meyer, while leaving for the Florida job will stay to coach the Fiesta Bowl. Good. That sort of thing can only help distract the Utes as far as I’m concerned.

Here’s Utah’s Coach and players’ comments about going to the Fiesta Bowl, Coach Meyer leaving, and playing Pitt. Basically, all the players admit that they no next to nothing about Pitt. That they haven’t seen them play yet, but they’ll be seeing plenty of film shortly.

Here’s comments from Coach Walt Harris. The best one:

“I’m proud of what our football team has accomplished. I really emphasis the word we; It’s not me, it’s about us, it’s about the team. It’s about all the people that support us loyalty, constantly, and continuously. It’s about football players, too. What our football players have accomplished this year, has made them a team. A lot of team wouldn’t have gotten down that they have gotten down under the circumstances and adversity that they have faced, and the turmoil they have created, if they didn’t have the right stuff. There are the ones that got it done and they deserve all the credit.”

We’ve given Harris plenty of criticisms in the past for the “Not my fault” stuff, so it is important to recognize when he is giving the credit to the others.

The AP wire story paints it as the Fiesta Bowl having no choice but to take Pitt, but is thrilled to have Utah. I’m not going to rail on this. This will be the theme, no matter what. We’ve covered this before.

I expect that some trolls will make their way here to try and complain and rip on Pitt for being in the BCS. Whatever. We all know the BCS sucks. It isn’t a playoff. The bowl system is about money for the conference “haves” of which the Big East is still one of.

I only caught snippets of the BCS specials on ABC and ESPN. Lee was planning to watch and comment, hopefully his observations will be posted soon.

For the next 12 days or so, I will also be doing some guest blogging (along with many others) over at the College Basketball Blog. Should be a lot of fun and an interesting experiment.

Well, we’re all waiting for the official announcement of where Pitt is going. It looks like the Fiesta Bowl against Utah, but I keep hoping that the Sugar will step in for a Pitt-VT match-up. The Hokies, to be sure would have mixed feelings about that game.

Another late day, so let’s get the highlights of the Pittsburgh dailies coverage of Pitt’s beating administered to USF and the fact that Pitt is BCS bound. It seemed to me that this was one of those games where everyone saw the same thing. The coverage and perspective bears similarity to my comments about the game.

The straight stories covering the game from the beat writers are here and here.

Some notebook stuff and comments regarding the game and records.

Gene Collier has a column about the game. I’m not sure he even knows how he feels about it. Apparently there was a very surreal feel to everything in Tampa, because Joe Starkey also was befuddled by the day.

The final column worth noting is Goose Goslin — definitely in the “Walt must go” camp — basically saying, “In Nordenberg, I trust.” In a creative twist of revisionism he writes like the previous coach search under Nordenberg — replacing Ben Howland as basketball coach — was a planned well thought out strategy. Instead of half-assed, focusing on only one target and missing. Then turning to Dixon out of desperation.

Meanwhile in Tampa…

This wasn’t a good thing. Former Pitt Panther, now a member of the Tampa Bay Bucs (drafted in the 6th round), Torrie Cox, was arrested for a DUI. This happened the night before the game, so he wasn’t out celebrating a Pitt win. Not too smart when you are 6th rounder, who’s played in only 6 games for a total of 9 plays. He does have one INT, though.

As for the game, well it’s new to them, so they break out the “Pitt-iful” play on words to headline the game.

USF has one player leaving the school for undisclosed reasons and another announced he will transfer muttering something about actually getting to play. USF’s top running back is openly talking about skipping his senior season and entering the draft if he would be picked in the first 3 rounds. Sounds like USF is well on its way to being a true Florida football school.

And one columnist notes that USF was 0-3 this year against the teams that will be part of the Big East next year, and that none of them were even close. USF still has progress to be made.

What can you say. Duquesne tried to stay close in the first half. But the second half Pitt just started running them off the court. Pitt outscored Duquesne 50-26 in the second half. The final score was 87-57. None of the Pitt starters played more than 29 minutes. The stories are here, here and here. I listened to most of the game via the Duquesne broadcast, and the announcers were just flailing about in the second half trying to find some positive spin to put on what was happening.

I guess it’s a shame this game doesn’t actually mean more. No sport is ever as good without a deep, long-standing, hated rival. Pitt really lacks that in basketball.

Still, no time to really think about this game. Pitt has its first real test on Tuesday against Memphis in NYC. Saw the second half of the Memphis-Purdue game on Friday night. Memphis plays a strong interior defense. Looked like a lot of man-to-man. Not sure how much time the Pittsburgh dailies will put into the game despite the local ties (John Calipari). The Steelers rule the roost of the sports sections on Monday, plus Pitt football has most of the rest of the attention.

I’m excited though. The game will be on ESPN so it will be the first game I get to see this year.