A nice Q&A with Pitt football and basketball (and, oh yeah, Steelers) radio play-by-play guy Bill Hillgrove.

Who is the best Pitt basketball player you have covered?

Hillgrove: I would have to say Billy Knight and for a lot of reasons. First of all, I’m prejudiced because he’s a local kid. And he had that performance at UCLA when he scored 37 points against that benchmark UCLA team. The old man [John Wooden] came over and shook his hand after the game. I don’t think he did that for a lot of players. He took that program to heights that maybe Buzz Ridl didn’t even envision. Plus, he played 11 years of pro ball.

Pitt has not been to a Final Four since 1941. Which recent team had the best chance of going?

Hillgrove: The Charles Smith team that lost to Vanderbilt was a Final Four team. They just didn’t take care of business.
…
Can the Pitt football team win the Big East again this season?

Hillgrove: I think the schedule is favorable. I think Tyler Palko will win two games by himself. It’s up to Wannstedt and the rest of the team to win those six or seven other games.

In Guy Junker’s weekly briefs column, he commends Pitt’s football scheduling sort of.

In an era where the nonconference schedules of a lot of college football teams are a joke, Pitt should be commended for adding games against teams like Iowa, Virginia Tech, Miami and even N.C. State. Who knows what kind of progams Pitt and Iowa will have when the Panthers travel to Iowa City in 2015? But scheduling has to be done in advance, and athletic director Jeff Long has added a lot of quality games over the next decade.

Miami and Virginia Tech are included there, but personally, they can go pound salt, for all I care for their defections from the Big East.

While some of those games were part of the agreement to settle lawsuits over those defections, I would rather Pitt move on without them.

Uh, actually of the defectors, only the Miami game was from the settlement. The VT games were negotiated separately, and are so far off; that even someone like me who has more distaste for VT’s actions than Miami’s is willing to let it go.