Bob Smizik’s column concerns the expectations for Pitt and Coach Wannstedt. I don’t disagree with his final sentence.
For this Pitt team, 7-4 will be a disappointment, 8-3 acceptable, 9-2 a possibility and 10-1 not out of the question.
It’s how he got there, that wasn’t too good. It was okay with the opening about how this is not a team in need of rebuilding — there is a nice mix of talent already on hand. But then to talk of how Coach Wannstedt could be Pitt’s Paterno? Just dumb. It doesn’t fit or work. Not just for the differences in years (coaching in one place and age), but because as soon as Smizik writes that it is “foolish to compare anyone to Joe Paterno,” he tries to do it. The extent to which is essentially — they are both on their last jobs. That is it.
The column then shifts gears to start going on about where Pitt is ranked and that other than Louisville, the rest of the schedule is against lower-ranked teams, and so on. Weak.
Then there is this piece on Coach Wannstedt based on his comments at yesterday’s press conference.
The Pitt Athletic Department is happily taking in the money right now with the Quest for Excellence fundraising campaign and football ticket sales.
Season-tickets sales for football are far ahead of where they were last year at this time and Long said he expects to sell out all of the season-ticket packages within the next week to 10 days (there are 48,500 designated season-ticket seats — 42,500 are non-club seats and 6,000 are club seats).
The school has sold on average between 200-300 football season tickets every day since they went on sale in May. Men’s basketball season tickets have not gone on sale yet but Long said based on the number of new donors and early requests, the tickets will again be quickly sold out.
“Part of the football sales is driven by the new coaching staff and the excitement that it has generated,” Long said, “but the bottom line is we haven’t missed a beat, and in fact we’ve gotten stronger.”
Long also said it is very likely that there will be no single-game seats available to the general public for the opener against Notre Dame because the tickets generally designated for single-game sales (along with the season tickets there are 16,500 tickets allotted for students, visiting team and corporate sponsors leaving about 2,000-3,000 single-game tickets) will be sold to Panther Club members.
“We will have about 2,500 standing-room seats, but Panther Club members will get first crack at those, so most of those will be gone as well,” he said.
It will just be a matter of the fans actually showing up to the other games.
