You know, I just don’t know how to characterize the AP top-25 poll at this point. Technically, it means nothing. It doesn’t help decide a national championship, so a good argument could be made that freed of the greater importance, the writers who vote can engage in stronger homerism and more easily fall prey to regional biases. Of course, working against that is the fact that most of the writers make their ballots public, so they still have to answer for them — unlike, say, the Coaches Poll.

Be that as it is, the AP pre-season poll is out and Pitt is ranked #23.

Useless aside, for all the talk of the West Coast Bias, the North East teams probably have it roughest when you look at how they determine where the voters are.

SCHOOLS ELIGIBLE – All NCAA Division I-A teams (119 for 2005). Teams on NCAA probation are eligible to receive votes.

VOTING BREAKDOWN – By state (1-3 schools – 1 voter; 4-6 schools – 2 voters; 7-9 schools – 3 voters; 10-12 – 4 voters) plus five voters each representing a region (East, South, Midwest, Southwest, Far West) and four national voters for total of 65 voters.

That means in Pennsylvania, there is only one voter. Same for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. I’m not saying they are wrong with the geographic spread (though arguably Ohio State really benefits from having all those MAC teams raise the number of voters to 3 in the state).

Here’s the list of AP voters for 2005. The Pennsylvania vote comes from Ray Fittipaldo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Fittipaldo is the beat reporter for the Pitt basketball team. Note that both Kirk Herbstreit and Chris Fowler of ESPN College GameDay get votes this year (though Herbstreit gets his as a member of a local Columbus, Ohio radio station).

Not a lot this morning.

An article on Bill Stull’s inevitable assumption of the back-up QB position even if he wasn’t particularly thrilled with his own work.

“We’ll see how it looks on film,” Stull said. “I’m not too happy with myself. I missed a couple things, here and there. But we’re all still learning.”
…
Stull said he is beginning to feel comfortable with the Panthers’ offense. The biggest challenge, he said, is tackling the playbook.

“There’s so much verbiage, so many different motions, so many different plays and formations,” he said. “It’s definitely the hardest thing.”

After the scrimmage, the players had the night off from meetings. The coaches remained at the South Side complex to break down videotape from the workout.

“They’ll let us know (today), how we did and everything,” Stull said.

I’m guessing Stull is feeling pretty good about coming to Pitt and backing out of his verbal to Kentucky. I wonder if he’s sending Joe Flacco a thank you card?

In a notebook of quick hits, Thomas Smith’s knee surgery went as expected, there are banged up players and the Dolphins are in town for an exhibition game.

In a bigger notebook piece, the suggestion is that Rashad Jennings will end up at the tailback with Tim Murphy as the fullback, just so they are both available in the backfield.

The ESPN College GameDay advance team was at practice to film some stuff.

An ESPN crew was at camp yesterday morning to film interviews and do some preparation for when ESPN GameDay sets up at Heinz Field for the Sept. 3 opener against Notre Dame. Former Heisman Trophy winner Desmond Howard interviewed Tyler Palko and H.B. Blades and also acted as a defender on receiver Joe DelSardo for a piece about the Panthers’ passing game.

I’m guessing the production people would have preferred Greg Lee — but for the injury — though, Howard probably preferred how he compared to the shorter DelSardo.

Otherwise, there are some banged up players but no significant injuries.

Tight End Eric Gill gets a puff piece. It talks a little about how he came on strong during the second half of the season and how he only had 2 catches in his first 2 seasons.

He was a starter in all 12 games a year ago, but, while he played in all 26 games combined in 2002 and 2003, he did not start any.

Uh, that’s because Pitt still had Kris Wilson. Wilson went in the second round of the NFL draft for a reason. The piece has a lot of comments from TE Coach Greg Gattuso and Gill seems very excited about the coming season. He should, Matt Cavanaugh’s style of offense tends to use the TE a lot. Just ask Todd Heap.

Pitt commit Jason Pinkston gets a puff piece, starting with his being a junior fireman, his moving to defensive tackle for his senior year of high school and the bad stuff with his one older brother. It’s a shorter version of a story that appeared in the competing paper a couple weeks ago. The earlier story is a little deeper.