Got an e-mail update from Pittsburgh Sports Report Keystone Recruiting. Trevor Ferguson, who signed with Pitt in the spring, decided not to enroll at Pitt. According to this article it was for “personal reasons, and the school is working with him to determine his future.”

Obviously, we don’t know everything yet, but I’m a little disappointed about this. I really liked the kid’s potential. Not sure what the NCAA rules are regarding him. He signed the binding NLI, but never enrolled in classes. Seems like it puts you in some sort of nether region for eligibility.

The good news, the transfer from East Carolina, Mike Cook did enroll in class.

So what does the Domer-centric media have to say?

Well, they import a piece from the Trib. on what is happening with Pitt and Coach Dave Wannstedt.

Notre Dame has released their game notes (PDF). Game notes, as I often mention, are more amusing when you are watching the game at home. If you’ve looked them over you can usually start catching just how much the broadcast team is relying on that information to drop little information to make it seem they have worked really hard at the research for the game. For example (pg. 3):

Coach Weis Vs. Coach Wannstedt
Charlie Weis of Notre Dame and Dave Wannstedt of Pittsburgh are making their collegiate head coaching debuts this weekend and are no strangers in terms of coaching competition on the football field. During their careers in the college ranks and the National Football League, Weis and Wannstedt have played each other on opposite coaching staffs 22 times. Weis carries a slight edge, as his teams have won 12 of the 22 meetings. The first meetings between the two coaches occurred when Weis was an assistant at South Carolina and Wannstedt was with the Miami Hurricanes (1986-87). The coaches then met on opposite sidelines during the New York Giants – Dallas Cowboys rivalry during the 1990s in the NFL. As Weis moved from the New York Giants to the New England Patriots, New York Jets and back to the Patriots, the two coaches met several more times with Wannstedt coaching the Chicago Bears and Miami Dolphins. Most recently, the two coaches met on the NFL gridiron in 2004 – splitting a pair of games between the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins.

So you may see someone throw out that 10-12 stat. Or worse, not realize that they are including both games from the 2004 NFL season. The second game — a New England loss — came after Wannstedt had already resigned from the Dolphins shouldn’t be included. Now personally I find that kind of reaching all the way back a little silly. I’m willing to give him the time at New England as offensive coordinator, but not when he was the Patriots tight ends (93-94), running back (95) or wide receivers coach (96)

Just from his offensive coordinator time with New England, Weis has a 5-4 advantage over Wannstedt and the Dolphins from 2000 to 2004. The Dolphins won the first 3 meetings and New England the last 4. The total points scored by both sides in 9 games: 153 for Miami and 152 for New England. You can take from that kind of superficial information whatever you want.

Here’s an article talking about ND looking to stretch the field more with the passing game. They now have two receivers at 6′ 5″. They are a senior and junior with rather lackluster numbers for their careers.

Of course, Charlie Weis is calling the offense.

A one-year turnaround seems daunting, but Weis believes he has the key ingredient: His success in the NFL was predicated upon the premise of fewer plays and multiple looks, thus confusing defenses as to what exactly he would call.

“Most offensive people would like to do the unexpected as often as they can,” quarterbacks coach Peter Vaas said. “If you can come out with three tight ends and two running backs, and you have the ability to stretch the field and throw the ball deep, now when everybody sees two running backs and three tight ends, what are they thinking?”

Said Weis: “With that veteran offensive line returning and with the number of veteran skill people we have, it allows me to be versatile. I don’t have to come out here and be conservative.”

It will still be up to the players to execute, and it is still a new system.

This piece discusses whether and how fast ND can turn things around under Weis.

Quick fixes are fewer and farther between in Division I-A college football, however, where the nation’s powers tend to remain the elite.

There are exceptions — and Notre Dame hired Charlie Weis as coach with the intention of becoming the latest.

Finally the issue of Charlie Weis and his past influencers — Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick.

If Weis can meld Patriots mojo with Notre Dame mystique and make the Fighting Irish fearsome again, he’ll take a place with Rockne, Parseghian and Leahy, coaches with icon status at Notre Dame.

“And the flip side of it is, if you don’t you’re just a dunce,” Weis said, typically blunt.

It’s impossible to watch the 49-year-old Weis, with his windbreaker pulled over his thick upper body and shorts down to his knees, slide behind a microphone and start zapping reporters in his Jersey accent and not think of Bill Parcells.

“Several people say it and especially my wife,” Weis said. “It’s not exactly the same but, really, I’m from Jersey, he’s from Jersey …. He’s earned the right to bust chops with the media. So I have to pick and choose my spots and be more tactful, because people are like, ‘What have you ever done?'”

Hours before Notre Dame’s first practice of the preseason, Weis picks and chooses a couple of spots.

Asked about access to players:

“Well, what do you need to talk to them about? I’m coming up here and basically answering most of the questions that you’re asking. I think I know more than they do.”

The whole thing that Weis has modeled in media dealings of “one voice.” Where he controls and restricts all access to coaches and players. Here’s the thing. He’s got one year of grace with the media. Then he has to start winning or they start turning on him — hard.

I live in Cleveland. Before that I’ve spent time in Pittsburgh and Chicago. Cleveland sports media is not exactly a rough crowd. I got here in ’94 when Belichick was head coach and the year after the mess with Bernie Kosar. Everyone says Belichick got burned in Cleveland because of the Kosar thing.

No. In ’94 the Browns went 11-5. That after going 6-10, 7-9 and 7-9. Seems to indicate the moves were working. Everyone except the hardest of the hard-headed at the time conceded that Belichick was right — it was the way he did it and the absolute refusal to talk to the media (and by extension considering the lack of internet and direct communications, the fans) that kept the fuse lit.

Here was what started it really burning. Belichick lost both division games to the Steelers and a 3rd to them in the playoffs. 0-3 against the hated rival in one year. Never been done before.

That made things uncomfortable, but what got the media to turn on him was his continual restrictions on talking to players, coaches and him.

Again, no willingness to give any answers or talk. The lack of access and information when people and the media wanted something.

If you’re winning (like in New England) you can get away with the arrogance and controls. The media may grumble and grouse a little, but it has no traction. The fans don’t care when you are winning. That’s all that matters.

So when Weis refuses to do any interviews before the Pitt game with ABC Sports — except completely on his terms — and operates that way with everyone; it won’t hurt him this year, and it may not come back on him if he does succeed quickly. But if it takes him a couple years to get going — he’s in trouble. Once goodwill is lost, it is doubly harder to get it back.

Apparently Florida Cornerback Ricky Gary is a little tetchy about his height. That’s what gave Pitt a, uh, leg up.

Pahokee senior cornerback Ricky Gary believes the University of Pittsburgh was the only school that ignored his dimensions and focused on ability.

And for that, Gary on Sunday rewarded Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt by giving the Panthers an oral commitment.

“They don’t care about my size,” Gary said. “They just love my play.”

Gary, who is 5 feet 9 and 177 pounds, said several schools were concerned with his size. He said Wannstedt never mentioned it and was active in the process.

“Coach Wannstedt recruited me harder than any other head coach,” Gary said.

Gary, a member of the Sun-Sentinel’s Super 11, is one of the top cover cornerbacks in the state.

Up in NY, Kevin Collier made his verbal known.

Churchville-Chili’s Kevin Collier expects dozens of phone calls from college football recruiters on Thursday.

The number of coaches who ring the Collier family home will dwindle down after that.

Collier, whose stock among college teams rose significantly this off-season, plans to share the news that he has given a verbal commitment to accept a scholarship from the University of Pittsburgh.

“It was the environment,” the 2004 All-Greater Rochester team running back said. “The guys on the team was the selling point. It’s where I felt comfortable. I can go there and take the majors that I want (communications and physical education).

“I’m going to get an education and have fun doing it playing football.”

Not that I’m not glad he chose Pitt, but it isn’t exactly like he is choosing subjects not offered at other schools.

With 17 verbals, Pitt has been one of the most active teams in the country in securing early commits. Only Texas and North Carolina have more commits than Pitt. Recruiting Coordinator and Tight Ends Coach Greg Gattuso sees more baby sitting than anything else at this point.

“We’re in the ballpark of being done,” said Greg Gattuso, Pitt’s recruiting coordinator. “Up to this point, we’re happy where we are, but we still have a lot of work to do.

“These are still verbal commitments. The bottom line is we still have to keep working at recruiting. We have to keep recruiting the kids we already have, and there are kids out there who are going to have great seniors years. We want to keep our eyes on them, too.”

Still, this will also be a huge recruiting weekend with a lot of out of state kids visiting.

Eight high school players who are being recruited by Pitt are expected to make official visits to the school this weekend and attend the season opener against Notre Dame. Some other players will attend the game, but won’t be on official visits.
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Gary will make his official visit this weekend along with teammate Tamarcus Porter, a receiver who is considering Pitt. Porter also has offers from Ohio State, Boston College and Maryland, among others.

Eric Latimore, a defensive end from Middletown, Del., also will visit this weekend. Penn State and West Virginia are a few other schools that have offered Latimore.

Woodland Hills defensive back Darrin Walls will visit this weekend. A few other top players who are considering Pitt are defensive end McKenzie Mathews of Syracuse, N.Y., and offensive lineman Dan Wenger of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Both have numerous scholarship offers.

I hope the wealthy alumni and donors aren’t expecting to get much face time with Coach Wannstedt aside from at the Kickoff Lunch on Friday.

Finally, it appears that former Pitt back-up QB Joe Flacco is indeed enrolling at U Delaware to play for the Blue Hens.

He’s as fired up as the players:

Dave Wannstedt had a bit of a bounce in his step as he approached the microphone yesterday to address the media for his first game-week news conference as the Panthers’ head coach. Months and months of anticipation and hype about the program, about recruits, about a new attitude have overshadowed the main reason Wannstedt came to town in the first place — to coach football.

Saturday, the Panthers will play host to Notre Dame at Heinz Field in a nationally televised game.

“We are here! Game week!” Wannstedt declared with all of the excitement of a young kid anticipating opening his presents on Christmas morning.

He’s exerting a calming influence.

Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt does not want his players to get too psyched, too soon for Saturday’s game against Notre Dame.

“It will build up soon enough,” he said. “This is not going to be, ‘Win one for the Gipper,’ because there’s going to be enough emotion and excitement in a game like this. The real key, I think, is not to let it happen too soon. You want to build it gradually.

“If anything, I’m going to be slowing ’em down a little bit, trying to let it take its natural course and not get ahead of ourselves.”

There’s plenty happening this week.

A pep rally and bonfire — “I can’t remember the last time I went to a bonfire,” Wannstedt said, smiling — will be held at 8:30 p.m. Thursday on the Cathedral of Learning’s law.

ESPN will station its GameDay crew at Heinz Field. Lee Corso, one of the cable network’s resident college football gurus, will do a book signing from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at Petersen Events Center.

“Guru” and “Lee Corso” do not belong in the same sentence together unless a negative modifier is included. Also surprising, is that Corso will not be signing picture books but copies of the ESPN College Football Encyclopedia. No truth to the report that he signs in crayons.

This AP Piece about Pitt developing a running game and more balanced offense has been getting in a lot of papers.

Here’s the one thing to remember about Pitt’s offense last year. As much as it gets characterized as a pass-only offense (as opposed to a more pass-first), Pitt’s problem was that it was unable to effectively run the ball. Taking out all of Tyler Palko’s carries shows that Pitt ran the ball 319 times, or about 26.5 times per game. Also remember that Pitt had no featured back. Whether due to injury and just trying to find the hot hand. Yes, Pitt passed more than they ran, but given the line and where the talent was, that made more sense.

Offensive Coordinator Matt Cavanaugh gets a puff piece looking back on 1977 when he broke his wrist in the opening game of the season — against ND.

Is it any wonder that high on Cavanaugh’s priority list for Pitt’s offense Saturday night is keeping quarterback Tyler Palko clean and safe?

That would give Pitt a better chance of beating Notre Dame than it had in that 1977 game after Cavanaugh was injured. Notre Dame was ranked No. 3 at the time, Pitt No. 7. The Panthers had won the national title the year before in no small part because of Cavanaugh, their quarterback. He was named MVP of their 27-3 rout of Georgia in the Sugar Bowl on a night his more celebrated teammate, Tony Dorsett, closed out his Heisman Trophy-winning career by rushing for a Sugar Bowl-record 202 yards.

“Tony was gone and it was supposed to be my team in ’77,” Cavanaugh said. “I was the guy who was supposed to carry us. That’s why what happened was so devastating.”

Cavanaugh marched Pitt down the field on its opening drive. But at the Irish 12 late in the first quarter, he was chased out of the pocket and forced to roll to his right. Just before the sideline, he planted and threw back across his body to wide receiver Gordon Jones. An instant later, defensive end Willie Fry planted him in the Pitt Stadium turf.

People would joke a few years later that this was the first of two times that Fry would play a cruel trick on Pittsburgh. He was the Steelers’ No. 2 draft choice in 1978 but never made it in the NFL.

No one was laughing after Cavanaugh was hurt, though. It didn’t matter that he completed that pass to Jones for a touchdown and a 7-0 Pitt lead or that the Panthers would add a safety to boost the margin to 9-0. His left wrist was broken. Pitt wasn’t going to win this game against that opponent without him. Backup quarterback Wayne Adams had trouble even getting the snaps from All-American center Tom Brzoza. The Panthers fumbled eight times, losing five. They didn’t score again and lost, 19-9.

Yeep.

The one extra advantage ND can arguably have, is that 2 members of their coaching staff worked with Coach Wannstedt with the Dolphins.

Bill Lewis is not too familiar with Pitt — which is no surprise, considering it has been 37 years since he worked there an assistant coach.

However, Lewis knows a lot about Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt. They spent the past six years together on the Miami Dolphins coaching staff.
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“Whatever information (about Wannstedt’s schemes) that coach Weis would want me to share, I’ll certainly share,” Lewis said. “We’ll try to study Dave’s background and then the background of his coordinators and so forth.”

Just as Weis and Lewis are trying to climb into Wannstedt’s head out in South Bend, Ind., Wannstedt’s crew is doing the same thing over at the South Side complex.

Wannstedt expects Weis to incorporate some of New England’s offensive tendencies into Notre Dame’s schemes.
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In that regard, Weis might have an edge on Wannstedt, because he has another ex-Dolphins assistants on his staff. Irish tight ends coach Bernie Parmalee performed the same duties for Wannstedt the past three years.

“We pretty much knowns that style (Wannstedt) likes to play, but that doesn’t guarantee that he’s going to play that style,” Parmalee said. “We just have to do what we have to do, and everyone else has to stop us. We can’t go into a game thinking about what they’re going to do. They have to worry about what we’re going to do.”

However, if they know what we know, and we know that they know we know, and — oh forget it.

The various Big East Notebook stories from around the country echo that familiar theme from the coaches after the weekly Big East coaches teleconference.

West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez came up with an idea during Monday’s Big East coaches’ teleconference that drew unanimous support from his peers.

“If there could be one rule change to make in Division I football,” mused Rodriguez, “it would be to have a scrimmage game or an exhibition against somebody else before the start of the season.”

Rodriguez is getting ready to take an inexperienced Mountaineer team to Syracuse for a nationally-televised season opener on Sunday afternoon.

It’s the only game pitting two conference foes against each other on opening weekend.

“That’s the thing about Division I football,” said Rodriguez. “The first time you play, it counts – and for us it counts a lot because it’s a league game.”

The attraction for coaches of a preseason scrimmage or exhibition is the chance to find out how their players – and coaching staffs – react in the heat of battle without running the risk of a loss in September that could come home to roost when bowl bids are issued in December.

I guess it’s a good question to ask considering the fact that most of the Big East teams are playing non-patsy games to open the season: WVU vs. Syracuse, USF at Penn St., rivalry game Louisville vs. Kentucky, Rutgers at Illinois and of course Pitt vs. ND.

So the reporters ran with it, getting everyone to comment.

What else is new? College football coaches are notorious worriers, a fraternity of detail-oriented fanatics who take pride in preparation and believe there are insufficient hours in the day or days in the week to get their teams ready to roll.

The rules of Division I-A football feed those flames of doubt by prohibiting teams from playing preseason exhibition games or even controlled scrimmages against another team. High school teams do it. Professional teams do it. Division III teams do it. So do I-A teams in other sports.

Football is the exception, and Monday morning the league’s coaches wondered why.

“If we could add one that doesn’t count I’d be all for it,” said Connecticut coach Randy Edsall, whose Huskies open Thursday night at home against non-league foe Buffalo. “Our soccer team just had two exhibitions. The basketball team has them. In football, it just doesn’t happen for whatever reason.”

“The biggest thing that has been kind of different for me is we don’t have preseason games,” said Pittsburgh coach Dave Wannstedt, whose last stop was coaching the Miami Dolphins. “You have four NFL preseason games. Even high schools around here have scrimmages. That’s the unknown of this whole college experience I’m still trying to figure out.”

From a selfish, fan perspective I can think of a good reason not to: money. Specifically they would want more of mine. Every school would want to host and sell tickets — likely add the cost to the season ticket package as well — meaning there would need to be 2 scrimmage games for each school to ensure at least one home scrimmage.

More repetitive notebook pieces focusing on scrimmages or exhibition games can be found from New Jersey and West Virginia.

I other notebook summaries there is the issue of heightened expectations at UConn and Louisville.

After leading Connecticut to a bowl game in the school’s third year in Division 1-A ranks last season, coach Randy Edsall knows he has created a monster in terms of expectations.

Never mind that the Huskies have to replace record-setting quarterback Dan Orlovsky or that seven of the 10 offensive linemen on the two-deep have never played a snap heading into the opener at home against Buffalo on Thursday. The 31,000 people who bought season tickets for this fall did so for one reason: They expect more of the same.

Still, everyone covering the Big East knows the Pitt-ND game is the biggest on the opening weekend slate.

For some of the straight questions asked of Coach Wannstedt, PantherLair (Rivals.com) posted a transcript of part of the teleconference.

Reporter from the Ft. Wayne Journal-Gazette: How well do you know Charlie Weiss? In your first time in college you may be facing a guy that knows you better than anyone else in college football.

Coach Wannstedt: That’s true. Charlie and I are friends personally just from our acquaintance through the NFL for the last 10 or 15 years. We probably know each other better from an X and O standpoint than from a personal standpoint. It’s going to come down to this. You can only do what your players can execute. You can only do what your players have time to comprehend and learn. For me to sit here and think we are going to be able to do a lot of things we could do with the Miami Dolphin defense is really unrealistic. It is the same thing I am sure Charlie is going through. We would like to do some things but I don’t think we have a Jason Taylor on our team. He’ll be facing the same thing with some of his players. That is going to be the biggest adjustment. There are things we know about each other and things we would like to do but can the players go out and execute it? We will see.

[Emphasis added.]