All season long there have been stories about Pitt great, Bobby Grier, the 1955-56 Panthers and the ’56 Sugar Bowl. Here’s another story. This one from a paper in the town where Grier grew up and played his high school football — Massillon, Ohio.

“Joe Smith, who was the team captain at Pitt and later played and coached in the NFL, was a strong supporter of Bob’s when he first got there,” Ed Grier said. “He was one of Bob’s biggest allies. Smith stood up for him and confronted some of the guys who were opposed to Bob being on the team.

“Once they found out Bob was a regular guy who was there to play football and get an education, he was accepted.”

Bobby Grier admits he may not have appreciated the historical significance of becoming the very first black athlete to play in the Sugar Bowl, until years after he graduated from Pittsburgh.

What touched him the most, he says, was his teammates’ decision to stand by him and risk missing the biggest football game of their lives.

Grier, who bypassed the National Football League to join the Air Force and become a missile officer, gets back to Massillon several times a year to visit his sister, and says he kept close tabs on the Massillon Tigers’ run to the 2005 state championship game.

For whatever this is worth, the Eastern College Athletic Conference announced its 2005 All-ECAC team for Div. 1-A (PDF), and 3 Pitt players made the list: H.B. Blades, Josh Lay and Greg Lee.