A very fawning Q&A between Paul Zeise and Tyler Palko (“Your work ethic has become legendary, from the time you put in, to how much film you watch.”). Of course, the intro does disclose that Zeise has essentially been following Palko since the kid was in high school and he was covering the HS beat.
Q. Do you think your teammates are as ready to get started as you are?
Palko: They’d better be. These guys are adults so they know what we need to do. And if that season doesn’t leave a sour taste in your mouth and push you to want to get back after it, you are in the wrong business. From watching our conditioning and whatnot, it seems like the guys are excited and ready to work.
Q. You lost your top receiver (Greg Lee left school early to enter the NFL draft). How difficult will he be to replace and can you guys overcome his loss?
Palko: We have no choice. We have to overcome it. We’d love to have Greg back and we wish the best for him, but he’s no longer a part of our team so we have to play with what we have. And I think we have some good young players at receiver and a lot of potentially great ones coming in, so we’ll be fine.
Q. Speaking of great young ones, how excited are you to play on the same team with fellow West Allegheny graduate Dorin Dickerson?
Palko: I can’t wait. Obviously I am very familiar with Dorin because he played at my high school and I’ve followed his career. He is a great talent, but I told him he’d better be ready to work when he gets here. All of the expectations mean nothing, he needs to come here to play football and be the best player he can be.
Speaking of Greg Lee, he’s trying to get drafted, so it is up to him to explain how his numbers fell last year without discussing the plethora of drops.
“When I heard we were getting him (Cavanaugh) I looked up the stats from his last season in Baltimore and his number one receiver only had 544 yards the entire season. I looked at that and knew it was more of a run based offense and there was a possibility he would implement that offense here,” Lee said.
Lee was right. The Panthers threw 70 less times for 712 less yards than the season before. Inevitably, Lee’s numbers suffered a drop off.
“It was kind of frustrating at the beginning. I was planning on having a better year than my sophomore season and at the beginning of the year we really weren’t throwing the ball that much. We weren’t winning any games; we lost our first three games,” he said.
Despite the Panthers’ commitment to the run, Lee had a solid junior season with 49 catches, 962 yards and 7 touchdowns. Lee still made his patented big plays and averaged 19.6 yards per catch, up from 19.1 in 2004. After the 2005 season, Lee made a decision to take his big-play ability to the big stage and declared eligible for the 2006 NFL draft.
Obviously, no one is exactly thrilled to read Lee trying to explain his drop-off in production by blaming the whole offense and offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh. Especially for Pitt fans who can visualize just about every dropped pass (especially the ones in the endzone) that he’s had over the past year plus.
It won’t make much of a difference for many pro teams who can review films and study him. Still it was somewhat of a savvy sales job to pro football fans who probably didn’t see him too much. They hear Matt Cavanaugh, offense and Ravens and it comes off as a pretty credible explanation.
