Looks like the other Onion type site, Scrivals, is changing and is now going to be like this site, but with all recruiting. Too bad because I thought it was even funnier than Panther Rants.

vote for pitt and reevis…

Pitt’s punt return is up against Boise State’s two-point conversion against Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, a Dwayne Wade shot in a win over the Indiana Pacers, an Endy Chavez catch in the NLCS Championship game and Travis Pastrana’s Moto X double back flip.

Fans can go to http://www.espn.com to vote through the end of the day on July 7. The show, which airs at 9 p.m. on July 15, will broadcast from Hollywood’s Kodak Theatre with Jimmy Kimmel and LeBron James serving as hosts.

Already voted for it last night… Would be sweet to see it win, but Im thinking the national audience is going with that Boise St 2-pt conversion… That play will be more recognizable to a national audience.

Never mind on that Scrivals site, by the way. Looks like they pulled the plug on it.

Boise st was nice..would vote for it if I wasn’t biased…camera work actually sucks on our play and takes away from it alittle bit…

I had a conversation yesterday with Chris Ferris the Assistant Athletic Director Marketing and Promotions at Pitt. (He kindly responded to my negative reply to the official announcement of the new logo) I had asked them why they wouldn’t poll the members of “The Panther Club” with 4 to 6 alternatives and let the choice of the fans decide which logo to use as opposed to going with something a handful of people within the marketing department/AD office had decided upon. His response was they had considered doing just that but things would get too complicated had they chosen to go that route. He also stated that they had only received 40 or so emails regarding this new logo and that many of them were positive. If that is indeed the case then we are getting something sub par simply because not enough people are concerned about it. The administration feels that people actually like this logo. I would urge the fans who read this blog to let your feelings be known to the marketing department regarding this new logo negative or positive with a quick email. I have Mr. Ferris’s email address listed below. He seems to be a polite and professional person who is more then willing to listen to the fans opinions as long as they stated in a rational manner.

cferris@athletics.pitt.edu

The problem is that the old logo was a disaster, so of course people will welcome a more simple look. Yes they could have done better (as usual), but again they have the right intentions. As much as I think the new Panther looks silly, changing the dinocat was the right thing to do. Most people will recognize that and applaud the move. Thats just how it is. (and everyone hoping we go back to the script, get with the new millennium – the marketing people are right, those colors just dont do it anymore. But as long as they are throwback, of course people will buy them, people love throwback)

Thnaks for the info Tony, I wrote a soft note explaining how bad the logo is and how all of my alumni friends feel the same way.

Interesting move for the band – I never thought of the placement of the away bands as an explanation as to why they sounded louder, but now that I think about it, that makes sense. Our seats are diagonally across from the away section in the corner of the open end, so the away bands usually play AT us; the Pitt band faces head on into the open end of the stadium.

The other explanation is that the other bands are simply better than the Pitt Band (VERY plausible). McArthur Park at any volume is an abomination, so let’s all pray that Pitt never plays that one again – at any location in the stadium.

I don’t really get what all the huge fuss is about the new logo. I don’t think it is all that bad. I never thought the old “dino-cat” was that bad either. I was at Pitt during the tail end of the “script” days and there for the new logo and colors too. Pitt football was absolutely awful while I was there. To me the “dino-cat” is the symbol I associate with the relative resurgance of the program. The majority of my years as a Pitt fan — that has been the logo. So i never hated or disliked it just because it was different. No reason to hate this new logo just because it is different (or even because it is not the script logo) either. I’m as big a Pitt fan as anyone, and while it would be nice to see the script back (but not the old colors) I can live without it. One thing I would like to see though is Pitt pick a logo and just stick with it.

I am a fan of the Script, but I would like any new logo of a panther to resemble a panther. That is where I am coming from on this. I think that a sampling of potential logos could have been presented to the current student body, or the Panther club, or a random sample of people walking around the city and a majority of people would have picked a better logo then we are currently putting in place. The BYU logo is great, it’s not the script but it is a big cat and anyone who looks at it can tell that. I am just not happy with a dog as our secondary logo.

yes, so Ohio State, Penn State, MIchigan, Alabama, USC, Texas, Oklahoma, UCLA and many others should just get with the times and change their uniforms and logos. GREAT programs don’t change every two years.

That is what peopel are objecting to. What was the reason to change in the first place. Why couldn’t they change the culture of the athletic department without changing the uniforms? The uniforms didn’t make our football team stink. It was bad decisions by the administration to begin with.

I sent ferris an email logging my complaint that the new logo does nothing to connect us to all of the pitt tradition/identity, which I think is the real failure here. It’s clearly going to have to be changed again.

I’m hoping they put the new logo on the helmets some day.

I don’t wish to insult Mr. Ferris by suggesting he’s a liar, but I frankly don’t believe they haven’t received complaints. In fact I bet they’ve gotten thousands, since email is fast and free.

If it’s not an outright lie, my bet is that most of them, particularly the negative ones, weren’t clear about who the sender was, so they discounted them. Selective counting, kind of like how Yahoo and Google throw out the searches for porn when calculating the most popular searches.

But I frankly do think it’s a lie. I have emailed (quite civilly) to Jeff Long and other Pitt admins with suggestions and complaints several times, including full name, address, references to my years at Pitt, etc. and have been utterly ignored every time. Not that my opinions were any better or worse than anyone else’s. The point is that they frankly don’t give a damn. That’s fine if they are OSU, ND or PSU, or the Steelers, etc. If I drop my tickets, 10,000 others will leap to take them. Not so in our case.

It’s pretty bad, and that’s definitely a dog nose. But we should be thankful that we don’t have to wear these teams’ panthers:
link to sportslogos.net
link to sportslogos.net

So you’re not going to the games if they wear a logo you don’t like?

Call the fashion police.

Not the logo (it’s dumb but no worse than the other one). Nobody would care about that if we were winning. Just things like the schedule, game times, renewal rules and the like. Not saying I was right or wrong in those opinions, just that there was absolutely no acknowledgement.

I do think such things erode the fanbase. My small group isn’t totally hung up on winning. We’ve had some form of season tix since 1983. We renewed in full after the 95 and 96 debacles. But the bad schedules, I-AA games, night games and Thursday games personally don’t appeal to as many of us (again, that’s just us) and we’ve gone from a group of 8 down to 4 that we now split. Their indifference did play a part in that.

There are just thousands of ways to f*ck up the “secondary logo” and we’re certainly not the only school to miss the mark (See Prairie View A & M’s “panther” 1998-2001 at: link to sportslogos.net
They nevertheless got it right in their 2002-present version. Hell, it could even be said that Prairie View’s ’91-’97 version was adequate.

Look back at Pitt’s past use of ‘the panther’ (again, courtesy of Chris Creamer’s Sports Logos site) and tell me that a suitable replacement for the Harris era “cat” — AKA disembodied panther head logo — couldn’t have been found amidst the athletic department’s archives (See previous use of logo btw 1956 and 1972 at: link to sportslogos.net).

Either of the “throwback” “primary” “logo” would suffice for what now accounts for our “sleeker” “secondary” “logo”

Oh f*ck it, could be worse: link to sportslogos.net

Love the new logo. TV viewers will actually know what it is now when watching the game. The last one was terrible. All the Pitt alumns I know like it.

ChrisA

I would support the team if they dressed in drag but I don’t have to like it nor do I have to purchase the team blouses.

c’mon now bill, prairie view’s panther is not that bad, really…

Haha …the long overdue spell check service has arrived — or I overlooked its installment how long ago?

(No doubt, Chas’ interest and concern for the intelligence of his readers and the integrity of our School.)

Actually a very good idea.

It’s hard enough to like the recent on-field product as it is, holding a grudge over a logo won’t make it any easier to enjoy Pitt football.

If you want uniforms that are trapped in the past try that other state school, Pitt has always and will forever change their uniform schemes.

So ChrisA is saying that our tradition is to have our uniforms always in a constant state of transition?

Not a new change every year.. but the uniforms have changed greatly over the course of time. One of my favorite websites is the Documenting Pitt site that Chas linked to a while ago. link to digital.library.pitt.edu
If you want, you can look at all of the old yearbooks and see what the uniforms looked like from year to year. It’s all there 1907-1980.

One of these days I’ll compile some pics of Pitt’s old uniforms.

The thing looks like my kitty-cat when it’s growling at the wind outside. Still, it’s nice that I don’t have look at walking billboards anymore when I look at Pitt’s uniforms. They were very high-schoolish last year and can’t think of any other D-1 team that put words on their shirts AND helmets. It’s a slight improvement this year in my humble opinion, kitty-cat not withstanding.

There should still be PITT on the helmet and Panthers on the Jerseys, no?