Everyone likes Power Rankings, yet never before have we seen them completely dedicated to our Pittsburgh Panthers. Every week or so we’ll take a look at the biggest news makers related to Pitt sports — all in Power Ranking form.
5. Kevan Smith, QB
The guy barely gets any publicity but got a story last week in the Post-Gazette. That’s one more newspaper article than guys like Pat Bostick, Bill Stull, LaRod Stevens-Howling, and most of the other guys on the team.
4. Pitt Marching Band
According to people who used to sit near the tunnel where the Panthers come out for homes games, they are being asked to move across the stadium. Why? The Pitt band is moving from behind the closed endzone to near that tunnel. The bad news is that they’re being moved away from the students; the good news is that they won’t be playing towards the open end where the sound can escape. It always seems that the away team’s bands are louder even when I sit closer to Pitt’s band — this could be the solution to that.
3. Clemson University
Our series with Clemson in 2010-2011 is off and then we pulled in one of their verbal commits. Yes, I wish we were keeping the series on with them but it seemed like a mutual thing. Taking one of their verbals…well hah!
2. Joe DelSardo Fan Club, Double-wide headband, writers, Panther Rants
They “took over” Dokish’s site and have turned it into what they call “The Onion of Pitt Sports”. They have had some posts that are simply hilarious including the press release of kickoff times for the 2008 season.
Also released was the start time for the matchup with Syracuse University on Saturday, November 3rd. “Dr. Gross [Syracuse Atheltic Director] and I agreed to start the game at 4:20. We chose this time because we figured you’d have to be high to go to this game. At that point in the season, both teams will be well out of the Conference race and any bowl possibilities. Therefore, we’re hoping a lot of potheads get confused and think it’s a Phish concert. There’s really no way to market this mess.”
1. Dinocat 2.0, new Pitt secondary logo
Two straight weeks of having a not-so-good subject in the #1 spot is a simple showing of which way most people think things are going. To top it all off, they throw out some “sleek” new logo that doesn’t even look like a panther. Panthers have noses like this, dogs like so. BYU, Florida International, and Houston got it right. Us? Not so much. At least we got something to talk about for a few days this offseason.
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.
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.
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.
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.
link to sportslogos.net
link to sportslogos.net
Call the fashion police.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.