Well, Josh Marks had his second visit to Pitt’s practice this morning.
Josh Marks, the former Southern Columbia star who left the Penn State team last week, watched practice from the sidelines for the second time in a week. He has been released from his scholarship at Penn State and appears set to transfer to Pitt, although nothing is official.
I’ve heard through the grapevine that Marks was making nice progress but apparently couldn’t get out of Joe Paterno’s doghouse despite being on the second-team at right guard (behind Central Catholic graduate Stefen Wisniewski) as a redshirt freshman.
By this afternoon there was something official.
Former Penn State offensive lineman Josh Marks has enrolled at Pitt and will join the Panthers next week when classes begin as a walk-on.
He will be able to play for Pitt next season since he is enrolled at Pitt for the fall, but begin practicing next week.
The controversy at Penn State was over his conditioning. There is little dispute he was overweight. With a year of only practicing and Buddy Morris working with him, we’ll find out whether it was the something more that was bothering him at Penn State.
I’m cautiously optimistic about this. At the very least, this is a low-risk gamble. Marks was a top OL recruit, that Pitt really wanted. His work ethic had never been questioned before. Again, the reports — even before his departure — were that he had struggled with conditioning from the spring onward.
If it was a short term slump on his part he will get over it and Pitt greatly benefits. If it really is his attitude, then the team will probably figure it out before the end of this year.
I’ve a feeling he was just fundamentally unhappy with something up there and chose to leave. Not every kid is going to make the right choice every time – we’ve seen it here a PITT with a few players over the last three years also, Matthews, Jennings, Murdock, etc.
And, not every transfer has to have a soap opera like drama attached to it either.
I give credit to PSU for making it easy for him to do what he wanted to do. I’m sure they would have rather he made this choice earlier, or even at his LOI day, but this looks to be more of a desire to leave PSU than it was a decision to come to PITT. We just happened to benefit from it.
