Yes, I know what the press release from the Big 12 says.

The Big 12 Conference Board of Directors have voted unanimously to accept West Virginia University as a full conference member effective July 1, 2012. The Mountaineers will begin competing in the Big 12 beginning with the 2012-13 athletic season.

And yes, I know what the Big East press release says:

West Virginia is fully aware that the Big East Conference is committed to enforcing the 27-month notification period for members who choose to leave the conference.

I’m also aware of a rumor that the Big East would let the schools out early for a $21 million check.

Simply put, the Big East isn’t going to release WVU, Pitt or Syracuse early at this point.

Not out of spite. Not for negotiation of money. Not to see if the will change their mind. They are not releasing these schools because the Big East needs to survive.

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Was in the middle of working on this post. It was going fine. Nearly finished. Exploring the idea of the rumors that both Louisville and WVU were going to announce a move to the Big 12 by next week. What it would mean to Big East survival (or not), that the departures could accelerate chance of Pitt getting to the ACC sooner — or have to wait longer b/c they need the bodies, and whether the possibility of 11 teams in the Big 12 suggested that maybe Notre Dame to the Big 12 in all but football could be a reality.

Then… KABOOM!

West Virginia has been invited to join the Big 12 Conference, college football industry sources told CBSSports.com Friday.

The Mountaineers will accept the invitation, sources said. The Big 12 is expected to officially announce the invitation later today.

The Big 12’s board of directors voted Friday morning and chose West Virginia over Louisville. They will stay at 10 schools, a source said.

So now we are back to where things were on Tuesday.

That’s a shame for Louisville (and for Pitt and Syracuse).

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I’ve been in a lot of discussions on here and on the message boards regarding whether or not Tino Sunseri is an effective ‘running quarterback’ in Todd Graham’s offense.

I posted on this blog more than once that when I watched PITT’s pre-season practices I was impressed with the way Sunseri took to the required role of a mobile QB who can get yards with his legs in this offense. He really did well at that during the training camps.  Then, we get into a disappointing season and fans insist that he’s slow, immobile and can’t run.

But when I looked at our game by game team results and stacked them up against how Sunseri did running with the ball the correlation between his rushing and his passing success, and his rushing and our strong offensive play in those games was pretty evident.  Here’s what I saw and commented on earlier:

In three games, Iowa, USF and UCONN, where Sunseri actually has used his run option aggressively, he’s rushed 25 times for 169 yards for a 6.8 ypc average (minus sack yardage) and 2 TDs. Place that up against Ray Graham’s 5.7 ypc this season and you can see how much of a positive it would be to have that on a consistent basis and how it helped in those games.

Also, in those games we scored 27, 44 and 35 points respectively – the highest totals against BCS opponents this year. He also threw for 225 (70% completion rate) , 216 (67%) and 419 yards (69%)  in those three games – with 4 TD and 0 INTs.

So, I did a bit of number crunching after my post on the night of the UCONN win, but wanted to get my numbers straight.  I’ll put out what I think the reality is and you can look it over and weigh in.

Note that I’m looking at Sunseri’s results through this filter… because Graham requires his running to be a component of this offense there have been a lot of plays where Sunseri has a run play called by staff, runs off his option or – as wbb points out – runs off scrambles when the passing play isn’t there.  I want to know what happens when he does that whether it be an ‘official’ statistic or not..

I am subtracting the sack yardage also as I’m trying to get a feel for how he’s done when he has purposefully made the decision to run with the football.  From what I can tell by going over the game stats and the play-by-play listings, plays where he’s taken off and run but has gotten stopped for no gain or minus yardage has been listed as a rushing play and not as a sack.

Here goes: (more…)