Ugh.
Depressed.
Frustrated.
….
Quit referring to Tino as a kid he turns 23 in December that is a man playing with boys, and he has another year of eligibility. Tino should be going on to his life’s work which is not playing football !
People can be patient with someone who shows up and quietly goes about their job making steady gains without promises. They will not forgive a person who comes in guns a blazin making tremendous promises and trying to sell them some fools Gold. High octane was fraudulent and now everyone feels deceived by the over selling. Todd Graham needs to deliver something to the fans. Something real and not falsified with fast talking empty promises
Has there ever been a better special teams guy than Tags?
Time for TG to get that through his head no matter how well Tino practices. Sunseri can’t take the heat of battle. Some guys freeze up under pressure, some guys relish the moment. Hopefully Voytik will be the guy who thrives in the adversity that has become know as Pitt football. Somebody, anybody BUT Tino Sunseri HAS to be put into the driver’s seat come spring ball.Tino has proven beyond the shadow of doubt that he will dependablly whither under the pressure of a close game. This experiment is OVER!!!!
NEXT, PLEASE, NEXT, ANYBODY STEP UP, THE SUNSERI ERA HAS ENDED!!!!
If Pitt can have multiple players substitute at other positions but QB, the most important position, shame on Todd for lack of preparation. Again, my opinion.
give myers the next game he cant be worse than tino that is a sure thing no one can be worse.
Maybe Reed can comment on Myers because he has had the opportunity to observe the Panthers fist-hand.
The “rumors” I picked up around the Pitt faithful inner-circle is that he is slow of foot, very slow release, strong arm, but a bit of a under achiever when it comes to meetings and game prep.
Also Smizass had to throw his 2 cents in, it’s a pity a Pitt grad constantly degrades the program.
I think in the long run, Graham was and still is a great choice for this program. Taking just the offensive side of the ball, there have been times this year even with Tino running the ship that we were able to see how prolific “High Octane” could be. The problem is that we’ve never seen it consistently because Sunseri hasn’t been able to execute it anywhere even remotely approaching “consistently”.
In a pro-style scheme, you can hide that a little bit better. In this kind of offense, if you don’t have that, you can’t really run the offense because the entire execution of the play hinges on the QB reading the defense and making quick and definite decisions with the football.
So what now? Well, I read a lot on here from a few who are constantly referencing back to measureables and recruiting rankings and arm strength. They don’t need a kid with all the measurables in the world to run this thing. They don’t need a kid who can throw it from his goalline to the opposing 40 without a problem, because this offense doesn’t stretch the field vertically the same way it did under Wannstedt (on the outside).
What Graham needs is a QB who can read and react quickly and make accurate throws, particularly over the middle on crossing routes. This has compromised what this offense is supposed to be. When it comes to putting the ball in the air, Sunseri can’t read quickly enough, and can’t make those throws consistently. As someone mentioned above, it’s one of those many things that Graham has taken out to try to simplify things to work with this group.
I’ve said this before – go look at Kellen Moore. He lacked ideal measurables – 6’1″, 185 lbs. – when he came out of high school. The only offers he had came from Idaho and Div. I-AA Eastern Washington. But he’s accurate. He reads defenses quickly. He makes decisions quickly. In that system, that’s what he needs to do, and he’s been just fine at Boise State.
So next year, maybe that QB that Graham needs is Mark Myers (since we haven’t seen him, I’ll assume the best – that he just needed a full year in this system). Maybe it’s Trey Anderson. Maybe it’s Chad Voytik. Maybe it’s a JUCO kid who isn’t quite on the radar here yet.
I think we know it’s NOT Tino Sunseri. I can’t see Tino ever improving on his tendency to hold the ball too long, and I can’t see Graham dealing with this for another season.
For so long, he’s probably been THE MAN. Successful in high school, walked in his Dad’s shadow, but just in way over his head now and at times seems oblivious to it. He’s got heart, but not the talent and apparently he is our best shot, so he’s in a tough position for a 20 year old.
He cannot start next year. This year, Graham gets a pass and is stuck with Wannie’s QB. Next year, he owns it and he cannot (and likely will not) hitch his wagon to Tino. We are going nowhere with him…let’s at least start grooming our future.
Graham is a great hire…we just need to give him some time to get his type of players in the offense. Tino is so overwhelmed..he is dizzy from the High Octane fumes!
This is what you sign up for when you sign the piece of paper giving you four free years of tuition and room & board. What’s that run at Pitt these days? $120,000? Nobody at that level lives in a bubble. His Dad is a FREAKING D1 COACH! Don’t you think he’s been exposed to this sort of thing from birth?
Get over yourself. Soon Tino will as well.
Have we ever played in the NFL or NHL, no, yet I bet we all have opinions about it.
Have we ever been a congressman, senator or president, nope, but we all have political opinions.
We have opinions on movies, music and current events too.
This is a sports blog, about Pitt sports, and peoples opinions on those sports.
Not sure what you expected to find on here, but, that is what this is, peoples rants.
If you’re looking for only positive, I suggest you go to Pitt’s website, they only tell you good things.
You wanna talk about pressure, how about having a full time job, a wife, and 4 children to provide for, most of us on here know all about pressure.
Real pressure!!
Did anyone see any improvement at the LB, DL, OT, and especially the DBs??? Though so!! that is coaching and that is the second best thing TG brings to this team. The best is the players he is bring in. He knows that a new QB is a must. BTW, Tony it is learning disability. You better look in a mirrow and you see what that term means.
Peterson will go immediately after Nordy retires. Nordy better not think about screwing Pitt on the way out by rewarding Peterson with a new “K”. Nordy’s legacy will be matriculating Pitt to the ACC and upgrading their sports facilities. The new Chancellor will hire a new AD, begin construction on a campus stadium, return to the mustard and higher a non-gimmick coach.
The offensive line was not the problem last night so quit trying to rip them. They ran the ball well, actually looked good doing it. Don’t blame injuries either. They all received full rides because they have talent.
I watched the game in my Pitt gear amongst 22 of my favorite WV supporters at a party last night. Two of the WVU attendees were former players at the University and an additional 1 played in the NFL. They mocked Tino from the second quarter on because he missed easy reads and couldn’t throw an accurate pass (albeit alligator arms carswell’s pass was spot on). The comments regarding alligator arms ranged from “he has hung players out for two years and got them racked” so who wouldn’t short arm a pass over the middle. They said that the tape doesn’t lie. I tend to agree with the hoopie faithful on that note although I don’t study tape like they do.
They all laughed at the Graham locker room speech!! Is that what you pay two million for? Oh good grief charlie brown, Nordy needs to clean house.
It was a bought time some one called tino out.
I just hope TG knows how sick of tino we are.
Not sure exactly what you’re getting at.
Supporting Graham here isn’t necessarily also backing Pederson. I’ve got many reservations about the way Pederson handled things, but I think support of Graham as the new coach is mutually exclusive from anything you cited that Pederson’s done.
And what else are we going to do? Change coaches every year until we find that once-in-a-blue-moon instance where a new coach comes in with players he didn’t recruit and wins right away?
It takes time. History has borne that out any time a program makes a coaching change that overhauls a system the way Pitt did going from last year to this year. Just because Wannstedt couldn’t get out of his own way as a gameday coach in Year Six doesn’t mean Graham will have the same problems. This team didn’t quit on Graham this year. The defense got better as the season went on. Young players stepped up at various positions and played well. There’s a solid core of young players to build around here and more on the way.
Graham has a lot to work on – gameday adjustments could come a little quicker, for example. And he will. He’ll get better and evolve as a coach in this program. But he also needs to get more of the pieces in place that he needs, and it’s a process. Walt got eight years. Wannstedt got six years. Let the process play out a little bit.
Yesterday, we got a large dose of our deepest position, running back. Bennett showed he belonged. Ran hard, picked up his blocking assignments for the most part and wasn’t much of a drop off. TG learned to shorten the game on WVU and it should have been enough. This is where Tino comes into the story.
This year has been a combination of a few coaching decisions costing us games with an indecisive, bone-headed qb costing us the others.
Myers should play the entire game next week to see what is really there. Sometimes you might have a guy who turns it on under the lights and he could be that kind of guy even if he’s not the hardest practicing kind of guy.
I fear that TG would rather get this team bowl-eligible than starting a new QB with his thinking that “Tino gives them the best chance the win.” Clearly it has been proven all year that is not the case.
DW gave us a good defense, let’s hope that continues in the years to come. And let’s hope TG continues to mature as a coach and let’s hope Tino takes a seat.
Regarding the QB situation, Sunseri and Myers are more geared to drop-back, pro-style offenses. They were bound to struggle with this system to some degree no matter how much time they had. Sunseri seems mobile enough to run the read-option competently, but the other part of that is reading, recognizing and executing quick-snap throws and he fails miserably there.
It’s been said that Myers has struggled with the read-option part and has had work ethic issues. Can he make the throws? No one really knows. Probably better than Sunseri can, but to run this offense you need to be able to execute all three facets. If he can’t run the read-option, that’s just as big a problem as Tino’s inability to execute the passing part of the offense.
Voytik, Anderson and Gonzalez all ran a spread/read-option in high school. Gonzalez supposedly struggled the same as Sunseri – could executing the running part of the offense well enough, but he struggled with accuracy in the passing game and reading the proper throws. Getting himself in trouble with the marijuana bust put him behind everyone else as he was suspended. I supposed there’s a chance he moves back to QB in the offseason, but these coaches may have already seen enough of him to know he can’t run it the way he wants it run.
Anderson was brought in as a low-risk gamble after Graham had six months with what he inherited and apparently realized Tino was the best of a bunch that really wasn’t suited for his system at all. It was a shot in the dark because the kid had run a similar triple-option offense in high school. I get the impression that Graham hoped Sunseri would stay healthy and execute the base offense at just a competent level, which would’ve bought a year to get Anderson to get completely acclimated to this level of football. When that didn’t happen, Graham turned to Anderson for some sort of spark because he wasn’t getting it from Sunseri.
Voytik has also run the triple-option in high school. Much of what I’ve read and seen on film of him leads me to believe that it may not take him long to pick this up.
So how does getting rid of Graham help any of this? What then? Bring in another coach whose “system” is more geared toward a ball-control scheme? Great. That puts them back at square one with two QBs not suited for that (Voytik and Anderson), a complete unknown in Myers and an incumbent in Sunseri who many of us agreed was average at best in Wannstedt’s offense.
No, you know what? I’m going to defer to Graham and specifically to Calvin McGee and Mike Norvell here. Norvell worked under Guz Malzahn and Chad Morriss, so he’s seen the blueprints of those offenses. Calvin McGee oversaw two offenses – one at WVU and one at Michigan – that eventually unearthed Rasheed Marshall, Pat White and Denard Robinson at quarterback. I’ll take my chances with the fact that he knows what he’s doing, and just needs to find the right guy.
Now considering the BigEast has been extremely bad the last two years, so bad that Uconn won it last year and Louisville at 7-5 might win it this year, 9-11 is putrid. Pitt has much better players at most positions than all these schools.
EXCEPT FOR THE MOST IMPORTANT POSITION. THAT BEING QUARTERBACK!
And of these 9 wins against legit (?) D1 teams, none of them have been against anybody really good. The best win last year was who….Kentucky?, USF? Cincy ? Syracuse? Rutgers?
None of those teams were really any good.
The best win this year was against who….Louisville (7-5), USF or Uconn? Again all these teams are not very good at all.
When you have a D2 QB you ARE NOT going to beat any good D1 teams. In fact, Maine’s D2 QB was better than our starter. That pretty much sums it up. And please don’t tell me he threw for over 400 yards against Uconn, the average Western Michigan QB threw for almost 500 yards against Uconn with 5 TD passes. Sunseri’s performance against Uconn was what you call an anomaly.
a·nom·a·ly (-nm-l)
n. pl. a·nom·a·lies
1. Deviation or departure from the normal or common order, form, or rule.
As a result of his allegiance to Tino, TG still does not have any game film of Gonzalez, Myers and minimally on Trey and is now in his self-created pickle for next year. That is TG’s fault.
The linebackers have not improved this year as you suggest. Gruder, Williams and Roberts still can’t cover anyone in pass defense and often fill the wrong gaps in run defense and are too slow to recover. Agree that Price and Thomas show promise if you consider Thomas a LB.
DB improvement? Are you serious? They have not improved consistently at all. A couple of nice plays last night, but for the most part, not consistently good. Run support is atrocius. Have they ever come up with a big defensive stop? A fourth and six would have been a good place to begin. It is easy for DB’s to play well when they are only being asked to cover for a few seconds because of a great pass rush. The DL I agree with. They play well and Donald is awesome and I only hope he keeps his tenacity. Watch the Rutgers tape again, the DB’s were a mess.
Pitt has no identity offensively. Bennet runs hard and Shell will run hard. Did anyone notice how WV bowed their chests and came out and bullied the defense by going to the power run game in the 2cnd half. They out physicalled the defense. Not surprising given all the negativity coming from the qb position. The OL was not the problem. The qb was. Period.
So you are wrong there Melbaplace.
If given a legitimate chance and enough work with the 1rst team and not having to play in 40 mph winds so that Tino would not look even worse. He would still operate this system BETTER than Sunseri.
Funny, those that have seen 24 games of terrible play from Sunseri(with an anomaly here and there against truly horrible teams) can’t seem to come to the conclusion, he stinks. But they can after seeing Anderson play for 2 or 3 quarters, total.
Amazing…really amazing.
Glad to see you finally come on over Incline.
Welcome to the Start anybody but Sunseri Club.
haha
Is he being gingerly sacked, I know on some of the longer runs of his, it seems like the defenders are actually running away from him. Don’t believe it, watch a replay of the Bowl game from last year or the USF game from this year.
Strange but true.
I think there were many, many improvements from Pitt over last year’s Brawl. Attitude, competitiveness, overall defense, all so much better…I think that’s what makes the QB role so hard to take – along with the over-injured, generally inept offense. Will we have three ready-to-go QBs next year, just in case the injury bug strikes again??
However, the OL and WR also has to share the blame .. just because our QB didn’t throw the ball away after 3 seconds doesn’t absolve the OL and WR from any blame. So what we if Tino would have had 5 more completions and 5 less sacks … we still lose the game.
Last year Tino was sacked 21 times in 13 games; this yea, 50 so far.
WE could have used a playmaker .. someone stepping up an makeing the play … instead of Street not holding on to a long pass (yes, it was a bit underthrown but still catchable) and how about Carswell short-arming the other long pass (hell, that may have been the best pass Tino threw all year)
WE NEEDED A PLAYMAKER … hell, we had Shanahan returning punts!!!
Coaches during that time
1) Johnny Majors (National championship and heisman)
2) Jackie Sherrill (perennial to 5 finisher)
3) Sarafino Foge Fazio (second worst PITT coach ever(
3) Mike Godfried (better than average but gets the start for the trifecta – beats Penn St., ND, and WVU in the same season! Will always have a special place in PITT fans heart for that one!)
4) Paul “I can’t hack it anymore” Hackett (worst coach in PITT history)
5) Johhny Majors (second coming was for PR reasons only after Paul Hackett tried to dismantle the program with his ineptitude. He did his job)
6) Walt Harris “Pitt should be glad to have me since they aren’t the dream job that they think” enough said…got fired one statement too late. Perennial underachiever saved by VT win every season
7) Dave “Mr Entitlement” Wannstedt. Deputy downer himself. The perennial downplayer. How could any player play for a coach who constantly preached that they werent as good as people thought?
8) Todd “low octane, big talk” Graham. He has two more year at best. No BCS by 2013 No Job in 2014. You get your one year pass with excuses. Suggestion – next year leave the big talk at home.
So that would be 8 coaches in 36 years. (one coach every 4.5 years). Folks, it aint easy picking a coach who can win. A lot of fraudulent coaches out there.
And very enjoyable to watch, I must add.
Biggest farce of a 9-2 team(well now 9-3) I’ve ever seen. Only Paterno being able to make that schedule, that didn’t include EITHER Michigan or Michigan State, two of the top teams in the Little 11, er 12. What….no Land Grant Trophy Bowl this year ! What’s up with that, college football will never be the same.
I guess they wanted to make sure he got the most victory record by a coach before he went off into dementia.
Rutgers pulled a Pitt, going up to Uconn and getting their hats handed to them when they could have won the BigEast for the very first time.
Schiano is another one, who I don’t understand how he keeps his job. Guy always bungles any big game Rutgers is in. 3rd tier bowl for Cignetti and former Pitt pals again! And Cincy got their act together under Munchie the QB and beat pathetic Cuse.
Next week two pathetic teams vie for bowl eligibility. Think I’ll take a pass on that epic struggle. Our vaunted qb is due for a big game against the pathetic Cuse defense, even Munchie had a big game(in his 2nd career start) against that horrid D, today. So the season will end with the vaunted qb playing well against Cuse and whatever joke of a team we play in the Sloppy Joe O’Brady Bowl. And said vaunted qb will be the Sloppy Joe Bowl MVP, as I predicted many weeks ago.
Setting him up for his big encore senior season as Pitt’s QB. I can’t wait ! (not really)
Truth & Virtue. (Does TG know this is the school motto, and for that matter how about Smiley)
Hail to Pitt !
Getting to a bowl is not the goal of a team. Winning the conference Championship is not the goal of the team. The team should have new goals every week. First week goal, win game 1. Second week goal, improve over first week. Win second week game. If first week game was a loss, the new goal is to win game 2 and each player and coach improving.You can’t be bowl eligible if you don’t win game 1 and so on. You can’t win your conference championship until you win the first conference game an so forth. It is sports psychology fellas.
That speech was weak….
Tino trying to stay in bounds at the end to keep the game clock running was priceless….
Low football mentality from the qb….time, place, circumstance, trends….
Emel’s rapid fire, insightful posts are enjoyed by most venting fans on here. Rock on Emel. Keep firing away.
