A sampling of Pitt football posts that would get a bigger hit count then mentioning the BBVA Bowl:

1. Recruiting
2. 2012 QB speculation
3. Tino-bashing
4. Speculating on new assistant coaching hires
5. Panthers in the pros
6. Mocking Hoopies
7. Mocking Nits
8. Expansiopocolypse updates
9. Paul Hackett retrospective

You get the idea. And it’s not that I won’t watch, and react. It’s not that I won’t be writing about it — both before and after. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s not even that the game is Alabama (this is a made-for-TV-bowl, after all). It is that it is 3 1/2 weeks away and against SMU. Still I have tabs to clear and I’m sick of seeing these.

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Here’s the situation. No one is happy with Tino Sunseri as Pitt’s starting QB. The thought of a third year of brain locks. Of holding the ball too long. Of staring down receivers. Of not setting feet. Of not being able to make accurate throws of more than 10-15 yards down field. Well, no one wants that. Not the fans. Not the coaches. To quote a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings, “The prospect of doing it all over again… quite frankly gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, you know what I mean?”

Unfortunately, at the present the options on the roster are limited. That means Pitt needs another QB for 2012 who can play right away.

Jared Johnson is not really a QB that can necessarily come right in and start in 2012 any more than Chad Voytik. Yet, he is being pursued by Pitt.

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A couple things I forgot to include in the basketball post from earlier.

Once again, the free throw shooting in the final minute played a role in making the game tighter than it should have been. With a minute left, Pitt had a 9 point lead, 70-61. Pitt shot 4-8 on free throws down the stretch. Dante Taylor was fouled and missed both FTs. Then Nasir Robinson went only 1-2 when he was fouled.

The good news, was that Pitt worked harder to make sure Ashton Gibbs got the ball in his hands in the next possession. Gibbs, in fact, took the last four free throws. As we saw in the Tennessee game, the struggle with FTs made the final score tighter than it needed to be. Just going to have to keep sweating that for a while longer.

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Coach Dixon sounds the realistic and optimistic thoughts after the win over Oklahoma State.

“We have work to do,” Dixon said after the Oklahoma State game. “This is a good win, but we have a lot of work to do. I look forward to this next week as we can try to get better. We have improved a lot. There’s no question about it. But we have a lot we can improve on.”

…

“We’re off the radar because of our youth,” Dixon said. “We have six freshmen. It’s understandable. We didn’t want to be one of those elite teams in November. We want to be one of those teams late in the year.”

It wasn’t a great win, but another good win. We are seeing players make strides. Some are stumbling. It is all still, very uneven. So say it with me again: “Progress and improvement are not straight lines.”

Sophomore forward Lamar Patterson, a first-year starter, believes the Panthers are close to becoming a team that can control games from start to finish.

“I feel it,” Patterson said. “You can see it on the court. We have little [spurts] where you can see our potential. You can see how dominant we can be. Just being able to do that throughout the game, that will come with more experience and guys getting on the court more. We have so much potential. We’re just going to keep working.”

You can see some players like Lamar Patterson and Dante Taylor are finding a level of comfort right now. A better sense of how they should be playing and awareness of what they can and cannot do.

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UPDATE: The tip-off for Pitt-OSU is now 2:50. Liveblog will be pushed to 2:45.

It’s the Cowboys of Oklahoma State and Pitt. Pitt and OK State have met twice since the 2004 Sweet Sixteen game, and I’m still bitter.  Just setting up the placeholder. Everything will be ready to go by 2:30 for The game is on ESPN2 for the CarQuest Auto Care Classic.

No time at the moment to put everything together. Things that need to be done to placate the family so that the 2 hours or so of this game are given to me in some relative form of peace.

Oklahoma St. has been predicted to be middle-of-the-pack in the Big 12. They have a potential one-and-done in LeBryan Nash. They are off to a 6-2 start. Both losses came at Madison Square Garden in the NIT Tip-Off. Yes, this is the third game that OSU will have played at MSG in their first 9.

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Pitt will be having kids visit for football recruiting this weekend and next. One of the visitors this weekend, defensive lineman Ryan Watson. The DL from Maryland is expecting after the Pitt visit to make a choice at some point in the near future.

The 6-foot-3, 275-pound Watson visited Purdue this past weekend and plans to visit Pittsburgh this weekend.

“Just those two [official visits] right now,” Watson said. “It’s probably going to be between those two.”

Watson is being recruited to play on defense by both schools.

Purdue “was really good, I especially like the people there and everyone was nice, including the coaching staff,” Watson said. “I really like the opportunity [at Pittsburgh] and Coach [Paul] Randolph, the defensive line coach and the head coach [Todd Graham]. When I went there for an unofficial, it was a really nice campus.”

Watson is nearly a consensus 4-star recruit. Rivals.com, Scout.com and 24/7 all list him at 4-star. ESPN (Insider subs.) says 3-star, but they also list him as an offensive lineman. He plays both ways, but all other reports say his future is most likely at defensive end or tackle — and indeed Pitt is recruiting him for the defensive side.

Here’s the situation. No one is happy with Tino Sunseri as Pitt’s starting QB. The thought of a third year of brain locks. Of holding the ball too long. Of staring down receivers. Of not setting feet. Of not being able to make accurate throws of more than 10-15 yards down field. Well, no one wants that. Not the fans. Not the coaches. To quote a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings, “The prospect of doing it all over again… quite frankly gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, you know what I mean?”

Unfortunately, at the present the options on the roster are limited. That means Pitt needs another QB for 2012 who can play right away.

First up, Deon Anthony.

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Here’s the situation. No one is happy with Tino Sunseri as Pitt’s starting QB. The thought of a third year of brain locks. Of holding the ball too long. Of staring down receivers. Of not setting feet. Of not being able to make accurate throws of more than 10-15 yards down field. Well, no one wants that. Not the fans. Not the coaches. To quote a race of hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings, “The prospect of doing it all over again… quite frankly gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies, you know what I mean?”

Unfortunately, at the present the options on the roster are limited. That means Pitt needs another QB for 2012 who can play right away.

There’s incoming freshmen (and hopefully stud) QB Chad Voytik. There’s Trey Anderson. There’s Anthony Gonzalez. And possibly Mike Myers. In other words, Pitt needs another QB who can compete immediately for the starting QB job.

The belief is that Chad Voytik will be Pitt’s QB in another year, but as much as Coaches Todd Graham and Dodge seem to believe that, they are also rational enough to know you don’t place all your eggs in one place by putting all the pressure immediately on a freshman. Ideally, they would love to give him a redshirt year and bridge 2012 before really being ready to truly having him compete for the job.

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After developing ulcers from watching our QB play over the regular season, and with all the current talk about Todd Graham advertising for an alternative at QB for next year, let’s take a look back and see how we got into the fix we are in now.

Early on in the 2010 preseason Dave Wannstedt announced that Tino Sunseri was going to be the starting QB in 2010.  He did this by telling us “Its Tino’s time’ in August of 2010 when he set the QB depth chart in stone by cutting out the competition.  From August 7^th on what we saw was what we got.

Sunseri’s 2010 season was much like the one we just watched him finish.  Listed below are his stats throughout his career – his 2010 year is bolded and you can see that, on paper, he looked pretty decent for a first year starter.

That’s on paper mind you.  What skews this is that mid-season Sunseri had two monster games against two of the more porous pass defenses in the nation in Syracuse and Rutgers.  Take away those two games and Sunseri played stone cold average at best in compiling these stats:

He was 172 of 308 (56%) for 1984 yards with 9 TDs and 8 INTs in the other 11 games.  Spread that out as an average per game and he averaged 16 of 28 (57%) for 180 yards with .81 TDs and .72 INTs per start.  Combined with much the same type infuriating inconsistency that we’ve seen this season from Sunseri and you can see why we ended up 7-5 even with loads of other talented players on offense.

(Edit: as pointed out by a commenter, Syracuse did have a good pass defense and I was mistaken to call it porous… RU on the other hand pretty much sucked.)

I’m not sure that PITT fans realize just how ineffective he was for the vast majority of 2010. (more…)

With only 7 full games (he started game 8, but went down in the first minutes of the game) Ray Graham still was impressive enough to be named 1st Team All-Big East. He couldn’t win offensive player of the year (that went to Cinci RB, Isiah Pead), but it is still a solid accomplishment.

Graham — probably not surprisingly — was the only Pitt player named to the All-Big East Team (1st or 2d).

On defense, Pitt placed five players. Only Safety Jared Holley, however, was a 1st teamer. Chas Alecxih, Aaron Donald, Max Gruder and Antwuan Reed were all named to the 2nd team. Somewhat surprisingly, Brandon Lindsey didn’t make either team. The Big East stats stuff list him as a linebacker which may have contributed to the confusion.

You know what’s sad? Well, many things regarding expansiopocolypse, but what is sad for purposes of this post is that the Big Sprawl Logo that FearTheStache did for me last year is now outdated.

We need the entire Continental US on the logo (don’t worry, I’m sure the University of Alaska Seawolves will be invited soon to add that all-important Anchorage market).

It is comical that the Big East is keeping its name. Apparently “Big Least” jokes are funny to the offices in Providence as well. Hell, I realize they think it has cache in basketball, but the name is not like the Pac-[insert number here], the SEC, Big 10, ACC or even the Big 12. This is the time to change it up — and get the offices the hell out of Providence. I recommend the CCC, or Coast-to-Coast Conference.

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I’m drafting an ‘end of the season’ piece that I’ll post in the next couple days but here are some thoughts on the “news” Zeise writes about today in the P-G.

There is nothing out of the ordinary when you have division and complaint after a major coaching staff change.  I wrote back in April that in spring practices it looked to me like there was across the board ‘buy-in’ from the players on roster. The players I watched were all excited and active in going about their practices and drills and the ones I talked to were very upbeat and looking forward to the season.   I think that’s pretty much true today also, with some exceptions.

Playing .500 ball during the season didn’t help smooth the transition between a new coaching staff and the new styles of play as much as a winning season would.  Graham pumped these kids up with some pretty high expectations and those dreams of a big season for the seniors not only didn’t happen but it became pretty obvious early on that it wasn’t going to.  Coming back down into reality means there are hard landings sometimes.  That probably skewed some upperclassmen’s opinions.

One thing we fans have to realize is that all the romantic visions of players and staff linking arms and singing Kumbaya just never happens no matter how much fans want it to.

It’s obvious that a few players didn’t like the firing of Dave Wannstedt and have let that influence their senior seasons.  Nix is one I believe and that may be the reason he hesitated on getting back in the lineup.  I don’t think it was any coincidence that he felt better and played the last two games of the season, one of which was the holiday national broadcast of the Brawl.  He had to show the NFL scouts that his injury wasn’t chronic before draft day and he couldn’t take a chance that he’d be able to do that in a bowl game… as PITT certainly wasn’t guaranteed to land in one.  (more…)

Toying with them. Glorified exhibition. Whatever you want to call it. Pitt had the game locked up early.

Most of the game, as expected, was about playing with the line-up, rotation and seeing what some of the kids not getting minutes can do (well, the ones not heading for a redshirt — Durand Johnson and Malcolm Gilbert).

Briefly on some things: Gibbs shot way too much for a game like this. Nas dominated with another double-double. VMI is small, and Pitt set a new team best with 60 rebounds in the game. Oh, and Pitt is hitting a lot of threes this year.

Khem Birch did not see much action because he committed 4 fouls in 11 minutes. Limiting his own minutes this game.He grabbed 6 rebounds and a block in that same time frame. Birch is still a freshman, and that line is a less than subtle reminder of it.

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Not TV. No internet. If you aren’t going to the game or don’t have Comcast in Western PA, you are out of luck to see this one.

This game is one Pitt should win easily. The real interest is seeing how Coach Jamie Dixon plays with the rotation. He needs to see if he can find a combination that will give Gibbs some more minutes to rest on the bench.

Well Pitt is heading to Birmingham and the big discussion point is Dave Wannstedt. Wait. Is this 2011 or 2010?

Now let’s get this out of the way. I like Dave Wannstedt. I know he cares deeply about Pitt. I know he desperately wanted this to work. He wanted to win and win big at his alma mater. In his home turf. He wanted to be coaching Pitt for a good 10 to 15 more years. It hurt him terribly to be fired by Pitt. Especially since he never saw it coming.

I also know he cares deeply about the players that he recruited on this Pitt team. Not Jerry Sandusky or Bernie Fine deeply, but he cared.

There comes a point, though, where he has to either stop talking or be nice. What he did yesterday was more pointed, but similar to the stuff he has been doing since leaving Pittsburgh to coach linebackers for the Buffalo Bills. I’ve tried to avoid it because it should be in the past, and I had hoped that someone would tell him that he is making himself look bad. Clearly that isn’t happening.

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