I’ve waited until spring practice is a third finished before chipping in an article because now we have something of substance to talk about as far as playing actual football goes.  There seems to be a different attitude around the Southside these days.  Gone is the jumping up and down and swearing things are going to fantastic, dammit!!

This version is business, business and more business.  There doesn’t seem to be much false bravado by either the players or the staff.  It feels like that all know that there is a long road to hoe to get back to what a good, solid program is and they want to do it the right way.

Paul Zeise reports hard hitting and fundamental football… “Pitt is playing football again, at least football the way people here in Western Pennsylvania want to see it played.”  That and the OL is shaping up to be the ‘smash mouth’ run blocking unit that PITT and Pittsburghers love to watch.

Our new OL coach, Jim Hueber will take no crap this year judging from his first interview.  You have to laugh just a little when a new coach states that “we have some kids who may not want to be here”.  This coming after we just had a whole coaching staff who ‘didn’t want to be here’.  Perfect!

Now, about that pesky pass blocking…

That said, the reports out of camp are pretty typical interviews and post-practice press conferences – that is if you can actually sit and listen to one of Chryst’s from start to finish.  I really like Paul Chryst and think he’ll be just what we need but it is tough to watch him answer the questions thrown at him when you can tell he really doesn’t want to be there anyway.

PITT is again putting out a nice spring practice website this year with a slew of articles and interviews after each practice.  Here is the March 20^th version.

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Chas has been doing great articles on the spring practices so far so I wanted to add a little something to Chas’ article yesterday about our first verbal.

Chryst just landed TE Scott Orndoff as his first verbal of the 2013 class.  He’s a good one ranked as the #13 TE nationally and a kid who had great offers to choose from.  He would have racked up more as his SR year went on.

Orndoff had verballed to Chryst and Joe Rudolph last summer but with those two leaving Wisconsin he opened his recruitment back up again.  An interesting point in his decision making is that he made his final decision in the car with his father on the drive back from an official visit to Michigan… not too shabby at that, eh?  At that age I would have been asleep or drunk during a five hour road trip.

Here is a good highlight film of Orndoff’s JR season at Seton-LaSalle HS.  He had 20 catches for 385 yards and four TDs last season.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see him get another star if he plays up to potential this year.  One thing about this highlight film though – Orndoff is split wide on every play.

Makes you wonder how good of a blocker the kid is but he’s quick and agile after the catch.  Perhaps the staff is looking at J. P. Holtz as the Nate Byham Memorial blocking TE and Orndoff will fill the anti-Byham role by actually being thrown to.  History with the Wisconsin approach is that the TEs will see some real offensive action during the year.

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I’m not sure there was any other Pitt player from this present era more suited to play, live and enjoy life in Europe.