With Big 12 and SEC meetings this week, expansiopocolypse talk picked up in the lead-in to the meetings. The meetings themselves were not supposed to result in any changes, but the chance for the media to talk to coaches and ADs would keep the story going.

That story has been a dud. The SEC has nothing to say on the matter. They just expanded to 14, so there really was no way that they were going to be doing anymore expansion. The Big 12, ah, now that should be where the story was.

Or not so much. Texas AD DeLoss Dodds said last week that he felt that there was no need for any expansion right now (unless Notre Dame came calling). Outgoing temp Big 12 Commissioner Chuck Neinas also suggested strongly that the Big 12 would be best served to stay settled and stabilized for a while after all the upheaval to the conference over the last couple years. Even the newbies at TCU want to wait. Heck,the incoming Big 12 Commissioner has been on record for over 2 weeks as saying he is no hurry to expand.

Now that the meetings are underway, any cracks?

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Over the weekend Pitt released info on the highest paid university employees for the past fiscal year (July 2010-June 2011).

Ex-head football coach Dave Wannstedt was actually the top earner at $1,859,357. That number seems higher than what his salary was believed to be. Considering his termination, I figure the number is higher than expected because he got something of a buyout on his contract on top of his salary for the year.

Coach Jamie Dixon had a boost from previous earnings to be getting over $1.8 million for the season. That isn’t too surprising given the overall success, and offers he’s had. There’s no question that the money is a reason why he hasn’t been hired away by other programs in the past couple years. To make it worth his while to leave where he is established, a program would now have to start the offer at $2.5 million just to get him to seriously listen. Not even to leave. Just to take the offer seriously.

That’s a lot for a college basketball coach. A figure not many are that willing to pay as a starting figure — even for an established coach.

According to the USA Today database, only 9 schools pay their coaches at $2.5 million or more (OSU, MSU, Marquette, Kentucky, Louisville, Kansas, Florida, Duke and UConn). After that, 9 schools pay $2 million or more (Indiana, Michigan, Purdue, Texas, Wisconsin, WVU, Arkansas, Arizona and UCLA). Marquette is the only surprise on the list, but Buzz Williams has been a surprisingly good coach who has attracted a lot of deep-pocketed attention the last couple of years.

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After missing the NCAA Tournament and a disappointing season, Pitt wasn’t getting much attention for the following year. Not much of a mention in the assorted way too early top-25 predictions. Even Pitt’s top recruit, Steven Adams, was overshadowed by the various undecided and reclassifying top recruits.

Still, there has been some more buzz picking up as the summer starts its long stretch.

Steven Adams is noted for his potential as a defender in  a list of  shot blockers.

Yes, another freshman on the list. Another guy who hasn’t competed in a collegiate game yet. But I think Davis’ success last season means these youngsters earn early credit on potential alone. This 7-footer has been a beast on the AAU and prep circuits. The standout from New Zealand also has international experience. So he’ll be a young veteran for a Pitt team that needs his physical presence inside. Adams has the athleticism to be a great shot-blocker at this level.

But it was the NCAA waiver that allows Trey Zeigler to start for Pitt this season. Suddenly both Zeigler and Adams become  top Big East players to watch this season.

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Every family is crazy in their own way.

Now that Pitt is heading to the ACC, we are getting a crash course in the crazy and issues of the ACC family. We’ve learned a bit about FSU’s (and to some extent Clemson’s) issues with the ACC. The whole basketball league, controlled by North Carolina interests, dragging/keeping down the football.

What’s interesting is the longtime ill-will towards ACC Commish John Swofford. From the vantage point of a Providence-based conference, Swofford has appeared to be a rather aggressive and dare I say dynamic leader of the ACC. He engineered the raid of the Big East to get Miami, BC and VT — entirely to bolster the football side of things. To do it he navigated over the explicit objections of Duke and UNC on the expansion. He worked around the Virginia politics that forced VT over Syracuse late in the process. He got the conference good TV money in the aftermath. Then he staged the second expansion that got Pitt and Cuse out of the Big East for next year (yes, technically Pitt and Cuse are not out of the Big East until 2014, but we all know the reality).

It seems, though, that from within the ACC the Swofford reign is much less charitably viewed. One place that truly hates the Commisioner: Clemson.

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Setting aside the arguments that know we are going to get into on a regular basis from now until Sept. 1 regarding who should be our starting QB going into the 2012 season, lets discuss how we got to be where we are today with that position and what this staff needs to do to correct it.

I’m going to piggy-back on Chris Peak’s work over at Rivals.com with his excellent article on the subject.  Please read it in its entirety and post your thoughts after you finish with this post.  (Thanks Chris, great work).

Needless to say we just experience a full six years under Dave Wannstedt where it was obvious that his idea of an offense didn’t begin with a top shelf QB. He was stuck in his NFL rut to where he felt that if every other aspect of the offense is strong then all the QB has to be is a delivery system for getting the ball to the running backs.

His choice of NFL QBs ain’t Murder’s Row.  When he was HC of the Bears he had:  Harbaugh, Walsh, Kramer, Krieg and Mirer.  Wait, it gets better.  When he was HC of the Dolphins he had Dan Marino, whom he forced out for Fielder and followed up with A.J. Feeley.  Awesome Dave!

At PITT he took his inherited QB, Tyler Palko (It’s Tyler Time!!) anointed him the starter basically forcing Flacco to split and then tied one hand behind Palko’s back to fit that NFL mold.  Flacco’s leaving  left us with nothing after Palko.

Problems continued because of this – “Of course, those issues were compounded when neither of the quarterbacks signed in Dave Wannstedt’s first class – Kevan Smith and Dexter Davidson – turned out to be viable options. ”   

OK guys, you can break out the kleenex now and I’m sorry to have reminded you.  Kevan Smith and Dexter Davidson.  Two answers to PITT trivia questions 25 years from now.  My God.

Does that sound familiar?  “neither… turned out to be viable options”?   Think Myers, Gonzalez and Anderson this season.

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Spent the afternoon and evening driving to my folks house for the weekend. My mom retired from teaching this week and they are a week away from moving down to Houston — where my sister lives. My reward for 7 hours on the road with the wife and two kids under the age of 10: drinking my dad’s good Scotch (right now it’s a a 16-year old Lagavulin) and finding out Trey Zeigler got a waiver to be eligible to play in the 2012-13 season.

Now typically you put out bad news late on a Friday of a holiday weekend, but we’ll let this slide as the exception.

“Trey was hopeful he would be eligible to play this year,” Dixon said. “Our associate athletic director Dan Bartholomae has been outstanding throughout this entire process with the NCAA and we are all very grateful that it worked out in Trey’s favor.”

According to tweets from Post-Gazette Pitt basketball beat writer Ray Fittipaldo, Pitt let Zeigler know as they were recruiting him that they believed he could get an immediate waiver. And that Zeigler has been on campus for the past couple weeks getting used/acclimated to the system and the players.

Needless to say, Pitt suddenly looks a even better for the 2012 season than before. The guard situation looks really good with Woodall, Zeigler, and Robinson. At small/wing forward with Patterson and Moore. Center with Adams. If Zanna continues to progress at power forward… Well, I think I need to reign in feelings of unbridled optimism.

Earlier in the week, BC blog, Eagle in Atlanta wrote a really excellent post on how and why ESPN should step in to defuse the whole mess of FSU wanting to flee (with another ACC school in tow) to the Big 12. It lays out a great case as to why it is in ESPN’s interest to do so and draws parallels to the way ESPN worked to make sure Texas didn’t destroy the Big 12 by leaving for the Pac-10/12/16. He doesn’t, however, see ESPN showing any interest in taking this kind of action. Read the whole thing, it’s really good.

I do disagree with him, though, in drawing the parallels to Texas. In the case of Texas, they were considering the Pac-12 for more than simply money and football. It was about the alignment with schools in the west. It was academic interests in being part of the Pac-[random number here]. Ultimately, they opted to stay in the Big 12 because it positioned them better — with the help of ESPN — to control more. The money was a big carrot, no question. But it was also the easier path. No fights with the Texas legislature over what would happen to Baylor and Texas Tech.

The better comparison would be to the situation of Texas A&M.

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Unintentional honesty is always fun. There’s the confirmation of what has been rumored, plus the hilarious attempts to walk it back. The latest, TCU AD Chris Del Conte talking about the Big 12.

Del Conte is in Lubbock this morning speaking to a Committee for Champions breakfast on the Texas Tech campus. According to Chris Level, who is the publisher of RedRaiderSports.com and a co-host of a radio show on 104.3 FM in Lubbock; he Tweeted that Del Conte said that the once dead Big 12 “now has schools like Florida State, Clemson and Miami trying to get in.”

This is called a confirmation, and it’s actually on the record.

Not that Del Conte is actually in a hurry to expand the Big 12 — now that TCU is in.

“From my standpoint of right now, I want to stay let’s take our breath. We are in a position of strength. Let’s not rush into anything. We know expansion has to happen. It may not be for a while. We are in the catbird seat right now. We don’t need to rush it. You are excited all of these teams want into the Big 12 and two years ago it was going to disintegrate.”

So how did Del Conte attempt to walk it back? By claiming that he was only commenting on the rumors of teams trying to get into the Big 12. Of course he was. Not actual ACC programs trying to get into to the Big 12.

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His football career is almost certainly done, but he still has his life.

The 20-year-old had been seen by a doctor after he complained of a severe headache and numbness in his side, but no one suspected a stroke.

“Found a mass, a blood clot in the back of his head, and a small one on the left side which caused a stroke and left his right side weak,” Dan Burns, Derrick’s adoptive father, said.

Wow.

Scary beyond belief. The silver lining — and there really is one — is that he will be all right and this can be addressed early enough for him to get well and live a normal life. Yes, football is done for him. But he still can get his education (I am assuming that Pitt is going to do the right thing and honor his scholarship). He still gets to live his life.

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Sorry everyone. We couldn’t even make it to Memorial Day without more Todd Graham spin-time. The latest is an ESPN piece by Ivan Maisel.

So much that could be (and probably will be) picked apart. But, just as I was about to do some, I realized that FraudGraham’s son just contradicted one of his earliest lies.

Todd Graham made the decision to leave Pittsburgh for Arizona State so suddenly in December that he caught his own son Bo unaware, and Bo is a member of his coaching staff. Bo walked out of a recruiting visit in Philadelphia at 9:30 p.m. and his phone rang.

“Hey,” Todd Graham said, “you need to come back here. Where are you?”

“You sent me to Philly,” Bo said. “Don’t you remember? Why do I need to come back?”

“Because I resigned my job.”

“You did what?”

“I resigned my job.”

“Why? Why would you do that?”

“Because I took another one.”

But… But… I thought Todd Graham resigned, without having the ASU job in hand. It was his leap of faith for his dream job.

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Well, like it or not, this is going to be a reoccurring topic for a while.

Let’s start with some background. Specifically when the Seminoles chose to go to the ACC over the SEC.

While conference affiliation would impact FSU’s entire athletic program, suggesting that football was anything less than a major factor in expansion talk would be naive. So while (Bobby) Bowden was not directly involved in the decision, his support was critical in the process.

Not surprisingly, the Birmingham born-and-raised Seminoles coach — who spent one year as a quarterback at Alabama — said the SEC was ‘emotionally’ his first choice. Even so, he carefully weighed all options.

‘I was probably involved just about as much as anybody in that I agreed to [the ACC],’ Bowden said. ‘I think if I would have wanted to fight for the SEC it might have caused some concerns for everybody, but I didn’t feel that way.

‘When you started looking at it from a financial perspective and what’s best for us, I felt pretty sure what we should do is go ahead and join the ACC. … Bob [Goin] had it laid out pretty good. I’ll be honest with you, it was a no-brainer.’

Haggard, like many on the advisory committee, valued Bowden’s view on the choice of conference.

‘Bobby was totally SEC when it started,’ (Andy) Haggard said. ‘As Bobby’s thinking changed, our thinking changed. It ended up unanimous ACC.’ (Haggard is currently the chairman of FSU’s board of trustees and he was the man quoted in yesterday’s story regarding FSU’s expansion committee.)

By the time a contingent of ACC school and league officials made their Sept. 2 tour of FSU’s campus, the league had already made substantial gains on the SEC’s initial foothold. Finances, football and basketball prowess aside, the ACC’s overall image — specifically its academic reputation — had left a strong impression.

‘More people here wanted the ACC; that’s what really changed me,’ Sliger said. ‘The faculty really wanted the ACC. There were very few [faculty members] that had gone to the SEC, but many of them had gone to North Carolina and Virginia, places like that.’

While the ACC and FSU continued to discover common ground through the search process, the SEC was losing ground.

That’s right, the same Andy Haggard that shot off his mouth two weekends ago about running to the Big 12 was part of the crowd that followed what Bobby Bowden wanted back in 1990.

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Welp, so much for that whole first scholarship football player from Indiana in 40-some years. Dan Samuelson has dumped Pitt and is now dating Nebraska. But he wants Pitt to know, it’s not you, it’s him.

The family liked Pitt plenty. They still think highly of the program and coaches. “We have a tremendous amount of respect for them,” said Tom [Samuelson]. “They did nothing wrong.”

Dan had visited the Pittsburgh campus three times, in fact.

But two Saturdays ago, he received a new offer from a school he just had to check out.

So the family stopped into Nebraska this past weekend. Immediately there was a connection…

But, really, it isn’t at all as it seems. It isn’t switching simply because Nebraska was a bigger, higher-profile offer. He’s really not that kind of guy.

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Still no confirmed reports on what sent Derrick Burns to the hospital.

Pitt football player Derrick Burns was hospitalized Tuesday with an unspecified medical condition, according to a statement released by the school’s athletic department.

Burns, a 5-foot-11, 235-pound redshirt freshman fullback, was listed in stable condition Tuesday night. More information about his condition was expected after tests were completed.

Rumors are he was life-flighted to UPMC. That there is a blood clot. But again, no confirmation.

Hopefully this will turn out to be a small problem, or one that was caught early enough. It goes without saying, that his football career takes a backseat to being able to live a long and healthy life.

Lot in the offline world, so I’ll just push out some stories.

Pitt athletes going to Haiti. Doing some of good at orphanages. Not just the football players. No excerpts for this. Just read all the pieces.

A reminder that the players experience at Pitt has been nothing like they expected.

There’s no other way to say it: no group of players has ever been screwed over like these Pitt players.

From Dave Wannstedt to Mike Haywood to Todd Graham to Chryst. Meet your new coach, fellas.

Now go out and make it work in crunch time, play like it’s second nature and don’t — for the love of pigskin — underachieve.

“We had great coaches with (Wannstedt), we respected them and they were let go,” said Pitt guard Chris Jacobson. “Then Graham gets here and we buy into what he’s saying, he leaves and it’s here we go again. Then (Chryst) gets here, and now everyone is buying into what he’s saying.”

Jacobson is then reminded he missed a coach in Haywood.

“Just a handshake,” Jacobson said, “and he was gone.”

Then it ends with the circle — possibly closing.

Chryst also had played for three coaches in four years at Wisconsin in the late 1980s. Maybe Pitt finally has found the perfect match.

We can hope.

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Last week, it seemed that things were beginning to slightly cool down from all the expansiopocolypse talk of Florida State and another ACC team (Clemson, Miami, VT, GT all being mentioned) fleeing to the Big 12. The FSU president put out a pointed statement talking down the Big 12. The details about media contracts were better explained.

Then this:

The champions of the Big 12 and SEC conferences will meet in a New Year’s Day bowl game annually beginning with the 2014 season, the conferences said Friday in a news release.

The five-year agreement calls for the champions of each conference to be in the matchup “unless one or both are selected to play in the new four-team model to determine the national championship,” the statement said.

“Should that occur, another deserving team from the conference(s) would be selected for the game,” the release said.

The style of the agreement will be similar to the one the Rose Bowl has with the Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences.

This was a largely symbolic gesture, but one that was immediately treated with deeper meanings.

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