My friends, I’d like to take a few minutes and let you all know just how much I’ve appreciated both the opportunity to contribute to The PITT Blather as a writer and the interactions we have had when you all commented on those articles.

I posted 154  pieces on here and am proud of every one of them.  I am most proud though of the fantastic readers and commenters on this site and of the truly high level of discourse we have had over the years.  It has been a real blast to be able to travel around representing the Blather, researching issues, trying to get the facts and then letting you all know what I found out and my thoughts and opinions and how I came to them.

As you can see over the last year The PITT Blather has added some new writers.  There will be  an injection of new writing blood with at least two new contributors, one a student-athlete from PITT, weighing in.  Justin is a well grounded and detailed writer and a great read.  That is well and good and I wish them all the best.

With that, I’m going to move onto other things and let the Blather go on without me.  I know, I know – it is no big loss and it probably isn’t.  There is going to be quality stuff on here as there has always been and hopefully just as much good and detailed discussion as we have all had in the past.

I have nothing but gratitude for Chas Rich for the chance he gave me to be part of this blog.  I not sure the readers know this but Chas is about the best possible publisher there is.  In all my time here he changed only one article and that was to make it more readable.  Other than that I was free to write what I wanted and when I wanted with no fear of editing or censorship – and I wrote some pretty controversial things.

Of course I’ll still read The Blather every morning and evening and comment as I have been doing.  There just won’t be many, if any, articles with my name on them any longer.  If anyone is at all interested in what I have to say more formally about PITT football just look around, I’ll still be attending practices, talking with others and writing and posting in other sites.  This really is going to be a fun and interesting second year for Paul Chryst and PITT football with a ton of things to talk about.

My true thanks to all, goodbye and Hail to Pitt!

Reed

My friend Sean and myself headed over to the spring game yesterday not sure what to expect. We’re the odd types who are still optimistic but with spring games it’s really tough to judge things when a team is facing itself. Is something a good play by one or a bad play by another? I went into this with the intention of only looking at things I could say with certainty and the best way to do that is look at individual performances as opposed to overall impressions. Did the offense look better than the defense yesterday? Yes, but there are so many factors that go into that; I’m not willing to say the offense is better. If the offense was running complex plays and the defense was running a more vanilla setup, it makes a big difference.

I’ll start off with the thing everyone cares about the most: QB. I’m going to do 2 entries for the spring game: QBs and everyone else. I’ll start with the QBs today and get everything else done after watching the game on ESPN3 because it’s tough to see OL and DL play live.

(more…)