Being 3-1 is within the expected area before the season started. The over the moon optimist dreamed of 4-0. The complete pessimist said 1-3. There’s a lot of work needed with this team. Everyone knew that going into the season. There’s a lot that won’t get fixed this year, because of the players in place or the coaching. That’s reality.
What I find strange is complaining about being 3-1, because the last two wins highlighted many of the problems even as Pitt managed to win. Does Pitt “deserve” to be 3-1? Yes. Not because they are a Florida or Georgia-level 3-1 team. But because they were better than the three teams they beat.
If Virginia won yesterday, they would be a 3-1 team. If Pitt had lost to Duke last week, Duke would be a 4-1 team. Would they “deserve” that record?
Here are the teams that are 3-1 at this point:
Cinci, Rutgers, UCF, NC St, GT, Mich. St., Neb., Ill, PSU, East Carolina, Ohio, Fla., Ga., South Carolina, Auburn, Ole Miss, ASU, Ariz, Utah and Tx St.
You can try to put them in some order. Or you can wait to let them sort themselves out beyond the 1/3 mark of the season.
I’m happy to have the wins. I don’t expect Pitt to challenge for the Coastal Division simply because they sit tied for 2d at the end of September. It is not outrageous or completely negative to realistically believe that Pitt only wins 2 or 3 more games the rest of the season. I also don’t think it is seeing things through blue-and-gold glasses to see Pitt go 5-3 the rest of the season. This is a team right now that is not great and it is not terrible. It is somewhere in that wide swath in the middle. We are still trying to figure out if they are good or meh.
Do they improve and build on things? Are they plateaued at points? I really don’t know. No one really knows. From the perspective of the overall talent, you could say that this team is not so far apart from the 6-6 teams of the previous two years.
The only thing I am starting to think that is really different, is that this team has something that the teams the last couple years don’t. The ability to overcome some bad breaks and take advantage of a few good ones.
PC said in presser that he expects Savage will play .. that they were mild symptons but no concussion
Va Tech game to start at noon .. meaning it will be somewhere on the ESPN network
Hopefully we will get used to hanging on to win and even someday the experience of a come from behind victory.
Coming home from SEC and ACC country, you see that Pitt has to pick it up quite a bit in fan frenzy.
In Gatlinburg, many, many Tennessee fans dressed in Orange T’s. Lots of Kentucky, Alabama, and NC garb. Definitely Dukes of Hazzard meets Hee Haw country. I am talking whole families dressed in their colors.
Ashville is a great place to visit, the street scene is entertaining, the bars and restaurants are great, shopping for the ladies, and lady watching for the guys, thanks Iron Duke for the suggestion, that micro brewery was hopping.
I don’t know what to think about VT, hopefully we will find a new way to win, special teams would be poetic.
This blog doesn’t have regular beat writers who attend every practice and make PITT football a full time job as the recruiting sites do.
One of the great traditions I’ve witnessed during prior trips to Annapolis is the post-game gathering of both teams in front of the Navy band during the playing of what I believe is called The Navy Hymn.
What a great reminder that good sportsmanship matters and while Navy may be one’s opponent, they are OUR Navy.
I hope EJ gets HCPC the word on the protocol as we were criticized for not following it after the last visit.
Reed – please adjust/correct where appropriate 🙂
On another note .. I’ve already seen a couple of notes of sympathy for the QB who took a beating on Saturday. Where in the hell was all this sympathy for his predecessor who took similar beatings for the past 2 years (especially 2 years ago?) … and especially from all of you optimists who allegedly have nothing but kind words?
Want to pile on the praise for Number 9’s
performance last Saturday. Very active
and lots of tackles.
Go Fraud (the low life) beat ND and thanks
for sneaking out of Pittsburgh!
wbb, if you must drag our previous QB into the blog again, I will give him credit for this, he sure knew how to take a beating. He was a tuff guy in that regard, and I can’t remember a game where he was knocked out of action. Although if he had had even rudimentary evasion skills he would have avoided many a sack in his days at Pitt.
But to be sure, he was the most common whippin boy that us fans consistantly criticized, me included. I’m sure he hasn’t missed being Pitt fans go to scapegoat since moving on to Canada.
In my own way however, I did give credit to House with my comment,
“all I heard last week was the defense has to stiffen up, they better make adjustments and get their act together”.
Now, they hold a Division 1 team, a team in one of the “Big 5” BCS conferences to a field goal, and I hear from sevral people.
“ya, but Virginia stinks”
“ya, but their receivers dropped the balls”
“ya, but their QB stinks”
In my own way, that was me giving props to House and the defense.
Like I said in a previous post, I didn’t really see the game, but from the radio call it didn’t seem like the offense was running too many screens / draws / short pass plays. I remember hearing about the failed TE screen, but that’s about it. Did we even try to get the ball to a running back on a the screen. Seems illogical for us not to…
Please lets leave the Tino thing alone already. In his entire 3 year career he never threw as many perfectly placed passes to WRs over DBs beyond 25 yards as Savage has in only 4 games. The displeasure for him was about his terrible play at the QB postion, not because he lacked toughness. Hard to feel bad about the beeting a QB is taking who you don’t want on the field in the first place.
God be with him in his football career, but lets put to rest any further discussion and more directly comparisons to Savage.
That’s all I’m going to say!
Aside from that, all the passes were outs or long sideline ones. There were no short or medium passes at all between within the tackles boxes .. Boyd dropped a pass on a crossing pattern early but that was the only crossing pattern I saw all day.
Savage appeared to be pretty much locked in on the 2 WRs who were pretty much doubled-covered … now whether that was design or not, don’t know but I highly suggest they work on a shorter pass game in the next 2 weeks
Real lucky to have the break before VT to get healthy, study the film and come up with the right game plan. I think the rest is especially important to Conner, who does not seem to be as effective in the second half of games.
Pitt played better, but not 52 points better. Virginia was responsible for some of that. To not factor UVa’s ineptitude into an assessment of Pitt’s defensive performance would be unREALISTIC.
I don’t really have a strong opinion on House yet, which is why I didn’t mention him. The Pitt D has faced 4 very different teams both in scheme and talent.
To say the D struggled vs. FSU and Duke is an understatement, but there have been some good signs. I’ll save my judgment of House until after this season.
Now enough said on that subject.
Glad to see the recruiting class of the last two years is helping this team succeed. Too bad the coaches can’t recruit.
Their passing game was pretty pitiful what with the bad passes and the dropped balls… a LOT of dropped balls.
So, IMO you gotta give our defense credit for shutting them down… like they should have.
VT… has got some offensive problems also so there will be opportunity for our D in two weeks.
However, whether or not our D will get picked apart again by a better offense like they got picked apart by FSU and Duke… remains to be seen.
Up to that point… we were not doing bad offensively considering the quality of Virginia’s D.. and if it weren’t for a couple of drops by Street we may have been able to move the ball the length of the field.
And you for sure have to give them credit for sticking the ball in the end zone after those two turnovers.
After that… you could see Savage was still playing 100% but… maybe Virginia found out that our running backs can’t block… and maybe our offensive line let up a bit after those two early scores and then things went downhill.
Wise choice to bring in Ibrahim late with a bit more speed… would expect him to start getting some carries over the course of the game. I guess they were using Boyd lined up in the backfield as the sweep RB but… not sure that is a great idea. We will see if Ibrahim gets more PT come the VT game.
In any case they have to shore up their blocking, No running game of any consistency and Savage sacked 7 times and hurried a bunch of other times… leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Hail to Pitt!
Delvon Simmons could probably ask to come back to Pittsburgh, although his last two stops resulted in head coach firings (texas tech and usc). I wonder if there is interest from either party. He would be an upgrade for next year. I think there were three that signed with TTech a couple of years ago. A tight end who originally committed to Pitt, but then went to TTech and who knows where. Anyway, that was random.
Also, I watched #9 again because I paid him a compliment for this game. Although he improved over prior games, he was also very lucky as VA had some drops and the qb wasn’t all that accurate. He will struggle against good to great qb play.
As far as ASU or ND, gotta go with the lepper cons. We should want ND with as few losses as possible when we play them. I can’t blame any direct report of Steve Pederson leaving. He has been a failure for both of his stints here and it would only make sense for a good coach to leave at the earliest opportunity at upward mobility. That is a shame because Coach Chryst, in my opinion, is the right coach for Pitt. He should have been extended. Pitt will lose him if he happens to go 8-4 or 9-3. Just sayin! If you are Pederson, you need to trust somebody other than Jamie Dixon. Trust goes both ways and Chryst hasn’t received any vote of confidence from the AD and now, recruiting will be more difficult with only three years remaining on a contract. Easy sell from competing coaches, especially the psu coach who has a 10 year contract after an 8-4 year. That’s how a good AD works.
Perhaps the Steelers can hire the Pitt cheerleaders so we have something to watch on Sundays. I can’t believe the Steelers never employed cheerleaders in the past. What a franchise!!
ND SHOULD come through with… from their perspective… a must-win rebound.
Even if ND looks the part of a world beater against ASU… at this early juncture… REALLY, LIKE Pitt’s chances against ND on November 9.
Now if it were only the same for VATech.
The last time he lead a team into South Bend it was Tulsa October 30, 2010. Tulsa won 28-27.
It was however the week of trajedy as the ND team and the entire school were in mourning. The game came days after the accidental death of Declan Sullivan, the 20-year-old student who died after high winds blew over the watch tower he was on while filming football practice.
Graham and his team undoubtedly benefited from the major distraction the tragedy brought to ND’s football program.
Ironically, it was also the win that mistakenly put Fraud Graham on the map as a coach on the rise. Undoubetedly, the win at Notre Dame played a role in landing Graham at Pitt.
At the same time, it is telling that to this day Graham points to the one-point win without any mention of the trajedy playing a role in his vitory.
“We were going into Notre Dame and that was the biggest win in the history of our school,” Graham said (ArizonaSports).
Not this time.
One of the real concerns that the staff has with Savage is that he isn’t as good on the quick reads/quick passes as he is on his deep balls.
Savage is the type of QB who needs that extra time in the pocket to be able to get the ball out accurately. When given that we have seen the excellent results. When asked to speed things up his passes are not accurate and he telegraphs his intent. This is how it has been with him from at least the spring camp at PITT.
Combine that with the need, so far, to keep all the protection they can in on most plays and the result is that his primary receivers, almost all the time, are the WRs. He’s gotten away with this so far as our WRs can make the plays.
But watching the replay of the VA game you can see that when the TEs are released via the playcall he can’t work down his progression and check offs well enough to find them. It is a real problem IMO and one that we have discussed on here for months.
Regarding “He Who Shall Remain Nameless” – it is interesting to see others take the heat for the references. It looks to me like Savage and Sunseri (oops, forgot) are almost 180 degrees from each other in their strengths. TS could hit those short and intermediate passes well, avoid INT sand work his progressions to get us yardage. Savage’s yardage comes in big chunks which is nice to have.
Just as we can’t seem to merger both offense and defense together this season, our recent QBs have distinct differences in how they each play the position well. The staff’s take on the 2104 QB recruits, Freebeck and Bertke, is that they both are good at being able to use all the field and are both quick thinking enough to make the fast decisions needed to execute.
IMO we may not get the quality of overall good QB play we all want until 2015 at the earliest.
When did the staff state this is a concern? I never saw that quote from a coach.
Also, saying Savage needs extra time to get the ball out is BS. He needs extra time because the team has been looking for deeper routes. That is the only reason. Any freaking QB can throw quick slants and dump offs.
Let’s not start the “Savage doesn’t go through his progressions” conversation again. No one on here knows what his reads are, what the progressions are, etc.
The deep pass potential of most QBs is a God given natural ability for most talented quarterbacks and is next to impossible to “teach”. Savage has that cannon arm and has shown he knows how to use it. If Chryst is the QB tutor that he has the reputation of being, he should be able to get Savage to comprehend and perform adequately on the short routes soon enough.
Seems to me they’ve been playing hard all season – they just lack the big play skills at certain positions.
On Savage, I think the spring experiment with the helmet cam was an indicator that the coaches were/are concerned with where Savage is looking and whether he is reading his progressions properly, or at all. Doesn’t seem to me that he had time in the UVA game to do anything but look at the primary receiver.
We did run a couple of screens, but not until late in the game – one to Ibrahim was a good gainer but could have been much more if he had read the blocking better. In a screen to Orndoff, the throw was a bit off and it was dropped.
Watching the practices and scrimmages you could see that Bollinger was making better reads on the progression the major work he was doing with Savage. Dr. Tom hit the nail on the head with his post above regarding coaching. This staff doesn’t have to waste one minute on Savage’s deep game.
I’ll disagree with one thing the good Dr. states above though; personally I don’t believe this is something that Savage is going to ‘get’ as the season progresses. This has been the way he’s played since his RU days.
Like any other QB in college, with the exceptions of those rare 1st round picks, Savage has his strengths and weaknesses. In his case both are pretty dramatic. If one watches the replays of the games and concentrates on watching Savage vice the ball it is pretty evident that he locks on and telegraphs in his short passing game.
Savage isn’t being asked to go deep every play, it is the intermediate and shorter plays where he needs more time to execute. He just doesn’t have that quick decision making gene like some other QBs have.
This isn’t a major criticism of Savage as a QB either. It is pointing out a fact that if this issue gets resolved it will make Savage an even better QB than he is now. He’s played well for us and IMO our wins and losses from here on out are going to happen in direct correlation to how well Savage plays QB during those games. I think he is that much of a factor with that excellent deep ability he has.
My point is, I have little problem with those who are “realistic” and give it to the coaches when their charges fail to perform up to the most minimal of standards, especially if the riticule is constructive criticism, but on the flip side, you gotta show some love when the coach makes adjustments and shows up for the game like House did on Saturday, especially after the Duke game debacle. That was an astounding turn around in one week’s time.
Nuff said on this subject, lets start concentrating on how best to beat VT down in Hokieland.