**** THIS ARTICLE JUMPED OVER CHAS’ BB PIECE – PLEASE READ AND COMMENT ON THAT FIRST****

Not that the basketball season is almost over, we hope not but as in Pitt Football our BB team isn’t a shoo-in for anything, let’s turn our eye toward some pre-spring practice info and discussion starters.

The P-G has a piece on DE Ejuan Price and his buying a condo at a Senior Living center in Boca Raton, FL.  He’s in his 6th year at Pitt and it seems like he’s an old man already… but he plays like a middle aged tornado… with his 11.5 sacks last season.  Here is a good video as he describes his past physical problems.

This kills me though:

But even among those hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent pairs, it only takes a split sec­ond for Price to tell you his fa­vor­ites: His Nike Gal­axy Foam­pos­ite Ones. Put out to a very lim­ited re­lease in 2012, the Gal­axy Foams reg­u­larly fetch up­ward of $2,000 on the sec­ond­ary mar­ket. Money that Price, as a col­lege stu­dent, ob­vi­ously didn’t have.

He stayed on the hunt for a few years be­fore he found a friend with an ex­tra pair who was will­ing to let them go for a more rea­son­able price. “I wore them for about a week straight,” Price said.

Then he reveals this:

Oddly enough, though, when Price is hang­ing around the fa­cil­ity, he’s al­most al­ways in flip-flops. Not any­thing from his vast col­lec­tion of sneak­ers.

“The funny thing is I have all those shoes and I wear these [san­dals] ev­ery day,” he said. “Mainly be­cause my mom will tell you, my shoes hurt my feet. She says I’ve got long toes. Even though I like them so much, my shoes hurt my feet.”

Here is Rivals’ Chris Peaks latest football-related podcast.  It starts out with BB but if you want to skip that then jump to the FB talk  at minute mark 22:50

Some key issues he talks about the open starting positions due to graduation of having left – of course Boyd is mentioed.  Peak also thinks that Narduzzi truly has a blank slate mentality once the previous season has ended.

More pre-FB things…

Cardiac Hill has a piece about how many Narduzzi has to trim off the roster before the Villanova game in September (actually the last day of fall camp in August).  They are saying this:

That’s because once they reach the Oakland campus, Pitt will have approximately 92 scholarship players on the roster. Per NCAA regulations, that’s a problem since the team must be at 85. When they have to be at 85 scholarships is not known exactly, but it is probably sometime over the summer before camp opens for the season.

Note that is with the recent departure of rsSR OL Gabe Roberts , a 2* Chryst recruit who very limited playing time and mostly on Special Teams, the number is correct above – we have to trim the roster by eight. The deadline for that is the end of fall camp.

I wrote about this exact issue two weeks ago in the article “Possible Roster Moves” as a refresher as to who our rising rsSRs are going into spring practices.  For the uninitiated the reason these rsSRs are so closely looked at is because they are ripe to be asked to “move on” in college ball parlance to make room for younger and hopefully more talented, blood.

That is a nice way of saying they get the pink slip. However, shed no tears because they have also had a full four years at Pitt to get a free undergrad degree and in some cases, Bostick for instance, graduate in three years and get a year of post-grad work done under scholarship. Of the players asked to leave most have been non-starters or have been ‘recruited over’ by a successive recruiting class player at the same position.

Here are those rsSRs who are on scholarship: (Players in red have left the team; in blue are the keepers IMO and the ones in black are expendable, again IMO).

4    Bam Bradley               6-2/230       LB    RS JR   Dayton, Ohio/Trotwood-Madison

4    Nate Peterman           6-2/225       QB   RS JR   Jacksonville, Fla./Tennessee

61   Pat Quirin                   6-1/225       LS    RS JR   Pittsburgh, Pa./Pittsburgh Central Catholic

69   Adam Bisnowaty        6-6/300       OL    RS JR   Pittsburgh, Pa./Fox Chapel

15   Reggie Mitchell          6-0/190       DB   RS JR   Pittsburgh, Pa./Shady Side Academy

30   Mike Caprara              6-0/230       LB    RS JR   Turtle Creek, Pa./Woodland Hills

7   Chris Wuestner          6-2/210       WR   RS JR   Carlisle, Pa./Carlisle

19   Dontez Ford               6-2/215       WR   RS JR   McKees Rocks, Pa./Sto-Rox

26   Jevonte Pitts              5-11/200     DB   RS JR   Forest Hills, Pa./Woodland Hills/Milford Academy 

71   Gabe Roberts             6-5/300       OL    RS JR   New London, Wis./New London

38   Ryan Lewis                 6-0/195       DB   RS JR   Seattle, Wash./Eastlake

62   John Guy                    6-7/310       OL    RS JR   Somerville, Mass./New Hampton School (N.H.)

16   Chad Voytik                6-1/215       QB   RS JR   Cleveland, Tenn./Cleveland

rsSR OL John guy has never started a game and played in only three last season all on special teams – he can go.

DB Ryan Lewis, even though he has played in 36 games over his last three years with us and has had some tackles and a blocked punt is on the bubble in my thoughts.  If superstar in the making true FR Damar Hamlin is as good as advertised and if rsFR Malik Henderson shows well during the spring, and I think he will be very good at cornerback,… then the competition for Lewis will get even stronger and he may be let go.

Oh, and if rsFR Dane Jackson “shows up” as DW used to say about every player he ever had, then the chances are more slim that Ryan Lewis stays.

LS Pat Quirin played well enough to earn a scholarship so he has earned a spot as a starting Special Teams player.  But I really don’t know how hard it is to teach an existing younger OL player to have that skill.  If Narduzzi wants to have a underclassman have that collateral duty the Quiren may be gone.

I’m not real sure that it would be a good thing to lose Lewis as upperclass players’ experience and leadership is always valuable. But if Narduzzi and Conklin truly want to start with another clean slate then the have to at least consider Lewis as expendable.  That will be an interesting matchup to watch over the next month.

On another note I had a conversation with a friend the other day about the D1 academic requirements for football.  Well, doing a bit of research here is the NCAA’s official info and it is pretty interesting.  note a few things when reading this:

1) These requirements are by the NCAA… and school can require higher standards and many do?  The Ivy League schools have policies that student-athletes must meet the admittance standards as any other student but some schools don’t.

2) Every so often a Pitt recruit can’t join the football team until his HS academic record is ‘certified’ by the NCAA Eligibility Center.  Here is that subject addressed:

Certification process

All college-bound student-athletes must have an academic and amateurism certification from the NCAA Eligibility Center.

The online registration process that must be completed by all future Division I and II college-bound student-athletes includes a questionnaire relating to the individual’s amateur status.  For the staff at the NCAA Eligibility Center to certify amateur status, college-bound student-athletes must answer a questionnaire during registration.

The questionnaire covers the following precollegiate enrollment activities: Contracts with professional teams

• Salary for participating in athletics
• Prize money
• Play with professionals
• Tryouts, practice or competition with a professional team
• Benefits from an agent or prospective agent
• Agreement to be represented by an agent
• Delayed initial full-time collegiate enrollment to participate in organized sports competition

The Guide for the College-Bound Student-Athlete contains more detailed information about initial academic and amateurism eligibility.

Here is Pitt’s student-athlete academic requirements policy.

This is what three years of hard partying in college does to a young man.  Bisnowaty now and then…however, and speaking of academics, Bisnowaty was an ACC All-Academic selection.