Tonight is the night of the new uniforms for the Pitt sports teams. Yeah us!! We’ll see the old script back at the team identifier…

“A rebranding process that effectively started 19 months ago finally will reach its conclusion tonight, as Pitt formally unveils its “new” script logo, as well as updated uniforms for its 19 varsity sports.

The return of the beloved script logo, which served as the school’s primary athletic mark from 1973-1996, will be celebrated with a public fashion show at 6:30 p.m. today in the Petersen Events Center lobby. On Tuesday, ahead of the unveiling, the university announced the renaming of its Twitter and Instagram accounts.

“We are excited to make the full transition back to the script logo,” athletic director Scott Barnes said in a statement. “Not only will this move help unify our branding efforts, it also gives us an opportunity to celebrate the amazing history of Pitt Athletics. Wednesday’s event will give Panther fans an opportunity to see some impressive Pitt apparel as well as some of the other exciting improvements we currently have underway.”

This in itself isn’t isn’t really big news – Pitt started doing this willy-nilly back in 2014.  It took two years to get Nike onboard with all the teams’ gear.  Again, the colors will not change but the graphic design of the uniforms will. The public roll-out will be done formally this evening, along with a silent auction of memorabilia and will, I’m sure, make the Internets right away.

Here is a bit of new news though:

“Those uniforms won’t be the only thing unveiled tonight, either. Barnes said last week at the ACC’s spring meetings in Amelia Island, Fla., that the school also will release plans for certain facility upgrades, including a facelift for Petersen Events Center, which opened in 2002 on the site formerly occupied by Pitt Stadium.

“We’re seeing nice signs of growth there,” he said. “We look forward to executing our plan. Years from now, we’ll be able to see the fruits of our labor, but I like where we’ve gone this year in terms of setting up shop.”

Want a clear indication of just how much the Pitt football program is, or in this case isn’t, in the public eye? Get a load of this then:  “Ohio State loses top quarterback target Phil Jurkovec to Notre Dame”

Yeah, sad but true  – Pitt is not mentioned either in the title nor anywhere in the body of the piece.  Fox does say this however:

“Jurkovec, a sought-after dual threat, was also being pursued by Alabama, Clemson, Michigan State, Penn State, UCLA and others.”

Hate to say it again folks but one 8-5 season doesn’t shoot up us anywhere near the front of the nation’s football brain one bit. This is the hangover effect from those horrendous 2010-2014 years when we went through four HCs and barely had a winning record at 33-32.

Put a few more of those together though and keep Narduzzi onboard then people will begin to sit up and take some notice.

Speaking of recruiting…

Here is some of the latest recruiting info from Chris Peak of Rivals and the Trib.  He talks specifically about our offers out to HS QBs…. And how this staff is hitting Florida hard for recruits.

Which is nice because it seems we are striking out on the top end local talent and this is pretty timely as we just saw Bertke disengage himself from Pitt’s team.

His main point is hit right off the bat – out of 169 total offers we have out 51 have gone to Florida athletes.  Wow, I suppose.

Then he goes on to state that our total offers to PA players is much, much less and that PA and VA combined is 30!

Assuming that Peak’s current ‘offer’ listing is accurate since he’s talking publicly about it here are the offers Pitt has out now.

Here is the list of “Dual” QBs and you can see that there are a few who haven’t committed yet.

Interesting stuff and I don’t really follow recruiting all that much at this stage in the game – it is way too early and takes too much time and energy for me to get into.  January is a whole different story though – that is when the rubber starts meeting the road.

I still believe that actually getting the best that PA has to offer, especially Western PA players, onboard are way more important than offering FL kids.  It’s getting pretty embarrassing the way these top PA kids are turning their backs on Narduzzi this recruiting season so far.

As a reminder as to who those top kids are here is a little bit dated article by Chris Dokish (the source for me on good recruiting/recruits background.  Remember this article isn’t up to date as far as the recruits committments go…