Wow.  Football has to take a back seat for one moment here.  A season turned on 8/10ths of a second.  Congratulations to the PITT BB team on a great regular season, and let’s hope the future holds better things in the post season play.  But what a disappointment!

OK, back to spring football.  Even though the new regime has closed off the practices to the beat reporters and media, PITT has done a very good job of providing as much info as possible to the public in other forums – albeit controlling it like the Ruskies and Pravda.  We have the Spring Camp Insider website which posts Graham’s post-practice videos, articles on the practice and a quote sheet from the HC.  There is a second Graham interview but it is on the Scouts.com pay board.

The Panthers held their third spring practice on Saturday afternoon.  Apparently the defense won the day again giving it 2-1 lead in practice sessions.  The staff assigns a point system to each series and that’s how they determine which side wins or loses.  Don’t know if that means much but Graham was quoted afterward as saying that he and his offensive coaches felt like the ‘offense was ahead of where we thought they would be’… so maybe that is good news even though the defense is getting the upper hand.

This was the team’s first day in pads and it seemed to go real well.  The practices have been very physical and Graham said that when someone hears the word “PITT Football” he wants them to associate it with a ‘blue collar work ethic’. OK… we’ll get right on that.  This is much better than having the words “Perennial Bridesmaid” associated with our school’s team.

The staff has a ‘lesson plan’ in place; 12 segmented tasks they want to make sure the team understands about the new systems before camp breaks.  There will also be three scrimmages, one each on the next two Saturdays and then the third at the Spring Game – which BTW will be televised again on the NFL Network.

The QBs seem to be making the staff happy. At least during the video Graham was saying that they did and Mike Norvell, the co-offensive coordinator (and passing game coordinator) sat next to him smiling and nodding in agreement.  The staff is putting on some pressure to have the QB’s pick up the ‘tempo’ in between plays. It would be nice to have some actual details on how the various QBs are playing but that is asking too much.

They liked what our receivers did in the ‘vertical game’ – singled out Devin Street for some big plays and mentioned Shanahan again also.

An interesting stat is that the defense has forced a ton of turnovers during the practices – improving our TO numbers was a stated goal going into the practices and it appears to be working.  One of our walk-on DBs, Davis has created a few and Jackson returned a Pick 6.  Coach Randolph, co-defensive coordinator, says the goal is to “Get the ball back for the offense” on a continual basis.

The post-practice staff video is good and worth watching even just to hear Graham try to pronounce LB Max Gruder’s name… most of the time it comes out Gruber.

Graham mentioned only a few players by name and it is getting somewhat repetitious – KK Smith, Donald, Caragein, Alecxih and our old favorite Buddy Jackson.  Guess Graham hasn’t got the memo yet on the difference between Jackson’s play in practice and his play in games. Maybe he breaks through this year and changes that hopefully. He has the size and speed to be a good one but this is his last season to do something.

Graham has also mentioned LB Carl Fleming a lot over this last week and says he is very impressed with what the young man has done at the Panther position.  This would be a great development as Fleming is a rsSO this season and could be a staple if he rises to the starting position.  He also has talked up rsSO LB Kevin Adams a great deal as he has with rsFR LB Eric Williams.  See a pattern here?  Graham singles out first and second year kids pretty often in his post-practice interviews.  Could Graham be targeting FR & SOs in the two-deep to set his teams for years to come?

Here’s a kick in the pants – Graham wants all our LBs and DBs to have 4.5 speed or better.  That’s a tall order and I wonder what Max Gruber thought when he heard that.   I mean Grouper, err… Grappler, oh hell… you know who I mean!

The HC seems real pleased with the play of our walk-on RB Des Brown:  “I am really impressed with him because we only have one scholarship player at tailback this spring and Brown has really been a shining light for us to come in as a walk on. He has a lot of ability and we really think he can help us out. His brother plays for the Steelers and is helping him get through school. I was able to meet and talk with him through mutual friends.” As stated on here yesterday, this young man may bear watching.

The HC made another veiled threat to the injured “Green Shirt” players by saying publically that they are in danger of being passed on the depth chart the longer they stay out.  I’ve never understood this psychological approach.  It is basically calling the players liars and goldbrickers, but every coach seems to do it.  It just seems to me that that info would be better passed to the kids in person and not in a public forum.

Odds and Ends:

A media note: Pat Bostick will be contributing his observations on how the practices are going on a biweekly basis on that website – yesterday was his first installment and was well written.  Pat has also written a fantastic article for the Panther Eyes magazine – it details his time as a PITT football player, including the days leading up to his freshman training camp, and his decision to leave the team to pursue his studies.  It is about as honest an accounting of a student-athlete’s four years as there is. Panther Eyes is a subscription magazine but keep an eye out for that, it’s well worth the read.

A PITT football alumni defensive back Josh Lay has been in the news.  He plays for the Pittsburgh Power football club now but has been laid up with an injury.  This is a nice article about where one of our own is now.

Brian Bennett of ESPN has listed his Top 25 Big East players of 2010.  PITT puts five on the list with Lewis at #20,  Pinkston at #16,  Baldwin at #15,  Lindsey at #13 and Jabaal Sheard at # 2.  Sheard was also the BE Defensive POY.  You may remember that three of those players were also listed as preseason All-Americans, with Greg Romeus being the fourth.  It may be some time before we see that type of talent on one PITT team again and it just makes thinking about how we so severely underachieved last year even worse.