Here it comes.  At approximately 10:30 pm EST we PITT fans will experience the long awaited end of  PITT’s  membership in the Big East Conference.  Has it been good for us and vice versa?  Will we miss it? That depends on how you look at things in a historical perspective.

Undoubtedly PITT’s greatest successes on the football field have happened when the program had no conference affiliation at all.  Eight of our nine national championships took place prior to 1939 when there were no formal football conferences as we know them today.  Those championship years, from 1915 (Pop Warner as head coach) to 1939 (Jock Sutherland), are the bedrock of PITT’s football tradition.  Hard enough to believe now but PITT was the standard of football excellence in the first third of the 20^th century.

My father and mother, who were born in 1917 and 1919 respectively, were students at PITT at the end of that championship era.  While I was growing up and attending PITT games I heard countless stories about Sutherland, All-Americans wide receiver Bill Daddio and the great Marshall Goldberg running the ball for scores.  Great for them – they had a reason to brag about PITT football and they did.

It was a golden age for PITT but, as does tend to happen with us, it was also a precursor of hard times for the program.  From 1939 until 1976 PITT had exactly one season with over eight wins.  The hard truth is that most of those years were sub-.500 seasons and from 1966 until 1968 we racked up three 1-9 seasons in a row, and yes, we attended every home game regardless.

Then all of a sudden PITT was thrust back into winning seasons and a national championship year.  Certainly the 1970s and early 1980s built up on that traditional bedrock to return the program back to national rankings.  We all know about how Johnny Majors, Matt Cavanaugh and Tony Dorsett gave us a championship in 1976.  It was a fantastic year and we looked to have a bright football future ahead of us.

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Only a two or three regular season games left on the schedule for many teams. The coaching carousel is getting warmed up for the latest whirl.

In Tennessee where, um, clearer heads are mostly aware that they won’t get Kevin Sumlin, Urban Meyer, and of course Jon Gruden; that leaves speculating on who they can get. And to what lengths they are willing to stoop (they are also not getting Bob Stoops).

Arizona State coach Todd Graham doesn’t need a dream to change jobs after a year. He already has Kiffined two programs, first Rice in 2006 and then Pittsburgh in 2011.

After last season, he told Panthers players goodbye via email and rushed off to Arizona State. All he left behind was a nickname: “Mr. All Talk Then Walk.”

Actually, he’s not all talk. He was 7-6 at Rice, 36-17 at Tulsa, and is now 5-5 at Arizona State, which returned only eight starters and has had four consecutive losing seasons.

If the Vols’ coaching search turns desperate — and they’re not above Kiffining somebody — Graham could be their guy.

/derisive snort

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So much for my belief that the entire Pitt performance would hinge on the O-line. Instead, a defense that has played very well the last three games — at least after spotting a team the easy opening march down the field before figuring out what they were doing — never got it together.

Part of it was simply a hobbled K’Wuan Williams being abused because the Pitt defense never tried to give him any help. Why? Because dammit the scheme is fine. All is well. If he was well enough to play, he could cover in the man-to-man secondary.

Williams left the Syracuse game early with a knee injury and was questionable to play this past week as recently as Thursday. Chryst, though, said he wouldn’t have put Williams out there if he wasn’t ready to play.

“You can do a lot of things call-wise, but in the end there are going to be some times when they’re one-on-one and I’d take [K’Waun] again,” Chryst said. “They made some plays and I give them credit for that.”

Teddy Bridgewater was 7-10, 172 yards in the second half.

But it was more than a well-executed passing attack. The run offense of Louisville kept Pitt’s defense honest. It wasn’t amazing — nearly 45% of their rushing yardage game on just two runs — but it was effective and they got into the endzone on the ground.

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Note: I didn’t write something right away because when you are getting 370+ comments on an open game thread pretty much everything has already been talked about.  Anyway, here are some of my observations…

Again, and with firm success, PITT snatched defeat from the jaws of victory last week.  Travelling to the Carrier Dome in Syracuse our Panthers dropped a close, low scoring game to the Orange, 14-13, in a match that may portend the way the rest of the schedule plays out in that we certainly played well enough to win but obviously didn’t.

The sad thing is I couldn’t even get too angry about that final ‘nail in the coffin’ intentional grounding penalty by Sunseri that deprived us of a game winning field goal opportunity because we have seen it, or something just like it, happen to PITT so many times over the years.  We just can’t find ways to win close football games coming from behind because we aren’t built for it, starting with our QB.  It isn’t only Sunseri that has been this way for PITT, Bill Stull before him had the same problem.

If I’m assigning blame – which is totally Tuesday morning QB’ing – then I’m pointing at the OL for most of the ills of the evening.  They didn’t open many holes for Graham or Bennett and they were just flat out terrible in pass protection.

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Over the many years of blogging, both sides of this Pitt-Syracuse game have noted the complete lack of vitriol and hatred. Despite Syracuse being Pitt’s (tied for) 3d most played opponent in football. And the fact that they will have the #3 spot all alone in a few years when ND starts rotating on and off the schedule, there isn’t much of a burning desire to burn their city and make them cry when it comes to football. Everyone wants the win, but no one circles this game on the calendar when the schedule is announced.

In about five years, Pitt will be Syracuse’s #1 most played opponent. Yet, they too can’t muster the hatred.

My longstanding theory is that, despite the closeness of the historical series — Pitt holds a 34-30-3 edge — the fact that neither team has been good at the same time has muted it. Pitt dominated them in the 70s. Syracuse ruled in the 80s and 90s. Now Pitt has been the force for the past 10 years, winning 9 of 10. How do you build up hate if only one side is ever playing for anything? If the other is stuck in their latest down-cycle or rebuilding?

So, instead, what has the team been up to with a bye week?

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We PITT fans were in the habit of biting our collective nails when Dave Wannstedt was coaching the team going into games coming off a bye week.  Because we are in that time period now and awaiting our game against Syracuse next Friday evening I thought I’d take a look back to see if that nervousness was justified and compare it to the results Paul Chryst had at his last job.

Since the 2005 season until his last year in 2010 Wannstedt had eight bye weeks over six seasons and compiled a 3-5 record in the games played after the bye.  Not very good all told and the image of his being poor at preparing the team over that long layoff is pretty accurate.

The breakdown of those games is as follows: one home loss; one home win; one away win and five away losses.  We kind of got screwed with the scheduling there as six of eight games were on the road.  One weird note is that in 2008 we had three bye week games that resulted in a win over Iowa at home; a win over Navy at home and a loss to Cincinnati at their place.

Fast forward up to today and let’s look at what kind of track record our current coach Paul Chryst, as the Offensive Coordinator at Wisconsin, had in getting his offense ready to play after an enforced layoff time.  Well, as it turns out Wisconsin was 4-3 overall.  They were good lately but very poor a few years ago.  Here is how it shook out (I used the offensive output as Chryst wasn’t the head coach):

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A fantastic piece by Luke Winn at SI.com that talks about the exploitable flaw in the RPI system. How it can be gamed, by numbers savvy coaches with their non-con to create a high RPI ranking without actually taking huge risks.

The NCAA tournament selection committee uses the RPI formula to assess teams’ non-conference strength of schedule (NCSOS). Two-thirds of RPI’s NCSOS is based on the raw winning percentages of a team’s opponents, and the other third is based on the raw winning percentages of opponents’ opponents. A team vying for an at-large NCAA tournament bid is best off having a respectable NCSOS rank and a number of wins over RPI top-25, top-50 or top-100 teams. While the selection committee has stated that RPI is just one of many tools it uses, the fact remains that schedule strength is viewed predominantly through the RPI’s lens.

The problem is that it’s a warped lens. Seventy-five percent of the RPI formula is about strength of schedule (SOS), and because the RPI uses the flawed metric of raw winning percentage to assess SOS, it fails to provide a true measure of the quality of opponents.

Here’s how that works. If you schedule decent to good mid- and low mid-majors. That is teams that can be expected to do well in their own conference, you puff up your own RPI because they end the year with 18 to 20+ wins. Even if most of those wins came in the MEAC or such.

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It sounds like you guys are pretty happy about the game last Saturday. I am also and can’t wait for next Saturday (Gardner-Webb; 3:30 @ Heinz Field) when we can really build on the mechanics of the systems to get ready for Big East football.

I’ve obviously taken a hiatus from The Blather for a bit.  We had all the preparations for my daughter’s wedding week; her wedding on Friday; house guests until Sunday and, with perfectly bad timing, my son was hospitalized on Wednesday and missed all the wedding activities.  He’s home, doing well and dodged emergency surgery but I was running around like a chicken without a head for the last week and couldn’t write anything.  Which also meant I had to be here in Maryland sitting in front of the TV rather than at Heinz Field.

But back to PITT football!

It was obviously a surprise to watch PITT not only get that big lead but to then hold it through four quarters.  As many Blatherites have posted we were sitting and waiting for it to slowly drift away.  That didn’t happen and we can credit the coaching staff for trusting Sunseri and the offense well enough to believe that they were going to string together enough 1^st downs to keep drives alive and the clock running.  That happened and it paid off with a late score to put the game out of reach.

I think the staff is beginning to see exactly what they have to work with and are adapting and substituting well enough to get production on the field.

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In Syracuse, Doug Marrone has a favorite word. That word: tremendous. He will apply it anything. Opportunities, potential of players, a dinner menu, a good pair of khakis, his thighs. Coach Paul Chryst is a man of few words, so it hasn’t been easy to crack the code to this point.

Here at Blather Labs, we have been parsing statements diligently to locate the “Word of Chryst.” This week, our research has yielded a potential hit.

The word appears to be: neat.

The O-line is doing a horrid job blocking? Well, that’s neat.

Pitt quarterback Tino Sunseri was sacked six times against Cincinnati, but coach Paul Chryst did not place all the blame on one player. “Certainly, the offensive line, you have five guys, and their job is to protect,” Chryst said. “We gave up one (sack) where we had both backs in there, and they both could have taken a hit off the quarterback. The quarterback has to get the ball out of his hands, and that means the receivers have to be precise in their routes. That’s one of the neat things about football. It takes all 11 guys, and that is a great example of it.”

How about the fact that the D-line can’t get any pressure up front? It’s sort of neat.

“One way is adding numbers to create pressure. Right now, it’s kind of neat that each week each team presents a little bit different challenge and you want to make sure you’re being smart with how you approach it,” Chryst said. “Certainly we pressured more in the Cincinnati game than we did the week before. We’re certainly looking at all different options and figuring out what’s best for Virginia Tech.”

Neat may not be the way you or I would describe disasters, but for Coach Chryst it’s all just a puzzle to solve.

Keep your eyes out for more examples of “neat” from Coach Chryst. Along with nifty, swell and even: keen.

Pitt has a ton of problems. And, yes, I have posted for a couple straight days with attention to the coaching staff. There’s a reason for that.

The deficiencies and strengths on this team — regarding the players/talent/depth — were mostly known coming into the season. The unknown was how the coaching staff would use them. How they would coach and prepare them.

So far, it has not been pretty. There’s no way to pretend otherwise. Yes, the coaching chaos the last two years have taken a toll. Almost certainly it has had an effect on the team psyche. Yes it has impacted the overall talent on the squad. Yes, there are injuries — especially to the linebackers. Yes, there has been a bit of overestimating the overall talent on this squad.

None of that is sufficient to explain the performance of this team in the first two games. Losing by 14 — and never even leading — to YSU. Not being competitive in the Cinci game. Sorry. This team should not be this bad.

Coach Chryst will and should have the time to set up this program his way. He’s also a first-time head coach, learning and making mistakes. We wish otherwise, but the on-the-field performance and the way the team has started in the first two games demonstrate that right now he is finding 0ut how steep the learning curve can be in moving from coordinator to head coach.

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Ahhhh. The one silver lining to Pitt’s Thursday night game. Sitting back all day with some nice beer and watching college football until my eyes bleed. No stress over what Pitt will do. Able to take breaks as needed. Fall asleep on the couch for stretches. Appreciating the misery of other teams losing. I’m looking at you Miami, Iowa, Colorado… and yes, Penn State.

One of the games I took a particular interest in was the Wisconsin-Oregon State game. Probably as much as Pitt Coach Paul Chryst took in the game given his mentor and place where he got his start at the 1-A level versus his alma mater and place that made him a reasonably hot head coaching candidate.

A chance to see what the program looks like without Paul Chryst directing the offense. And perhaps to get a glimpse of what we hope to see Pitt become. Instead, it led to some other questions and a bit of speculation.

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So much for that August optimism. You know, when we thought the overall talent wasn’t too bad and that Coach Paul Chryst would coach this team up. Because that is what Chryst is. A coach. A football coach. A football coach’s coach.

It’s hard not to feel a wee bit of annoyance over the performance of the team in the first two games.

Tino Sunseri will come in for the bulk of the criticism as far as play. And there is no doubt he wasn’t good last night, along with the typical brain farts in the red zone that we all expect at this point. Two plus years and nothing appears to have changed with him.

Yet, he isn’t the biggest problem on this team.  Almost all of the problems start on the side of the ball that was expected — that was needed — to be a strength. The defense.

They were completely unprepared at the start of both games. Once more they couldn’t stop the run. They couldn’t get any pressure up front. They couldn’t get off the field. They struggled to cover. They continually looked a step slower. It’s not all because the linebacking corp is without Thomas and Price.

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Is the negative experience of Saturday night starting to dissipate yet?  No? Well tomorrow’s another day as they say in show business and they also say the show must go on.  So even if we’d prefer the 2012 season to end right now as some PITT fans might, there will be more games.  Its not me threatening you with this – blame Steve Pederson.

Tomorrow night PITT goes into Cincinnati coming off what can easily be termed the worst pure loss in its history because of the conference level of the YSU team being D-II quality.  I say ‘pure loss’ because the 48-14 loss to Penn State when we had a shot at the NC game and the more recent come from behind loss to Cincy with a Big East championship BCS game on the line affected PITT’s season’s standings more than this YSU loss can.  In reality the YSU loss means nothing in relation to the BE conference play.  Psychologically though it was devastating.

So, the first and foremost thing PITT fans will want to see is how we’ll bounce back from something like that.  I’m not calling for a win, you may have to be insane to do that, but I believe we’ll acquit ourselves better than we did last week.  Put it this way, as disappointed as I was in the last game’s result I wasn’t shocked as I talked about it before the kickoff.  Just as with that, I won’t be shocked if PITT wins tomorrow night either.  I’d just never bet on it or publicly predict it.

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Coach Paul Chryst has avoided any public pronouncements on goals or expectations. They exist, but he’s not saying much on them. That has been a consistent approach of his since taking the head coaching spot at Pitt.

“We have a lot of goals. To sum it up, you’ve got to work to improve and guys have got to get better. You’re a better team if each individual player gets better,” Chryst told the Panthers’ official website as summer practice got under way.

“I’ve never been able to tell what a guy’s ceiling is or how good he can be, but I think that it is enough if you keep working to be the best you can be.”

But try and get him to state what the actual goals are for the team. And you get nothing.

I asked him if he’d broached with his players the topic of a Big East title.

“No,” he said, politely.

Does he ever mention overriding goals such as winning a conference or national championship?

“No,” he said, politely.

This year, definitely a good thing. The last two years have seen high fan expectations dashed, followed by brash, bold talk that crashed and fled. Going forward, though, Chryst will not be able to avoid at least talking about team goals a little more specifically. It is also something he has to do.

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Folks – I put this bit of information below in a comment back on the “2012 Predictions” post but was interested enough in it to bring it forward for your conversation.

Back in April we posted an article about Paul Chryst’s run:pass ratio in his playcalling as the Offensive Coordinator at Wisconsin.  In it we showed that there were some years where he called almost 70% running plays.  That was in 2010 when he had three 1000> yard rushers in his offense.  In his other seasons he was consistently run heavy.

Fast forward to Pittsburgh in 2012 where we see Tino Sunseri play well enough in summer training camp to keep his starting job but not setting the world on fire, nor lessening PITT fan’s expectations of his mediocrity.  Because of that and his last year’s play there are thoughts, echo’d on other blogs and message boards, that Sunseri would be handcuffed by Chryst to lessen the chances of Sunseri making a bonehead play to blow our opportunities of winning games.  Some fans were saying they thought that Sunseri would throw as few as 15 passes per game.

With that background, here is another comparision between the past UW and PITT offenses that I worked up yesterday.

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