Because this has been a bye week we’ve had 13 days to reflect on the 2-2 start PITT has had so far and have looked both at the wins and losses from many different angles.  However, we are still collectively scratching our heads as to just what sort of football team we actually have in Paul Chryst’s first season as our head coach.

To recap: we shat the bed in a 31-17 loss against YSU; play pretty poorly again in a 34-10 drubbing by Cincinnati; played to a convincing win against a 13^th ranked Virginia Tech which was even more lopsided save a VT punt return and a 85 yard passing TD then soundly beat a lesser opponent in Gardner Web in a 55-10 rout.

Huh?  So which of those games is the real indication of what this 2012 team is made of?  Well, that isn’t easy to answer.  Sometimes if you peel back the scores and look at how a team actually played football in their games, regardless of wins or losses, you can get to the tenor of how the team produced on the field.

(more…)

One of the greatest sources of tension for Big East football fans and ND has not been the fact that ND stayed independent. Not that they wouldn’t fully commit, and on top of it they wouldn’t really schedule Big East teams unless it was on their terms (Pitt and Syracuse being exceptions owing to history). No, it was the bowl relationship. That on top of being able to park basketball and their olympic sports in the Big East, they could swoop in and grab a bowl bid just by being within two wins of the team inline for the bowl. A source of immense frustration that only exacerbated the anger most Big East football fans had towards the line-up of bowl options.

The justification from the Big East — and repeated so many times by so many — was that the Big East would not even have the bowl line-up it presently has (had?), but for the affiliation of Notre Dame as a carrot to the bowls. Which of course, begs the question,  what happens to the Big East bowl line-up post-ND? A related and more relevant question for Pitt fans, what about the ACC bowl line-up?

There is a slight possibility of actually finding out what Notre Dame’s impact on a conference bowl line-up beyond the perpetual rhetoric.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

At one point I had some measure of respect for Mike Tranghese. No, not as Big East Commissioner. As a shrewd political manipulator. He held the Big East together in 2003 because he terrified the football schools that if they broke away, he wouldn’t be their commissioner and they would lose his personal relationship with all the other BCS commissioners and thus get frozen out of the BCS. For the basketball side, he kept them in line when they were convinced they could survive without the football side.

Then he retired and as the Big East has been raided and re-tooled and jury-rigged to stay together, Tranghese has to keep talking about how he knew all of this was going to happen. That he could see it all coming a mile away. Now he’s saying the same thing about Notre Dame’s departure.

Tranghese said he wasn’t surprised, saying that he told the rest of the league for quite a while that if the Irish could find a conference home, they would leave. The only schools that might be bothered by Notre Dame’s departure are the Big East’s non-football schools, “who enjoyed that rivalry.”

The man has amazing vision, right? Of course, he did nothing about it. Just like he did nothing about Pitt, Syracuse and WVU. At best it means he set his friend John Marinatto up for complete failure.

The likely reality. Tranghese is completely full of crap. He just keeps trying to keep his own image in shape so he can land that next “consulting” gig. I’m sure ECU is trying to reach him right now.

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.

(more…)

Oh, come on. First it was the Pre-season NIT. But that finally seems resolved.

According to a source with direct knowledge, the four pods will look like this for the 16-team even that will end with semifinals and finals in New York over Thanksgiving: Host – Kansas State (North Texas, Lamar, D-2 TBD); Host — Pitt (Fordham, Robert Morris, Lehigh); Host — Michigan (Bowling Green, Cleveland State, IUPUI); Host — Virginia (Penn, Fairfield, Delaware). Michigan and Virginia should be the two locks to get to New York based on the pods. Pitt will have a legitimately tall task getting past Lehigh, but should prevail at home…

[Emphasis added].

That should mean Pitt could finally release the schedule for the basketball team. Wait. Now it’s the Big East?

The Big East has sent its conference schedule twice to the conference teams. The league office has run into one issue that has slowed up the full release of the schedule. The 15 Big East schools have seen the schedule, but can’t put it out until this “issue” — likely with a game or site — is cleared up.

There’s going to be a lot of rush orders sent to printers in the Big East this month.

UPDATE (9:18): And just like that, the Big East tweets that the conference schedule will be posted at noon.

We are now under the one week count down until the 2012 season opener and Paul Chryst’s debut as the PITT Panther Head Coach.  The Youngstown State Penguins come into Heinz Field Saturday at 6:00 pm for an out of conference and out of division game.  Please try to make it to the stadium, Paul needs you to be there.

Here is the .pdf of the 2012 media guide for YSU.  They are in the Missouri Valley Conference of the NCAA Football Championship Subdivison (FCS), as opposed to our being in the famed Big East of the BCS division.

YSU has an interesting coaching staff with some familiar names on it.  The Head Coach is Eric Wolford who has “has moved the Penguins back into postseason contention and is showing the nation that the program is on the cusp of returning to national prominance.” Those are YSU’s words, not mine. I would have spelled ‘prominence’ correctly.  He is married to Melinda Wolford and has two children.

Their Ass’t HC and DL coach is PITT alumni Tom Sims; their WR coach is Andre’ Coleman the former NFL receiver; their OLB coach is one of the famous Stoops boys, Ron Stoops, jr and their Cornerbacks coach is Glenn Davis who has been dead for seven years.

(more…)

Okay, football stuff coming later. First a bunch of links to touch on some other topics.

The daily bomb threats on Pitt’s campus last spring should not re-occur. The FBI has their man (sort of). It’s as weird as possible.

A 64-year-old, wheelchair-using Scottish man from Dublin, who already has served a prison sentence for emailing hoax bomb threats, was indicted Wednesday as the person responsible for emailing a series of 40 false bomb threats targeting the University of Pittsburgh during the spring semester.

A federal grand jury in Pittsburgh also charged the suspect, Adam Stuart Busby, with sending emailed bomb threats to federal courthouses in Pittsburgh, Erie and Johnstown and with threatening U.S. Attorney David J. Hickton.

Speaking at a news conference announcing the indictments, Mr. Hickton said Interpol had been alerted to the federal warrant charging Mr. Busby, who currently is in custody in Dublin on a Scottish warrant for similar crimes there. He would not speculate on any timetable for extraditing Mr. Busby from Ireland to face prosecution.

…

According to The Irish Times, Mr. Busby has multiple sclerosis and is a leader of the Scottish National Liberation Army, which seeks independence for his homeland. He recently was released from prison on a 2010 conviction in Ireland for emailing two false bomb threats in 2006 to Heathrow Airport in London. Those threats, which cited specific international flights, claimed to be from the Scottish National Liberation Army, according to the Times.

Since last month Mr. Busby has been held in custody in Dublin on a European Union warrant seeking his extradition to Scotland for additional charges of sending false threats, according to Irish media outlets. He is charged with making hoax threats in 2010, mostly by email to media organizations, that threatened then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown with a noxious substance, and claimed buildings would be bombed and that the English water supply would be contaminated, Irish news media reported.

The FBI wouldn’t give a reason for why he targeted Pitt for the bomb threats (Editor note: I know this is somehow related to you, McClearn).

(more…)

Ever since Cinci joined the Big East, they have been trying to play catch-up in terms of facilities and bringing in money. Really, for most of their time in the Big East they have been in the red. Now, they want their cut from the extra money the Big East has to deal with their issues.

“We had some conversations about it yesterday,” said UC athletic director Whit Babcock. “Hopefully we’ll know by the end of the calendar year. Not all of those payments are in lump sums. Some of them are a five-year payment. There’s also entrance fees, which for Houston, SMU and those schools is $2.5 million to come in to the league — $500,000 for five years. So we’ve got entrance fees. We’ve got exit fees. I hate to see those schools go, but we’ve got a new successful league and I’ll be happy to take the funding.”

Babcock said the school is continuing to move forward on plans and funding for the renovation of Fifth Third Arena and Nippert Stadium.

The Big East, of course is saying, “Whoah. Slow down with all this money talk. We don’t really have that much… Or a plan.”

(more…)

When they post them I’ll put up links to the Big East interviews of players and coaches. After the interim and associate commissioners took their turns to start Big East Media Day, the Big East Coaches all got turns at the podium. Let’s just say that Chryst won the award for brevity. He got up there said a few words and was done. It really did seem to be a blink and you will miss this situation. The contrast between him and Fraud Graham is very obvious at times. None more so than when it comes to getting in front of a group and a camera. Right now it’s refreshing, charming, and looked at as a positive. “He’s a coach. He doesn’t care about the self-promotion and wasting time with the other BS. He gets “it.” It’s refreshing…”

It’s also real easy to see how that can be turned against him if things don’t go right. “He doesn’t get it. It’s not just the coaching, but selling the program and what he wants to do. It’s not helping recruiting. He’s alienating the fans with his unwillingness to engage…” He might want to give Walt Harris a call and see if he can get some pointers about what to avoid on that respect.

(more…)

Let me echo (in a variation) the comments Paul Zeise made about “rooting” for the Big East’s survival. I’m rooting for the football schools in the Big East to survive. USF, Louisville, Rutgers, Cinci and even UConn. They’ve been stuck in the same boat as Pitt for a while. And their path really doesn’t get any easier. They’re stuck in the conference because there is no other choice right now. These aren’t programs that haven’t put any effort into their football and sports. They aren’t coasting on the conference. Yet they are stuck. It could very easily have been Rutgers or UConn heading to the ACC instead of Pitt or Cuse, and we’d be bemoaning Pitt’s plight.

Yeah, I have nothing but contempt for most of the conference framework. The basketball-side that controls too much. The continuing kow-towing to Notre Dame. Even that chunk of media that somehow romanticizes the Big East of the 80s as something pure — when it was created solely to make money for the programs and try to shield basketball-only schools from the growing power of college football. And the host of other issues.

That doesn’t mean I want the football schools screwed.

(more…)

Considering the Big East just got $20 million from West Virginia, another $5 million from TCU and $5 million more from Pitt and Syracuse as part of their initial money pay to depart, you would think the Big East would have no excuse for repeating last year’s inexcusable screw-up of running out of lobsters in the Big East clambake. But no, for a second straight year the lobsters were gone before the players were done trying to set records.

Pitt, however, finished an embarrassingly bad last place in the unofficial rankings. Only 2 lobsters consumed? Can’t tell you how disappointed I am in this performance.

Thanks to Twitter the results of the Big East Media Poll are already known. Pitt is picked to finish 5th in the conference this year.

1. Louisville
2. USF
3. Rutgers
4. Cinci
5. Pitt
6. UConn
7. Syracuse
8. Temple

On the plus side, it will be harder to disappoint expectations with that as the preseason spot.

(more…)

It’s the start of Big East Media Days today. Next week, Pitt starts fall practices. That means camp updates, obsessing over the smallest things. Blowing things out of proportion when it suits our notions (Sunseri had a bad day! Voytik and a good day! ZOMG! Chryst is totally going to start Voytik over Sunseri! That is unless the Sunseri family doesn’t use their booster connections to force Chryst to play Sunseri!).

The Big East gets to put on its happy face with two lameduck teams, a team they had to bring back after kicking them out nearly a decade ago. And all of their myriad of problems.

That’s because Big East football will have teams in four time zones, will have three members who are football-members only (Navy, Boise State and San Diego State) and 10 schools which are full members (Central Florida, Houston, Memphis, SMU, Rutgers, Connecticut, Temple — the Owls will be a football member this year and a full member next year — Cincinnati, South Florida and Louisville).

And the conference also has to appease Notre Dame — for the time being at least — which plays everything but football in the conference as well as seven other schools (Villanova, Georgetown, Providence, Seton Hall, St. John’s, DePaul and Marquette) whose primary revenue sport is men’s basketball because they don’t field Division I-A football teams.

The Big East will be a 21-team league, starting in 2015, yet Bailey has told anyone who will listen that the league can survive in this fashion and said that the league’s strength is in its diversity.

…

Beyond that, the two biggest challenges facing the new commissioner will be negotiating a new and lucrative television package as well as finding a way to remain relevant in the national championship discussion and major bowls.

That is when they can find a commissioner that fits what they want.

(more…)

ESPN.com’s college basketball side of things has been doing conference looks for the past week or so. The Big East came in for its look.

In the best-case/worst case scenarios there is the one reason to worry.

Pittsburgh

Best-case scenario: It’s time for the Panthers to reboot after an uncharacteristically bad season. The good news? The No. 4-ranked center in the class of 2012, New Zealand-born Steven Adams, has been enlisted in the cause, as has No. 4-ranked point guard James Robinson, both of whom should be ready to contribute right away. Point guard Tray Woodall is back and healthy, while Talib Zanna and Dante Taylor form a fearsome offensive rebounding force — the one redeeming aspect of Pitt’s 2012 season. This team may not compete for the Big East title, but with all this talent, a return to the normalcy of the NCAA tournament is well within reach.

Worst-case scenario: The Panthers have incoming talent, sure, but freshmen are rarely great defenders out of the box, and what the Panthers need is defense: They finished ranked just No. 151 the country in defensive efficiency last season. If Pitt doesn’t guard someone, its fans may have to swallow a foundation-building transition year, which is a polite way of saying a bad one.

The defense is not something that we’ve thought about/discussed too much. Ashton Gibbs was not a good defensive player, yes. But all the defensive problems cannot be pinned on him (or Nasir Robinson). We don’t know how well Trey Zeigler plays defense at this level. None of the returning players were consistent on defense. There’s hope based on the CBI that Zanna is “getting it” on the defense. But, we just don’t know for sure.

(more…)

Pitt has posted video of the nearly 16 minute press conference with AD Steve Pederson. Not much in the way of revelations in it.

Pitt has paid $2.5 million to the Big East back in September when it was announced Pitt was heading to the ACC. He didn’t specify when or how Pitt was going to pay the other $5 million, but made it clear that it wouldn’t be hard to do since Pitt will make that difference up in TV revenue in the ACC.

He defended the lawsuit, sticking with the argument that it was the catalyst to get movement on the settlement going. Didn’t really expect him to say, “Yeah, that was a waste of time.”

Apparently Pitt and Cuse were negotiating separately with the Big East. Okay.