Here are a couple of podcasts to listen to while working.  First is Jerry DiPaola being interviewed by WTAE’s Junker and the other Guy about the Spring Game… and talks about the closed practices.  He makes a good point (again!) about being able to watch only the calisthenics, then the kicker and the punter punting.  He hates it, every media person hates it, I hate it and some at Pitt even dislike it.

DiPaola’s Guy and Junker Interview 4/11/16

He also talks about how the offense looks unbalanced at this point because of the dearth of receivers with any game experience at all.  Challingsworth and Ford are the only two WRs on the roster who caught passes last season.  He quotes Nate Peterman as saying “Wait and see which WRs we can count on.”

DiPaola reiterates that Stocker is slowly cementing the QB2 position.  Stocker is a big QB and is also a good runner – DiPaola mentions “Wildcat” a few times.  The subject of bringing in a FBS transfer QB in (Schneider) and how that signals that the staff isn’t happy with our current #3 and #4 QBs.

What is shaping up is a competition for the 2017 starting job between Schneider and MacVitte.

(more…)

DiPaola of the Trib has a blog entry about J. P. Holtz waiting for the NFL draft that will be held on April 28-30.

When he’s not hanging out at the E Town Bar and Grille in Etna (I hear the fish sandwich kills), former Pitt tight end J.P. Holtz is getting ready for the NFL.
He has visited with several teams, including the Browns, Chargers, Bears, Bengals and Saints. Other than that, he’s working out almost every day – often with his former Pitt teammates at the South Side facility.

“It gets boring sometimes,” Holtz said Friday during an appearance on TribLive Radio.

“All you do is work out all day. It’s kind of nice, actually.”  Holtz is ranked the 23rd tight end available in the draft, according to NFLDraftScout.com, after catching 81 passes for 931 yards and 11 touchdowns in four years at Pitt where he never missed a game or practice.

In his freshman season, he caught three passes for 54 yards and a touchdown in Pitt’s near-upset at Notre Dame.  At 6-foot-3, 238 pounds, he could morph into a run-blocking fullback with the ability to catch short flips.

“I’m a pretty decent blocker,” he said. “I’ll do whatever a team needs me to do. I can do both. I really doesn’t matter to me. I just want to play football.”

(more…)

Here are the scrimmage stats from yesterday.

Bertke was 3-3 for 52 yards but Stocker seems to be holding onto the #2 QB slot.

The Trib has a few pieces today.

(more…)

The local media and we here on the Blather have been in some serious discussions about our current QB corps.  The reason for that is that coming out of spring practices there is some real trepidation about who will be the back-up QB in case starter Nate Peterman goes down with an injury.

The main questions seem to be “Can Pitt recruit good quarterbacks?” and the answer is… it depends.

That’s a loaded question and really has two ways to be answered; first is can we land highly rated QB recruits and second, can we get our recruited QBs to play at the expected level or even exceed that?

These discussions led me to want to review the last 15 years of our QBs, both those we recruited and those we placed on the roster via transferring in from another program.  So, I did some digging and came up with the table below.

Before you get too deep into it here are some notes on it. The ‘Year” is the recruiting class.  The numbers in parentheses are the highest national recruit ranking for the QB position the player received – I used the higher of two if the player was ranked by both Rivals and Scouts.

(more…)

Before we get into this next video let’s review which numbers our five QBs are wearing:

#3 – Ben DiNucci;   #4 – Nate Peterman;   #7 – Adam Bertke;   #8 – Manny Stocker;  and #15- Ryan Adzima.  That’s our Murder’s Row going coming out of spring practices in a week.  I post those because Pitt has a nice 2+ minute video highlighting our new OC Matt Canada working with the QBs and WRs.

(more…)

Well, it isn’t just The Pitt Blather talking about Manny Stocker rise through the ranks.  The Post-Gazette’s Craig Myer has a nice article on him also.  Check this part closely:

 After an experiment at wide receiver in 2015, his first with the Panthers, Stocker once again is playing quarterback, the position he has played virtually his entire career. He also has been reunited with offensive coordinator Matt Canada, with whom he spent one season at North Carolina State in 2013.

It’s a strange return to normalcy in some ways, but there’s also a certain solace for Stocker as he works to make an impact in a quarterbacks group that, outside of starter Nate Peterman, largely lacks experience.

The reason I clipped that quote is that we have seen Pat Narduzzi not hesitate to look at his roster and make decisions based on the talent at hand.  It is one thing when a phenom like Jordan Whitehead, a highly rated and sought after recruit, walks into camp and claims a starting job.  Many other coaches do that in allowing true FR to start playing right away. But Narduzzi sat down an established starting QB in his first year in a HC position.

Showing of course that every position on the team is truly up for grabs.

(more…)

We have had a lot of discussions over the last week about our relatively new Athletic Director and his actions in the BB coach hiring process.  Readers on here and other media outlets have discussed Barnes in detail and expressed opinions ranging from feeling he should have his work closely looked into to showing support for Barnes in what he has done.

One of our readers and our favorite senior citizen Old Pitt Grad pointed out in the comments section of yesterday’s article that Barnes had held the “Senior Assistant Athletic director” position at the University of Washington inferring that must have been an important post to have had.

I lived in Washington State for three year back in the early 1990’s and attended many Washington Huskies FB games. Back then what really jumped out at me was just how similar in almost every way the University of Washington was to the University of Pittsburgh.

It sits in a nice mid-sized city, is an “Urban School” (be careful with that phrase Reed!”), but interestingly enough has double the enrollment as Pitt yet has just about the same track record in D1 football as Pitt has had over the years.

(more…)

It was closed. Nothing to see here.

(Calm down guys – Just kidding & still updating). 

The news outlets did have some football stories up though…

The Trib has an article on the OL.

After nine days of spring ball, Pitt’s offensive line is unsettled, with only the left side set. All-ACC seniors Adam Bisnowaty and Dorian Johnson man the left tackle and guard spots, respectively, and both have been starters since 2013 (30 starts for Bisnowaty, 27 in a row for Johnson).

But when former starters Alex Officer (left foot) and Jaryd Jones-Smith (knee) return, the offensive line will look different than it did Saturday when Pitt scrimmaged at Heinz Field.

With all the questions concerning the Pitt hiring process and the square dance that Barnes did with that Search Firm John Harris’ article in the Trib on the subject is timely:

Universities’ reliance on a third party has made search firms power brokers in college athletics. And that has raised questions about sports departments’ and coaches’ relationships with those firms.

“It used to be sort of be the old boys’ network,” said Chris Hunt, president and cofounder of Hunt Scanlon Media, which tracks the talent management industry. “This athletic director knew another one. The people (behind) them might be brought up through the ranks to replace them. That’s changed.”

In this instance, Barnes didn’t enlist the services of just any firm. He reached out to a friend. Barnes selected Collegiate Sports Associates, which has conducted searches for high-profile head coaching and athletic director vacancies.

(more…)

[Greetings from Cincinnati — don’t ask.]

Even before anyone was hired, I stated that it was unlikely Pitt was going to see much in the way of transfers. With a large senior class, JUCO, redshirt, a couple of local kids and a sophomore in line for plenty of playing time. That has indeed been the case.

Pleasantly surprising has been the retention of the 3-man recruiting class. All three had other choices with their release — and they did indeed take a quick look about. Corey Manigault was the first to ask for his release, but was also the first to recommit. Justice Kithcart — the player with the most programs coming to poach him — has decided to stay. And now it seems Crisshawn Clark is going to stay as well.

(more…)

DiPaola’s Blog from the Trib has some interesting stuff today:

Make room in the outside linebacker competition for North Allegheny graduate Seun Idowu.
He is one of three players who came to Pitt at other positions, but have been moved to linebacker to help fill a big hole in the defense left by graduating senior Nicholas Grigsby.

At practice Thursday, Idowu caught everyone’s eye when he recognized a jet sweep by wide receiver Quadree Henderson and made the tackle.
“He was like a jet,” senior middle linebacker Matt Galambos said.
Idowu, who came to Pitt as a walkon, said he remembered the play from previous film study. Earlier in the day, he didn’t make the tackle on a similar play, but he refused to be fooled twice.

“It’s a great feeling to recognize something you saw in the film room,” he said.
Idowu said it takes time for walkons to attract attention.

(more…)

This is pretty damn cool. The Pittsburgh Pirates open the season on Saturday, April 3.

James Conner to open 2016 @MLB season with first pitch for @Pirates vs. Cardinals on Sunday at 1:05. #ConnerStrong pic.twitter.com/DJWj9zzcq6

— Pitt Football (@GoPittFootball) March 30, 2016

(more…)

Let’s get back to football for a while and turn off the “noises” we fans have been spewing about BB that upset King Scott so much.

Here is the latest video of the practices out of the Southside.  We are at the halfway point as we just finished our seventh out of 15 practices allowed which includes the Spring Game – the NCAA counts that as a practice just like the others. That scrimmage BTW will be at Heinz Field on April 16th.

Take a close look at #85 making some nice plays and harder catches.  That’s rsJR Jester Weah and the guy who we Pitt fans, and the staffs over the last three years, having been hoping to come around. Would be nice… especially if our new OC wants to open up the passing game with more deep balls.

(more…)

Well, here is a subject whose time has obviously come to be ‘talked about’… and that is the horrible back up QB situation we have at Pitt this spring and maybe, if our bad luck holds, will have going into fall camp.  As readers of the Blather well know I have been harping on this almost continually since Chad Voytik departed.

As a matter of fact just this morning I posted an article on here that in no small measure addressed this subject yet again.

In conversations with other Pitt fans I find it interesting that there was so much blowback on Peterman transferring in to usurp Voytik … but there has been virtually no fan noise made about the fact that we’ll drop in quality rather surprisingly if we have to replace Peterman for any length of time.

Many fans have stated ‘Well, this is a normal thing to have the QB2 be a kid with no real game time experience.’ and I will beg to strongly differ.  Almost always a D1 head coach will get his back up QBs at least a few snaps to get somewhat acclimated to true game conditions.  But that didn’t happen last season because we had the Nate Peterman / Chad Voytik tandem… so the assumption at the time was that going into 2016 we’d have the same level of talent at both the QB1 and QB2 spots.

Obviously that can’t happen and Narduzzi has been caught with their personnel planning coming up short in that area.  Matt Canada is inheriting this situation and can’t be all that happy about it.

Again, fans counter with ‘Hey, we have no idea if Bertke and DiNucci can play in a game pressure and neither do you.’ And that is true also.  But there is a twist with those guys.  Because of the two senior guys at QB neither Bertke nor DiNucci has ever taken any QB2 snaps in any practices and certainly not during game weeks when the practices revolve around the offensive game planning.

(more…)

It looks like we may see a true FR step into the starting role at CB given our shortness of talented depth there due to Lafayette Pitts’s graduation.   Of course the first name that springs to mind is Damar Hamlin, the highly rated and coveted DB from Pgh’s Central Catholic will be joining the Panthers in the fall.

DiPaola has this:

Actually, Coach Pat Narduzzi’s defense puts heat on all its cornerbacks, often locking them up in one-on-one confrontations with wide receivers. That might be the reason he recruited three in this year’s freshman class: Central Catholic’s Damar Hamlin, Brashear’s Therran Coleman and Henry Miller of Kissimmee, Fla.

If those players are ready, Narduzzi and Hill are willing to give them the opportunity to win a job. At least, that has been said repeatedly through the first five days of spring drills.

But that may not sit all that well with the kids who have been waiting in the wings for a chance to shine.

(more…)

Two days ago we talked about ex-WR Elijah Zeise being moved to the Linebacker position. Here is an article and some background on the move:

He looks just like his old man.  I like this switch and it shows that for as much as the fans want new players to come into the program and get playing time right away Narduzzi doesn’t feel that way.  Any coach will play guys like Boyd or Whitehead as true freshman but the reality is that most players usually have to wait their turn until their Sophomore or j* year to become starters.

We fans are high on rsFR Brightwell and McKee and rookie FR Kaezon Pugh, and those kids look to have nice talents, but they’ll be sitting a lot more than playing this season. That said, after this year when we lose who may well be the starting LB lineup of SRs Galambos, Caprara and Bradley those kids, Brightwell and McKee will be rsSOs with two years college experience under their belts and will fleet up to starting some games.

Jerry DiPaola of the Trib has this piece on the subject.

Beset by injuries at the position and in the name of trying to “get the best 11 on the field,” coach Pat Narduzzi on Tuesday texted Zeise, requesting a meeting to talk about a position switch. “Honestly, I thought I might be in trouble for something,” Zeise said.

On the contrary. Narduzzi sees an opportunity for Zeise to replace Nicholas Grigsby at the star (outside) linebacker spot that also requires the skills of a safety. Zeise, who will be a sophomore in the fall, played wide receiver, safety and cornerback at North Allegheny and helped the Tigers win the PIAA Class AAAA championship in 2012.

“He’s a good athlete, and I think we need him on defense,” Narduzzi said. “He’s a guy who can come in and play some very quality reps for us. He has a chance to start.”

Moving Zeise (6-foot-2, 220 pounds) from wide receiver to linebacker makes statements about Pitt’s situation at both positions.

(more…)