The one position coach that most wanted to see go is offensive line coach Paul Dunn. He was a part of Dave Wannstedt’s original coaching staff as well as being a former Pitt player, but so far his OL unit has failed to put out the needed results. During his three seasons, the best player we saw was Jeff Otah, but other than that the O-line was mostly a disappointment.
Who might replace him? The Post-Gazette offers one name:
A replacement for Dunn has not been hired, but the top candidate is believed to be New York Jets offensive line coach Tony Wise, who is a longtime friend of Wannstedt and has been on the same staff with Wannstedt at a number of places the past 30 years, including stops in the NFL with the Cowboys, Bears and Dolphins. Wise was a graduate assistant at Pitt in the mid-1970s.
Another name that might be mentioned is current Thomas Jefferson HS head coach Bill Cherpack. He played for Pitt from 1985-89 and has had a ton of success at TJ including winning back-to-back state titles.
“His record speaks for itself as to what type of coach he is,” Panther head coach Dave Wannstedt said of Cherpak. “There’s a reason why T.J. has such a good football program.”
Don’t forget, his best player — Lucas Nix — will be playing on the OL in the near future.
Meanwhile, the hoops team is tied up at 30-30 at the half. Villanova ended the half on a very nice run, but with our roster situation I think being tied is good enough for now. More to come.
In my opinion we will be better off with a more capable replacement even if it means missing out on Jenkins.
Who knows though, maybe he will like whoever we hire more than Paul Dunn anyway.
Ramon is fucking awful. He is slightly better than 5 white guys from lafayette.
We’ll be EXTREMELY lucky to win 9 games this year and make the tourney. Nova isn’t even that good.
The thing we’ve always had was a good PG who could DRIBBLE – how low have we fallen that all i hope for is competency in dribbling. What’s more of a joke is that Ramon was only credited with 5 TOs! He was responsible in some way for at least half of them. He had more assists to the other team than he did ours.
gil brown is gonna be good..im excited to see how he continues to improve…those 2 blocks were sick……
With 10 seconds to go he has to give that ball up to someone, not put on a dribbling exhibition.
Double team was on Blair and Ramon looked astonished?? Why?? He should have expected it.
Sam Young was wide open and Ramon never looked at him.
Great effort tough loss..especially after last night. Going to be a long season.
I still don’t understand how any coach goes into as season with only 1 real point guard (or 1 QB).
Injuries are a part of the game (see Steelers) and you always lose the one guy you can’t afford to.
Wannamaker must move up on the depth chart for Pitt to have any chance against the big boys.
Oh well…just want to see game to game improvement. Thats all we can ask at this point.
Wannamaker is not ready to contribute – see the end of the game, when Pitt went big instead. Basically, Pitt is trying to win running six guys out there. All things considered, I wasn’t too disappointed today – I thought things would be worse actually. Let’s get our expectations checked with reality.
Wednesday’s game is the important one – not this one. If we want to make the tourney, we MUST win games like Wednesday’s.
He is NOT quick enough…. is what I was trying to say.
Biggs showed that he stinks when he’s up against quick players. Bad, bad fouls. And at one point he threw up a jumper from 10 feet when there was no one between him and the basket. Not a good game for Tyrell.
It’s gonna be ok.
Whether you want to admit it or not, ‘nova’s a good ranked team, we played them in a tough place to play, and we have a few crippling injuries…
… and we still were one 2 point basket from winning.
We play that game at the Pete, or maybe even Wachovia and I think we win.
I heard rumors that Fields’ recovery is looking good. The Big East isn’t a great conference this year (or at least not as tough as in the past) and we just need to win the winnable games until he gets back.
I have faith in Coach Dixon. We’ll be fine.
You tend to get a pass when you’ve been successfull in the past. Wanny hasn’t, but he did win himself another big pass with the WVU upset and the 3rd straight stellar recruiting class.
The only problem is that DW shouldn’t have been criticized as much. A veteran quarterback would have been recruited by Walt Harris. He could have pursued a juco in one of the last two classes. Because of that, he could have fixed the problem, thus he is partially to blame.
Dixon has recruited every player on this team and deserves the blame much more than DW. There is absolutely no reason for us not having a back-up PG. People claiming that Ramon is a good back-up PG are just wrong. He is doing his best, and I don’t blame him for not doing so well.
I didn’t blame Wannstedt either. I said, to paraphrase, “we can win some games as soon as stull is back, this team is better than last year” – too bad he never came back. I didn’t expect much out of a freshman QB, redshirt or not. But a senior? C’mon.
I’ll take any other bigeasts SG as our pointguard right now (at least that i can think of, over 75% of them).
And the reason we all look back fondly on the past few years when our team was upsetting other teams, is because when it came down to 1 pt games, we had a PG/SG getting layups, and we’d win. That’s not going to happen this year. We’ve always had good guards. Ramon just hasn’t developed. Time to look at reality – we won’t be pulling out the close ones like we used to.
