Bummer for Pitt football coverage.
This is my final day as the Pittsburgh Trib’s Pitt football beat writer, as I’ve been offered an opportunity to move into a new role within the sports department that includes writing a weekly column.
The new Pitt football beat writer is John Grupp, who has done an outstanding job covering the Pitt men’s basketball team the past three seasons and I promise will do the same with the Panthers in football. John also is one of the nation’s leading writers on horse racing and covered high school sports here for about two decades.
The Trib also has a new addition to our staff, Ralph Paulk, who started Monday and will join John in providing coverage of the Pitt football and basketball teams. Soon, they are expected to set up a Pitt-centric blog to continue the intensive coverage to which you’ve become accustomed.
I’d like to express my sincere thanks to all the readers of this blog who have passed along kind words. The pleasure was all mine.
This sounds great for Kevin Gorman. A definite step up in the food chain. I wish him luck and will miss his fine work.
Selfishly, I’m bummed about losing a quality writer that did solid reporting and provided fine observations on his blog. The Trib’s Pitt football coverage has been well done for some time. There was Joe Bendel before Gorman. The fact that both have moved up the chains does indicate some solid people in the spot.
I’m going to be curious about Grupp taking the football side. He’s been decent in basketball, but I can’t say outstanding. In his fill-in posts for the Gorman blog, they were rather devoid of any opinion. We’ll find out I guess about whether he’s comfortable to express his own opinions about what he sees.
Now for a little shameless note of getting love. From ESPN.com’s Big East writer, Brian Bennett’s chat today.
Jack (PA)
Are there any Big East bloggers that you would put on your Big East Message board MVP’s? (Most Valuable Posters) If so, who?Brian Bennett
The ones I read the most are Troy Nunes is an Absolute Magician, Bleed Scarlet, Card Chronicle and Pitt Blather. For what it’s worth.
[hyperlinks added.]
Can’t fault his choices. These are the ones I read regularly in the Big East blogosphere.
Rivals: 4-star, 17th overall DE (nationally)
Scout.com: 5-star, 6th overall DE
Maxpreps: 59th best player overall (nationally at all positions
Yet ESPNU has him at 3-star and ranked 53rd best DE overall. Go figure. This proves ESPNU is like ESPN in covering just all the big names and name schools (SEC, Tebow, USC, ND, Oklahoma, etc) just like ESPN which spend in inordinate amount of time on Bosox, Yankees, Favre, TO, Kobe, Lebron, etc. Note there is no BE 2010 recruit in the ESPNU150, however, I guarantee if Clemmings would have verbaled to UF (who offered him), he would be much higher ranked on ESPNU.
BTW, ND is pre-season ranked 13th on ESPNU … could you imagine any BE team who lost at home to Syracuse last year being ranked that highly in the following year’s pre-season? I luv the live game coverage that ESPN/2/U provides but take their analysis with a grain of salt.
And Luke, this blog has been around for many years, and Chas has made this the #1 blog for Pitt sports on the net. As good of a job as Gorman has done reporting on the team, Chas has done as well on gathering Pitt-related news from all over the web. He deserves all of our thanks as well.
Props to Chas for getting a mention from Bennett, for whatever that is worth. I guess it will direct some more traffic over here in the short-run.
2nd. TJ Clemmings dad says he doesn’t think his future is to play football at Pitt, check Zagsblog or NBE football report (new website). Stinks cuz he looks like a big time talent, maybe a good year will bring him back.