Before I can get to actual training camp, I need to clean out some browser tabs that rapidly accumulated over Big East Media Day.
Related to nothing, but a good laugh. A 1980s golf outing photo featuring Coach Wannstedt and Nick Saban.
If you want to judge which Pitt player was the favorite choice for the media to interview there are two options. One is to wait until you find an article that mentions which players got the most attention (“…the media’s most popular interview at Tuesday’s event — Zach Collaros and Dion Lewis tied for that award…”). The easiest metric, though, is volume of stories. Dion Lewis was the overwhelming option.
Whether it is Lewis doing what he could to respectfully tamp down the Heisman talk.
“When I was little, I used to dream about winning the Heisman,” Lewis said Tuesday. “I’m too busy to dream now. Football is 24 hours, seven days a week.”
…
“It feels good to be mentioned in the same sentence with the Heisman,” Lewis said. “But it’s such a team reward. You’ve got to win games to win the Heisman. As long as my team wins, everything will be right.”
While admitting he would like to win it.
“Yeah, I want to win it,” Pittsburgh’s dynamic running back said Tuesday.
But?
“But thinking about winning it and actually winning it are two different things,” he said.
Coach Wannstedt had a comment on Lewis for this season.
“I’m kind of excited to see how he handles it,” Wannstedt said. “Because it will be a different challenge. Not physically and not mentally from a football standpoint, but a little different challenge mentally from an approach standpoint. But halfway through (last) season, he was breaking records and Dion was putting up big numbers. He wasn’t a surprise to anybody.”
As an aside, this was a NJ Star-Ledger article from Big East coverage which when coupled with a story on Pitt being the Big East favorite, a capsule breakdown of all the Big East teams (which includes a Q&A with Jonathan Baldwin at the bottom) and an article on Pitt having significant success plucking kids out of New Jersey has the Rutgers fans a touch peeved. Blaming the Star-Ledger for hating Rutgers, claiming that Rutgers never really wanted these kids, that their standards for admissions/character are much higher. Typical defensive fan reaction, really.
Then there are the stock stories, almost recycled from last year on how Lewis was overlooked by most of the D-1 programs including Rutgers and Syracuse because of his size. This story has the nice touch of how his family made the trip to see him play at Buffalo last year in an RV. Plus the added flair of Lenn Robbins trying to tag “Dion the Dynamo” nickname on him which, well… no.
