Too many links piling up. Need to dig out. So, here are several that I found of interest, and somewhat related to Pitt.

As expected Maryland QB Danny O’Brien is done after Randy Edsall did his level best to botch the situation. Taking the top rookie QB in the ACC the previous year and doing all he can to wreck him — including benching him 3/4 through the season. Then expressing shock and blaming O’Brien for transferring.

“I’m disappointed by Danny’s decision,” coach Randy Edsall said in a prepared statement. “Danny told me that he’s not committed to our program, that he’s not ‘all in.’ I want what’s best for all of our players. Danny wants a fresh start elsewhere. I wish him well.”

That elsewhere, though, won’t be Pitt. According to tweets and reports ACC schools — including future ACC schools — are right out when it comes to schools Edsall and Maryland will let O’Brien transfer. So is Vanderbilt, where Maryland’s former OC  James Franklin is the head coach. Why? Because Randy Edsall is a dick.

I don’t say that lightly. But when you drive 24 players off a team in a year’s time. Yeah, that seems like an accurate reflection of the coach. When the QB you are driving off, is actually a real student — graduating 2 years early (which allows him to transfer and play right away) — yeah, a lot of this goes on the coach.

When I watch these kind of things that coaches and schools can and do, do to kids after they are under scholarship. Well, I have a harder time being outraged by the kids drawing out the recruitment and making coaches jump through hoops and sweat it out with hat decisions.

Speaking of being a dick. The NCAA.

Seems the NCAA is sick of being the whipping boy on articles about how the system is. So they are getting aggressive in attacking back at reporters and writers who give them grief.

As digital sources of information have exploded — and the lines among reporter, analyst, columnist, and provocateur have blurred — the NCAA has taken a harder stance against some writers. Lately those exchanges have gotten personal, with NCAA representatives referring to some journalists as “lame,” “dumb,” “pseudo-journos,” and “bad ones.”

In 2009 the NCAA hired Ronnie Ramos, a former sports editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, as managing director of digital communications. Last August he wrote on Twitter: “Notice how folks like @DanWetzel and @PeteThamelNYT post false statements and then never correct them.” He was referring to the Yahoo columnist Dan Wetzel and The New York Times reporter Pete Thamel, two of the most respected sportswriters in the country.

He has also called out CBSSports.com’s Bryan D. Fischer (“you can’t possibly be that naïve”), Fox Sports’s Thayer Evans (“ever heard of reporting before writing?”), PBS News (“as usual, Frontline is wrong”), Sports Illustrated‘s Frank Deford (“off-base again”) — and even the Colorado State University compliance officer John Infante, who has a blog on the NCAA’s own Web site (“if you want to throw stones, there are other places for your blog”). After taking heat for that last line, Mr. Ramos said he was only kidding.

I dunno, seems being a PR flack for the NCAA these days would be a rather Sisyphean exercise.

Great story on the Memphis drive to join the Big East.

John Marinatto, the commissioner of the Big East Conference and a wide-faced Rhode Islander, sat in front of his steak. By implied request, the party was small. President Shirley Raines and athletic director R.C. Johnson represented the University of Memphis. The other half of the table was as influential a triumvirate as the local business community can offer: FedEx founder, chairman, president and CEO Fred Smith; FedEx executive vice president and CFO Alan Graf; and former Promus and First Tennessee Bank chairman Mike Rose.

Marinatto had spent much of the day in the passenger seat of Johnson’s black Cadillac sedan, touring the town on a mild afternoon in a Memphis winter filled with them.

Despite the great details, there is one noticeable missing item. Somehow the name of the consultant Memphis had hired to help them with conference affiliation never gets mentioned. Some guy by the name of Mike Tranghese.

Want to find something else to angst over for the Pitt football offseason? How about what kind of impact the new strength and conditioning coach will have after reading this article.

“They’re the heart and soul of your program,” says Texas coach Mack Brown. “They have to have the guys in condition, and they have to push them while doing so within in the rules to be safe.

“At the same time, they have such a close relationship with the athletes that if the athlete is griping about a coach, our strength and conditioning guys have to stand up and get everyone back on the same page.”

Meyer put it more bluntly in a recent interview with Pete Thamel of the New York Times:

“You can’t function in today’s era of college football without a superstar as a weight coach,” Meyer said. “That’s more important than a coordinator or a line coach. That’s changed.”

The biggest and best programs in college football are rushing to make appointments because of that change.

“It’s so important because No. 1, the strength and conditioning guys spend more time with our team than we do as coaches,” Brown says.

Quite simply, the guys in the weight room are the glue that holds a program together, and it goes far beyond having more in the tank in the fourth quarter.

I was already a little worried about Rice. This sort of story doesn’t help.

My first impulse is that I love everything about this idea.

March Madness is great, but you know what would be even better? May Madness — a 4½-month season, starting around New Year’s and ending just before the NBA playoffs take center stage.

“It would be a jolt — the traditionalists would go crazy — but there’s some merit to that idea,” said Pete Gillen, the former Virginia and Xavier coach, who is now an analyst for CBS Sports Network. “I’m partial, but I think the tournament is the greatest 3½ weeks of the sporting year. I think the tournament is powerful enough that it could be pushed back.”

The NCAA Tournament is so big, so popular and so profitable that moving it will, admittedly, never happen. But while college basketball is content to ride its three weeks in the spotlight, its regular season is becoming increasingly easy to ignore.

And it’s not entirely college basketball’s fault. Sure, the sport has flaws, starting with too many teams in Div. 1, absurd roster turnover from year to year and too few interesting non-conference matchups. It could be a much better, much more consistent product than it is.

But even under the best of circumstances, there’s only so much oxygen in the atmosphere. From November through the first weekend in February, football takes up almost all of it.

I can’t disagree that basketball is almost entirely lost in the shuffle. Heck, around the same time of this, Simmons was speculating on how the NBA should permanently push its start time to Christmas rather than the beginning of November. Baseball was king, and that was the reason to wait until November for the basketball seasons. That is no longer true. It is football. A time to adapt and adjust makes sense.

Think the NCAA rules would make it too hard to move? Nope. Turns out it can be done within the current framework.

It would be outstanding for me. Minimal overlap of the seasons. Extending the season to May rather than the beginning of  April. The only downside would be to my marriage. Not sure how the wife would respond to me being able to have my Pitt obsession  extended an extra 6-8 weeks per year.

Finally, courtesy of SI.com. The cover of this year’s swimsuit issue.