Now that we are starting the “long desert march”, that dry spell we go through every summer until we get to the Fall Camp in the beginning of August, there are a few things on my desk I want to share with you all.

First addressing the question of QB Nathan Peterman’s role in transferring from Tennessee to PITT and why he’s doing it.  Everyone assumes it is just to provide a back up to Chad Voytik because somehow Voytik has a ‘lock’ on the starter’s job.

That isn’t true. There is no doubt that Narduzzi and OC Jim Chaney are bringing Peterman in to compete for the starting job right off the bat.  Chris Peak has written a very good piece with strong quotes about this subject in his April 23^rd article.  That article is behind Rivals’ pay wall but here is a taste of what Narduzzi said…

“He’s going to come in here to compete,” Narduzzi said Wednesday. “Chad knows that. Chad’s embraced that, and Chad’s got to look at it as, ‘Hey, this guy is going to make me better.’ I think it’s always good when you can look in that rearview mirror and see that someone’s there on you. I don’t know that Chad had that throughout the spring, to be honest with you.

“So he’ll have that in fall camp, and they’ll learn together, and it will make us a better football team.”

Reading between the lines I think Narduzzi may well have meant that Voytik didn’t have that competition last season either and he wants to make that happen. I get the feeling,  just a feeling only, that Narduzzi isn’t 100% sold on Voytik’s skills at QB.

There is more substance on this issue in Peak’s article and I don’t want to impinge on his hard work but read it and you’ll see this isn’t some unknown kid coming to PITT just to be on the roster.

A four-star member of UT’s 2012 recruiting class, Peterman was rated as the No. 8 pro-style quarterback in the country coming out of high school in Florida.  After taking a redshirt as a true freshman, Peterman started one game in 2013, breaking his hand in the loss to Florida, and one game in 2014.

Peterman committed very early to UT after a sterling senior year of high school. Cheney lobbied hard for Peterman to come onto the team especially because Peterman has two years left of eligibility.  Remember that Chaney was with Peterman for a full season as opposed to three weeks so far with Voytik.

This mirrors almost exactly what I was told in response to some questions I asked when I was on the sideline during the spring game however I wanted to let some time pass before I quoted Peak’s stuff directly.

So, don’t be too shocked if we see both a competition and a controversy when we get to the meat of the fall camp. I expect we’ll know a lot more around August 22^nd or so.  Here are the HS stats just as a comparison at a snapshot time.

Those numbers are a bit misleading as Voytik has a full college season to show what he’s done, for instance his completion rate at PITT is a good 61.3 so take the table above for what it is, an historical look at the two kids.  Should make for some fun conversations…

Second is the continued insistence that somehow there is a windowless office on campus where the “non-existent super-secret plans” for an on campus stadium are being worked on.  Can we now please forget this idea for the next 20+ years?  The new Chancellor said it wasn’t going to happen at his initial press conference  and then yesterday at Barnes press conference our Interim AD Dr. Juhl re-iterated the point by saying this, and right before he introduced Barnes BTW…

“Juhl said part of Pitt’s pitch toward Barnes was the opportunity to make a difference.  We don’t have to raise $300 million for a stadium,” Juhl said, “but we have more than enough things that we can work on to fix to bring us up to where we want to be.”  (emphasis mine)

Guys, PITT can’t make it any more clear that they are not going to pursue an on-campus stadium either now or anytime in the near and not so near future, so can we just drop already?  It is one thing to talk about in general terms but I keep hearing and reading from otherwise sane fans that  “the plans are in the works…: They are not in the works and won’t be.

Lastly, that “front porch” quote we got from both Gallagher and Barnes is a rather cute, albeit misleading, one.  Here it is in the entirety:

“Athletics truly is a front porch,” Barnes said after being introduced as athletic director on Friday. “It is not the most important room in the house but it is the most visible and what comes with that is opportunity and responsibility.”.

Every single PITT fan that has heard and read that quote is in love with the ‘welcoming’ image and the thought that athletics is the gateway to a school’s positive reputation.  Great! How wonderful!

Too bad it only rings true in a perfect world. I am here to tell you and remind to you also, that you can’t take that front porch phrase and apply it only when things are going into a positive direction for PITT athletics and therefore for the University itself.

We spent a full year on here railing at the world and our readers that all the crap that went on inside the football program from the end of the 2009 season until DW walked off the campus in January of 2011 was highly embarrassing to the university not only locally but on a national scale and negatively impacted the school and the athletic dept’s reputation.

Back then we shared with you that when the football program had an unprecedented string of highly visible and violent incidents, and then hard on the heels of that we had the Sports Illustrated “Top 25 Arrests” issue being released it was airing PITT’s dirty laundry across the sports world.

So just understand that all that gut wrenching crap we had to watch unfold back marched right up those same front steps, onto the university’s front porch and right into the school’s administration forcing them to make changes.

Over and over I heard fans either minimize what was happening or saying that it didn’t affect the school’s reputation at all.  That wasn’t true. I guess the fact that the best we could to in hiring HCs after all that bad publicity and the subsequent firing of Wannstedt was Mike Haywood and Todd Graham was just a coincidence. Do we really believe that the pool of willing and higher qualified candidates didn’t shrink rapidly when their phones rang and it said “Steve Pederson, PITT” on the screen.

Do any of us honestly think we’d have gotten an AD as qualified as Scott Barnes five years ago had Pederson been fired along with DW back in late 2010?  Hell no! Pitt was anathema at that time.

Barnes is inheriting an Athletics department that now does things the right way and is getting a football program that just went through a vigorous and successful top-to-bottom revision with Chryst as the HC.

Others may think fund raising must be Barnes first priority and that make sense, but for right now there seems to be enough money in the pot to go around.  So I’ll disagree and shelve that thought and say that keeping the progress made in the department moving in a forward and upward ethical direction is Job One for him.  If he sets a strict and positive tone right off the bat then his sports coaches won’t have a problem feeling the same way and doing the same thing.

So let’s keep this in mind even as we are celebrating this new AD hire. We can believe that our front porch will be squeaky clean with Scott Barnes as the AD but remember that just as quickly PITT’s front porch can be dirtied as we saw not all that long ago.

NOTE: In response to comments here is the 2014 ACC QB rankings