My friend Sean and myself headed over to the spring game yesterday not sure what to expect. We’re the odd types who are still optimistic but with spring games it’s really tough to judge things when a team is facing itself. Is something a good play by one or a bad play by another? I went into this with the intention of only looking at things I could say with certainty and the best way to do that is look at individual performances as opposed to overall impressions. Did the offense look better than the defense yesterday? Yes, but there are so many factors that go into that; I’m not willing to say the offense is better. If the offense was running complex plays and the defense was running a more vanilla setup, it makes a big difference.

I’ll start off with the thing everyone cares about the most: QB. I’m going to do 2 entries for the spring game: QBs and everyone else. I’ll start with the QBs today and get everything else done after watching the game on ESPN3 because it’s tough to see OL and DL play live.

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A friend of mine, Matt Alkire of Upper Hand Promotions, introduced me to a recent Pitt offer. Matt’s work at Upper Hand Promotions helps student-athletes gain a competitive advantage in the recruiting process. For any parent or athlete who has gone through the process I’m sure that sounds like a godsend. When I saw on twitter that one of his clients is Rasaan Stewart of Perkiomen Valley, I begged for an interview. Thankfully Rasaan was ready and willing. Here’s what the 6’1 athlete had to say about Pitt, his ideal position, and a few off topic subjects.

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Allow myself to introduce…myself. Justin here, I post as NFLGimpy on Panther Lair and twitter. I graduated from Pitt in 2008 and still live in Pittsburgh. I’m a proud football season ticket holder. I’ve been writing about the NFL for several years now, most recently on Scouts Notebook, an NFL/College Football website mostly focusing on the draft. This has led me to looking at a lot of tape and highlights for draft eligible players and I wanted to add a little bit of that to my first post here on Pitt Blather. I reached out to Chas and Reed and after successfully blackmailing demonstrating my worth, they agreed to humor me.

I figured I’d start off with Tom Savage. With Savage as the likely starter at QB for us in 2013, most of what us fans know about him is purely from memory and practice notes. Tape has been difficult to find for him since he was a freshman and most of what I found is purely highlights which are obviously the “good” and not the bad or the Tino Sunseri pocket presence. But you can still learn a lot about a player from the highlights, mostly the “what COULD this guy be?”

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Flying home from Houston today. If we could avoid any more transfers or quitting the team today, that would be great.

On the bright side, at least Mike Rice isn’t/wasn’t Pitt’s basketball coach.

Stay safe everybody on Zulema St.

Down in Houston to see family. Wonder if this might be a topic of discussion with my sister and brother-in-law (both Rice alum)?

Oregon’s Arsalan Kazemi? has been a key player in the Ducks’ run to the Sweet 16, but while at Rice from 2009-12 he alleged that Owls athletic director Rick Greenspan repeatedly made insulting and discriminating remarks to him, two fellow Middle Eastern players and an assistant coach, and that led to his request for a hardship waiver from the NCAA to be eligible to play this season.

According to a document obtained by SI.com, Kazemi, the first Iranian-born player in NCAA Division I men’s college basketball, alleged in his hardship waiver that Greenspan made derogatory comments referencing Al-Qaeda and the Axis of Evil when talking about Kazemi and two of his teammates.

The NCAA only grants hardship waivers under special circumstances, but in this case it gave waivers to Kazemi and his teammate, center Omar Oraby, an Egyptian who transferred to USC in September.

The Egyptian born assistant coach who helped recruit these players also filed an EEOC complaint after he was let go. At the most generous, kind reading of the comments the Rice AD made, he was making very, very tasteless jokes.

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Hey, who wants to get a beer on Sunday?

A couple weeks ago I posted about meeting at Voodoo Brewery in Meadville this coming Sunday to sample some HTP IPA brewed up by one of our own. A tour and likely chance for some sampling are involve.

I know that there will be a small group coming in from Grove City. It’s looking good for me to make it out there. I may be a little late — was hoping to be there right around noon — but I should be there. I’ll be the guy walking in with a couple empty growlers. Really starting to wish I wasted money on this transport system.

Hope people can make it.

If one were to chart the results of the 2012 PITT football season you would have had the graphics of a perfect sine curve up until the Rutgers game yesterday afternoon.  Far from being just a coincidence that sine curve is the symbol of what it is to be a PITT fan.  We don’t get too high on a winning streak because a losing streak is sure to be at our back door.

We started off with two killer losses. First we had the 31-17 loss against a FBS Mountain Valley Conference Youngstown State team who beat us like a drum at home in racking up 381 yards of offense.  This was Paul Chryst’s debut in a long line of recent head coaches at PITT.  He made his first impressions by suspending six players, including three starters, for undisclosed reasons then went out and lost what should have been a rather easy win.  Needless to say it was an inauspicious debut.

We followed that up with a 34-10 ass kicking road loss against a BE opponent in Cincinnati.  This game set the tone for the season IMO.  We could believe that the YSU game was something of a fluke but to play so damned poorly against someone who we have had great and close games against over the years was adding insult to injury.  It didn’t take a Lydia Callis to show us how screwed we were.

Plus we permanently lost the Riverboat Trophy.  Even though Darrell Strong, who was intimately involved obviously, and I are the only PITT people who actually liked the trophy it still would have made a nice addition to the rest of the PITT bling down at the Southside Complex.  Oh… it would have been a needed win also.

But wait, there’s more!

Chryst and the players righted the sinking ship in grand fashion by throttling the #13 ranked (yeah, sure!) Hokies of VA Tech 35-17 and playing the way we fans felt this team could. It had all the elements for a big game – uncertainty in regards to the ability of the staff and team, a great offensive showing in putting up 581 yards and 35 points and a defense that stifled the Hokie offense.   Sunseri threw for 283 yards and three TDs including the missing deep ball; Ray Graham continued showing us how well he could do even after that injury (that first cut was amazing); Devon Street played the way we have been waiting for him to play and Rushel Shell gave us a glimpse of the future.

We played very well and kept the Hokies from singing their victory song in the locker room after a win.  If you think “genac, genac, genac” is weird take a look at this:

“Hoki, Hoki, Hoki, Hy.

Techs, Techs, V.P.I.

Sola-Rex, Sola-Rah.

Polytechs – Vir-gin-ia.

Rae, Ri, V.P.I.”

Speaking of fight songs here’s a PITT one I found that I had never heard before.  So, win number one under the belt, a following tune up against the weakling Gardner Webb (a 55-13 victory) and we are ready to tackle the rest of the season in fine fashion having shown what we can do.  Right?

Not exactly the way things played out though. Standing at 2-2 and with a two game winning streak we followed up with a 14-13 away loss against a struggling 1-3 Syracuse team.  The fact that we missed a relatively easy 1st quarter field goal attempt just made it that much harder to bear.  What was scary about this loss was the return of the “4^th quarter Sack Fest” that Sunseri gets an invitation to every week.   He did make a nice play under intense pressure when he hit Shanahan for a big gainer while getting hit.

OK – we’ll get ‘em next week.  We played pretty well against SYR and just didn’t get the breaks we need for that close loss. We are 2-3 and have a lot of football left to play.  Next week’s a win, take it to the bank…  sure Louisville is ranked #18 but didn’t we just beat a #13 team two weeks ago?  Well, that thud you heard after the Cardinals racked up 21 unanswered points in third quarter was the PITT fan’s expectations for the rest of the season.  Who the hell is Senorise Perry anyway and where does he get off playing like that against us?

That was how it played out in the beginning of the season: two losses – two wins – two losses.  Regular as can be and the only consistent thing we had done all year.  It was too much to bear and got us fans thinking that the season was a complete write off at that point at that point.   We have Buffalo and Temple up next. OK, but we just lost to YSU and SYR so let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We pulled those next games out with another two game winning streak, the second one of the season, and we were back at .500 ball.  But let’s face it, going into South Bend and playing the #3 team in the nation is a sure loss.  Well, it was a loss but there was nothing sure about it.  We outplayed the Irish for 3.5 quarters and took them into triple overtime before the dust settled with ND on top by a score of 29-26.

OK, OK, OK!  Hold on! We lost that game but hey, didn’t we look great in doing it? We have UCONN coming up next and we all know how badly they suck.  A 3-6 record is terrible and that means something doesn’t it?  No, it really doesn’t and they had their way with us in grabbing a insurmountable 24-0 lead in the 1^st half.

A crap 24-17 loss to a poor team and we’re back to the 4-6 W/L rotation.  Not going to get any better next week either.  Maybe we’ll buck the trend and lose to make it three losses in a row.  It can’t be any other way.  Except the Vegas money men saw things differently.  They had PITT giving points in this home game and somehow that turned out to be the case with a 27-6 PITT win.

It was a satisfying win on many different levels.  One of which is that it put us within reach of a bowl bid if we can beat a pretty poor 3-8 USF team at their place next week to finish at 6-6 for the regular season.  Secondly we beat RU in our last BE game together with them going to the Big Ten and us to the ACC, that feels nice.  Lastly it showed that this team can win a football game again.

So now we sit at 5-6 in a 12 game season, with 6-6 being the best we can do at this point.  It’s been a roller coaster ride this year, down/up/down/up/down and now up again, and leaves us with a lot of unanswered questions moving forward.  Can we finish the season on a high note and beat a team we are supposed to beat?  If we do that will the Bowl officials look at PITT and be convinced they want us in their post-season games? Can we actually get through this season with a winning record after all the poor and inconsistent play we put out on the field?

However, perhaps the most important question to be answered in the future is this: Will we be able to look back on 2012 and see that it was a season of growing pains a new head coach went through for things to get better in 2013 and beyond or will we look back and say that 2012 was the harbinger for the remainder of Paul Chryst’s time at PITT?

Personally, I think the former.

For some reason, it won’t let me log onto the moderator account for Chas’ cbox, and I can’t figure out how to embed it in the post. So, if you could just click here, it should show up in another window.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Big East Play gets an early start this season as Pitt takes on Cincinnati for final ownership of the River City Rivalry Trophy.  Here’s a half-assed preview of Thursday’s game:

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The Biquarterion is a group of once powerful Big East mascots. They meet in Mike Tranghese’s old clubhouse. They control absolutely nothing and don’t plan on it in the future.

Viewer Discretion is Advised……

WE’RE IN THE MONEY….WE’RE IN THE MONEY!!!
  YAY! In about 12 months those assholes will be gone!

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Here we go. Camp is wrapping up with some light work today and we pretty much know what the status of the two deep, injuries, attitudes (I just threw that one in) etc. are going into the season.

We have nine days until showtime so lets get our thoughts on record.  I’ll throw some questions out and you share your thoughts and why you feel that way.

1.  What will be PITT’s regular season record, what bowl game if any and why will it be this way?

2. What will be Tino Sunseri’s and Ray Graham’s final stats?

3.  Which new “star”, either a new or returning player, will burst onto the scene in a way we didn’t expect?

4.  What will be the most disappointing aspect of the season?

5.  How will PITT fans feel in January of 2013 about the Paul Chryst hiring?

Obviously you guys do what you want to do but feel free to be as detailed as possible.  I’ll throw mine out after the ball starts rolling.

  The Spring Game scrimmage is right around the corner and is being played on Saturday afternoon at North Hills High School’s Martorelli’s Stadium.  There are a lot of questions unanswered, some questions answered they way we don’t necessarily want them to be and a lot of concern about our 2012 season under a new coaching staff.

  After attending a practice, reading everything I can get my hands on, watching all the interviews and having some conversations with people in the program,  here are the questions that I’m most looking forward to seeing answered out on the field Saturday.

  Can Sunseri carry practice success onto the field against competition?  We all know by now that Tino Sunseri is going to be the starting QB on Sept. 1^st unless something drastic happens.  Mark Myers didn’t rise to the challenge and Trey Anderson, while a good passer, isn’t going to overtake our incumbent QB starter.  I want to see if what we are seeing and hearing about Sunseri’s calm demeanor and accurate deep throws in practice can translate into completions at game speed.

  What will Mark Myers do when the spotlight is turned on for more than a play or two?  If Sunseri has a rep of being a practice star then can’t the opposite happen and someone who has struggled in practice play well when there is less thinking and more doing?  Myers has struggled with the short/intermediate passing game.  I watched this happen in practice and I’ll be watching Saturday to see if that is still an albatross around his neck.  If it isn’t then new life may be breathed into the competition for the fall.

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Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long sits alone in his office. It is the morning after firing football coach Bobby Petrino. He is still physically and mentally exhausted from the events. He is reviewing some paperwork.

The phone beeps.

: Yes?

Secretary: Sir, you have a phone call on Line 3.

(wearily): Carol, I said I did not want to talk to any boosters or reporters right now. I just need some quiet and the soothing peace of low-grade administrative paperwork.

Carol: I know sir, but it is Oklahoma AD Joe Castiglione… your friend and old boss… And…

: It’s okay, Carol. Yeah, I’ll talk to Joe.

[Pushes a button on the phone.] Joe, good to hear from you…

Voice on the phone: Jeffy, finally! It’s not easy to get to you. That secretary of yours is a tough one to crack. She may have to go as we make the changes for Arkansas!

: Um, you aren’t Joe. Who is this?

: Todd Graham, your next football coach, the Good Lord willing! Oh, sorry about the trickeration there, Jeffy. It just took a some doing to get to speak to you.

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Here is Coach Chryst’s schedule:

March 14th – Finalize staff plans for the next month. Declare recruiting a disaster and decide not to do it any longer this year. Ask staff to reaffirm commitment to PITT in writing. Ask Joe Rudolph how he developed a sudden wrist injury and can’t sign.

March 15th – Spring practice opens. Watch QB drills where Sunseri amazingly completes his first five deep balls thus cementing his starting job for a third straight year.  Make public announcement to that effect.   Ask the Athletic Director why the PITT ticket office is suddenly flooded with season ticket cancellations.

March 16th – Hold first official team meeting. Ask anyone who wants to transfer to declare it now.   Go looking for Trey Anderson as he had to leave the team meeting to go to the men’s room and hasn’t been seen since.  Review the program’s Rules and Standards of PITT Football.  Scream at the secretary who forgot to search and replace “Chryst” for “Graham” in the document.  Discuss Chryst Amendment #1 which states that any PITT football player(s) who break into a student’s dorm party and beat the crap out of numerous students are required to clean Heinz Field after the next game.

March 21st – Readjust two-deep lineup. Demote Sunseri because he keeps running out of bounds as soon as he gets the snap. Elevate Myers to 1st string on the condition Myers can find his playbook – which is propping up a broken bed leg in his dorm room. Ask Ray Graham if he’s 100% sure he can’t participate in practices; infer he’s a pussy when Graham starts waving his crutch around while saying “I can’t even walk, cracker!”

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The horrible events at Western Psych yesterday overshadow everything else. Details are still so sketchy. The shooter is dead but still unknown. It’s not believed he was a patient, but he sure wasn’t well. Prayers and good thoughts for the family of Michael Schaab who was killed as well as to the injured. UPMC is not releasing the names of the injured, but is providing updates on their conditions.

A week and a half ago, the shooting took place at Chardon High School. Some 20 miles away from where I live. Everyone around here is still trying to process that. Trying to make sense of the senseless. I don’t know if it’s really possible.

How do you explain a sickness that manifests itself in such a violent way against others? Maybe we learn some details that explain part of it.  Individuals with some understanding, education, or training may be able to vaguely comprehend the breakdown. But that final step. That point where the horrible act is performed. When the full break happens mentally. How do you make sense of it?

Even those with extensive background and education. There’s nothing simple and easy to offer in the way of explanation. Or solutions.

The small gestures of wearing ribbons or a band on the wrist doesn’t seem enough. It sometimes feels lacking and not nearly enough to express support and sympathy. But sometimes that is all we can do. Show that we care. That we are not merely nodding our head and making sympathetic sounds. Taking some step to show we care about others and our community.