There is a game next Monday against USF on ESPN. Pitt has its Game notes and some stats (in PDF) available.

Up late doing other things, so let’s get some of the news that was already posted on sites.

Depth is becoming a bigger issue every day for this Pitt football team. The team is thin at the tailback, fullback, and lines. Just not a good thing. We are going to be holding our breath every time a Pitt player is even slow to get up after a play this year.

Something very useful Joe Bendel at the Trib does articles on the offense and defense, complete with his grading and quick summary of the components. Not totally surprising, but the defense looks to be improved while the offense is really thin and with question marks everywhere. Both lines are still reasons to worry.

Backhanded defenses for Walt Harris in the whole Pitt-Penn St. Rivalry won’t be renewed mess. Paterno is taking the beating. First, Ron Cook, who has been on a 3-5 year mourning of watching Paterno fall from grace in his eyes.

I think we can agree Walt Harris was way out of line with his inane comments about the Pitt-Penn State football series earlier this summer. To say Penn State was somehow selfish for discontinuing the series — even as talks between the schools’ athletic directors were going on to resume it — was outrageous.

To suggest Penn State was to blame for Pitt’s recruiting problems was blatantly self-serving. Harris wants to know why he couldn’t outrecruit Penn State after his team went to its fourth consecutive bowl game last season and the Nittany Lions went 3-9? It’s because the Big East Conference turned into a second-rate league after Miami and Virginia Tech left. He wants to know why he’ll have a hard time outrecruiting Penn State again after this season? Maybe, just maybe, it’s because star players will be hesitant to play for a coach who will call them out publicly if they happen to get hurt.

As I should stress, again, backhanded defense.

Harris’ habit of speaking before he thinks isn’t enough reason for Pitt and Penn State not to play again.

We all know the truth here.

There is absolutely no good reason for the series not to resume.

Joe Paterno will tell you differently, of course. He’s the greatest college football coach of all time. He also might be the most petty. That’s the only reason this great series between great rivals withered after Penn State’s 57-13 win in 1992 and finally died after Pitt’s 12-0 victory in 2000.

Paterno doesn’t want to play Pitt and will use any excuse not to do it. Not because he’s afraid of losing the games and his recruiting edge, as Harris so foolishly observed. The idea of Paterno being afraid to play anyone is almost laughable. No, Paterno doesn’t want to play Pitt because of a grudge he still carries from more than 20 years ago when Pitt joined the Big East basketball conference instead of his dream all-sports Eastern league.

That’s why the reports of talks between the schools about resuming the series were more unfathomable than encouraging. Paterno has carried his bitterness this long; there’s no reason to think he’ll change his mind about playing Pitt now.

He’s right. He still has a bit of hero worship, so he couches it as petty and a blind spot in Paterno’s vision. Still, by the end, even Cook admits the game won’t resume until Paterno is dead retires.

Next this piece from Joe Starkey is much more caustic and brutal to Joe PA.

If not for Joe Paterno’s petty resentments, Pitt and Penn State might be kicking off each season against each other instead of against, say, South Florida and Akron.

Paterno wrecked the great Pitt-Penn State rivalry, and he’ll use any excuse to prevent its renewal — even if it means pulling a few harmless quotes out of a student newspaper.

The truth is that Paterno harbors grudges against Pitt administrators, who have long since left the university, or, in some cases, have long since died.

The truth is that because the Ohio States and Michigans of the world can’t be bullied, Paterno needs an outlet for his bully tendencies, and he views Pitt as a convenient target.

Starkey may also use petty, to describe it — because it is — but he is more brutal than most sportswriters when it comes to describing Paterno. He then runs through all the sudden changes that seemed to make the return of the game appear to be on the horizon. He is more willing to give a better defense of Harris (though with a backhand slap for flourish).

Then, Paterno supposedly turned sour when Pitt coach Walt Harris popped off to the Daily Collegian, Penn State’s campus newspaper.

“I think it’s a selfish act on (Penn State’s) part, not playing us,” Harris said in the July 29 edition.

He was right. Penn State discontinued the series twice in the past 11 years, essentially because Paterno hasn’t gotten over the fact that Pitt wouldn’t join him in an all-sports conference back in 1982.

Or was it 1882?

Not knowing the athletic directors had spoken, Harris said, “I don’t think there will be any communication on playing (Penn State) as long as one man is running the program.”

Those comments are said to have ruined Paterno’s will to renew the rivalry.

Suddenly, it looks as though Harris is the bad guy. Don’t believe it.

Oh, Harris is plenty capable of screwing things up — he often does — but he’s not the culprit here.

He had the right idea, even if he has backed off his statements and said he would have kept quiet if he’d known talks had occurred (why didn’t he know?).

The right idea, by the way, is this: As long as Paterno is running Penn State, this rivalry is dead.

Besides, how substantive could the talks have been if all it took to derail them were a few comments in the student newspaper?

It will be interesting to see if the central and eastern Pennsylvania newspapers even are willing to write anything about this. Or will they pretend it never happened so they don’t have to defend the indefensible? The Penn St. Weblog on PennLive has nothing for all of August.

UPDATE: Apparently something finally got the attention of the PSU Weblog. He doesn’t actually defend it — other than using the old Paterno chestnut of the Eastern League argument that is nearing it’s 25th anniversery of never happening; and the more recent talking point of Pitt packaging the tying all (other than the allotted tickets to PSU) individual ticket sales for the ’98 PSU-Pitt game with Temple tickets (and for the record, the combined cost of the two was still cheaper than a single ticket at Beaver Stadium that year). Enjoy that Land Grant Battle.