Month: July 2016

Pitt POV Sunday Podcast; July 31

Sunday’s Pitt POV Podcast:

 

Sorry about the abrupt ending there – must have hit the wrong button.  Here is the remainder of the Podcast:

Two Pitt Players Named to All-ACC Team
Pitt offensive lineman Dorian Johnson and defensive end Ejuan Price were voted to the preseason all-ACC team, the conference announced Wednesday.

Johnson, a Belle Vernon graduate, has started 27 consecutive games and enters his senior season as a pillar on an offensive line that is expected to be among the conference’s best. Price, a Woodland Hills graduate, rejuvenated an injury-riddled career last season with 48 tackles, 19.5 tackles for loss and 11.5 sacks on his way to earning first-team all-ACC honors.

OUR NEW PUNTER:

Upon visiting the United States this month, his good fortune continued when Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi offered him a scholarship to be the team’s next punter. He quickly accepted.

“If they ask me to jump,” Christodoulou said, “I’ll say, ‘How high?’ ”

Christodoulou, who graduated from Balwyn High School in Melbourne last year with a 3.62 GPA, hopes to enroll at Pitt in January when he will become the school’s first Australian-born football player in anyone’s memory. He is part of a huge wave of Australian athletes who grew up playing Australian Rules Football and now find themselves on U.S. college campuses or NFL teams, becoming part of a game they usually only watch back home on pay TV.

Australians have won the past three Ray Guy Awards, given annually to the best punter in college football. Utah’s Tom Hackett won it in 2014 and ’15 and is with the New York Jets. Memphis’ Tom Hornsey was the 2013 winner.

PITT 3rd in preseason PollWhatever…

Pitt Self-Reported NCAA Violations Long Ago

PITTSBURGH — The NCAA accused the University of Pittsburgh of 15 recruiting violations in football and one in basketball, and the Big East school said Friday it planned to cooperate with investigators.

Mark Jones, a director of enforcement for the NCAA, confirmed a letter of inquiry had been sent to Pitt but declined to comment on specifics.

Athletic Director Oval Jaynes said the 15 violations against the football program were self-reported by Pitt last May, some as violations and others as possible violations.

The school said then that staff members under former coach Mike Gottfried and former AD Edward Bozik broke NCAA rules by giving football players money, meals and clothing and giving recruits limousine rides and deluxe hotel rooms.

Peak’s Podcast

A Look Back Saturday; Pitt vs ND 1975

5:53 pm: I had to re-post this to accept comments.  Used a friends laptop and it screwed it up…sorry.

As much as I love college football the one thing that is so frustrating is the popularity polls to determine who the Top 25 teams are on a week to week basis.  It has gotten a bit better as far as crowning a national champion with the four game playoff system now in place though.  I did some reviewing of the final Top 10 teams over the last few decades and I’d say that most of the ‘mythical’ national champions (MNC) that were named would have come from the final top 10 listing.  So the pundits were in the ball park at least.

College football used to have two major polls to base these ranking on.  One was the Associated Press (AP) poll that consisted of selected sportswriters across the country who voted by listing their personal top 20 teams.

The other Poll was the Coaches Poll that was run along the same lines except in lieu of sports writers there were selected  Division I coaches voting for a top 20 list.

Continue reading “A Look Back Saturday; Pitt vs ND 1975” →

How We Look on Paper

Pittsburgh Sports Now has a ‘five story lines going into camp‘ piece up and they make good points.   But since this is what I do I’ll take a friendly shot, for fun, at the article and place a rebuttal of my own.

Mike Vukovcan (I’ll call him Mike V. because his name is hard to pronounce even in my head) is clearly drinking the Narduzzi Kool-Aid when he says this:

“On paper, Pat Narduzzi looks to have a 8-9 win team and if things break right, Pitt could be looking at 10 wins. While that might now seem like much, consider that since 1981, Pitt has only had 1 ten win season (2009, 10-3).”

We may have a different idea of what “on paper” means here.  When I hear the words ‘on paper’ it means stats and historical facts. One formal definition is:

“…on paper definition, meaning, what is on paper: judging something by how it has been planned rather than how it really works in practice.”

So using that as a basis I’m more pessimistic than he is for the upcoming season.

Continue reading “How We Look on Paper” →

Camp Profiles: Mike Caprara

We are getting close to the beginning of Pitt’s fall camp as players report to Pitt on Aug 7th and on Aug 8th the fun begins.  That is only  11 days from now so I thought I’d take a day or two per week from now until Sept 2nd to peel back the curtain on some of the  lesser known players who we’ll see out on the field this season. We’ll call these articles “Camp Profiles”.

I’ll concentrate on Panthers in the two-deep who we recognize, and may even know a little about, but who are not in the glare of the spotlight.  I firmly believe that star players are fun to watch but the less heralded young men actually win the ball games.

James Conner might make a nice 20 yard run to give us the winning points late in the 4th quarter but it is the others who grind it out every play to get us within striking distance of the win.  Those players are the guys who usually don’t get much playing time until their junior or senior years but then really start to contribute.

So I’m crossing these more well-known players off this profiling list: Conner, Peterman, Bisnowaty, Ollison, Johnson and Orndoff on offense and Price, Soto, Hendrix (we’ve discussed his background already on here), Bradley, Whitehead, and Galambos on defense.

Continue reading “Camp Profiles: Mike Caprara” →