Month: December 2016

My Thanks for a Great POV Year!

31 December 2016

Dear Pitt POV Readers and Friends,

As a new year begins I’d like to take a moment and share some of my thoughts with you regarding this website and your involvement in it.  If I may, let me take a minute and list the things that I wrote down as a mission guide for myself before I started this endeavor:

  1. Make it a place where Pitt Fans meet to discuss the Pitt football program and the University itself.
  2. Create an environment where the readers become commenters, the commenters become friends and the friends become family.
  3. Keep it a civil, clean, and well-respected place where everyone is entitled to their opinion, has a platform to share that opinion with others and can expect honest feedback.
  4. Integrate humor and teaching along with honest criticism into the discussion of the subject matter at hand.
  5. As the owner and writer I will keep an open mind to others’ thoughts and criticisms and use them to continually make this site better for everyone who comes to read and comment.

How have I done so far with that? Well, I hope.

My thanks to you all for helping to make this site the resounding success it has been so far.  It has taken off beyond what I envisioned when I started it.  We now have hundreds of thousands of readers, great commenters (you) and are getting more new readers and commenters, members of the “Pitt POV family” as it were, every single day. Growing by leaps and bounds…

Continue reading “My Thanks for a Great POV Year!” →

Monday Morning QB: Northwestern

Well, we’ve had over 775 comments during the bowl game and describing our feelings regarding the loss afterward so I’m not sure there is a whole lot more to say about the specifics of the game itself, that is how the game was actually played out on the field.

Suffice to say two main things happened, at least to my eyes.  Everybody associated with Pitt from the Chancellor through the AD and coaching staff, through the players and into the fan base, were way too overconfident about facing Northwestern.  They just didn’t see a loss coming and I didn’t either.

I felt that we’d use our experienced and bigger OL to establish the ground game.  We’d use Narduzzi’s “take away the run or else” philosophy to hinder their running game then by default let them throw all over the field until we outscored them at the end.

Number two was a funny thing happened on the way to Yankee Stadium.

No one told the Northwestern people that was how it was supposed to be.  Instead they thumbed their collective noses at our vaunted #9 rushing defense, shut down our vaunted #26 rushing game and finished with more points on the board than we did. Whaaaa? Continue reading “Monday Morning QB: Northwestern” →

Bowl Eve Recap & Game Thread

OK then. Let’s go down a recall list for the revelers and submit an after action report.

Left my hotel at 6pm and got to the Pitt HQ hotel, the Sheraton Times Square, a bit after.  On the way there I walked up to  Pat Narduzzi standing on the street corner looking up at the street signs and trying to figure out where he was with the phone in his hand.

It was kind of a nice scene because he was in his all Pitt blue and gold sweats and had two packages of shopping in his hands so he looked like a regular tourist but in full Pitt regalia.

Once I got into the hotel I walked up to the bar and saw two guys in Pitt gear so I sat down in the middle and began to speak with them. On my left was Brandon Ford’s father Richard and it was a real pleasure being with him; on my right was another rabid Pitt fan whose Name Escapes Me Now but we sat and talked for about an hour on everything that has to do with the Pitt football program.

Brandon’s Father had a lot of insights into the recruitment of his son, basically from the middle of Penn State territory as that’s where they grew up. He thinks the world of the coaching staff now but really had glowing respect for Paul Chryst and Joe Huber who began recruiting Brandon in his junior year of high school.

Continue reading “Bowl Eve Recap & Game Thread” →

POV: Know the Enemy – Northwestern

Quick note:  The Pitt POV just received the best Christmas Gift ever – a full 3′ x 5′ Pitt Script flag to go along with the generous POV flag that Bernie (BigB) had made up just last month.  Now home tailgates are certain and it will be my pleasure to treat – the POV flag will fly directly over the Script flag and will be lowered to half-mast when my liver finally goes out.

I waited a bit to post this article because everyone does these holidays differently and I didn’t to miss any of the many celebrations that go on this time of the year. We had more out-of-town visitors than we thought we would thus the radio silence from my end…

A while back I posted the article “A Pitt Fan’s Holiday Wish List” where I laid out what I wanted for the University of Pittsburgh and then you all chimed in with your wishes.

Continue reading “POV: Know the Enemy – Northwestern” →