“Now Sir! Time doth bring sad changes, for people often change and seldom do better”

When I was in my 20s there was a West Coast fusion band I loved named Tower of Power and one of their hit songs was titled “What is Hip?”   Here is the refrain from that…

“What is hip?
Tell me, tell me if you think you know
What is hip?
If you was really hip
The passing years would show
You into a hip trip
Maybe hipper than hip
But what is hip?”

The point is that being that “hip” is flexible, it differs and is unique to you.  You can be hip one day and things change and you are on the outside looking in. Unless you create your own style.  Then you are hipper than hip because you own it.

I immediately thought of that on Friday when I was reading the comments to that article written about the aftermath of the Bowl loss up in NYC. The phrase SOP or “Same Old Pitt” came up, as it regularly does, about a hundred times a day when talking about Pitt football

I wrote then that SOP ‘has no real definition and a thousand faces‘ because I think that it is one phrase we throw out, usually in dismay, as it is seen and processed through our own individual lens.  If those lenses are blue and gold then you most probably didn’t see much SOP over the course of the season that just ended.

However, the more pessimistic fans saw SOP under every bush and around every corner from September until last Wednesday.  It is a hard question and answers differ so let’s take a look at the Pitt football program itself before we start to try to pin an answer down.

Continue reading “What Exactly is Same Old Pitt (and Do We Have It?)” →