**** BREAKING RECRUITING NEWS ****

Well, not really, but interesting doings with the recruiting front lately.  Pitt just landed their QB of the future, possibly, perhaps, in local kid Jack Salopek from Norwin HS. A 3* recruit he grabbed the first actual offer that came along and will now be a Panther behind Pickett, Patti and 2019’s Davis Beville.

Beville’s mother, Cruella, said this about Salopek; “If he thinks he’s seeing the field as long as my son Davey is at Pitt he can crawl right back to that dirty, smelly steel mill his daddy probably works in.”  When the POV tried to explain that there were no more steel mills in Pittsburgh Cruella shouted “Of course not, it’s a loser town. I wanted Dangerous Dee to be a Gamecock at South Carolina but they didn’t offer him! Damn Muschamp to hell!”

Salopek has some pretty nice numbers after his sophomore year at Norwin so that’s all well and good – I just think committing yourself to a kid in 10th grade is premature but that’s the way of college ball these days.

So now Pitt fans can’t complain in June of next year that Narduzzi doesn’t have any commitments yet.  Hey, that maybe why we offered this kid!

In the “Duh” department 5* Paris Johnson Jr verballed to Ohio State.  You’ll remember Pitt signed his father on as a “FOP” (Friend of Pat’s) hire a while back.

The less cynical Pitt fans will point to his hire and say “Hey, he’s well qualified in his own right“.  Others will say it was an incentive for drawing his son to Pitt’s 2020 recruiting class.  Who knows really?  Doesn’t matter one bit because if you look at the kid’s offer sheet Pitt had virtually no shot at him anyway – new Director of Player Personnel or not.  But it does have a scent of ‘we swung and missed’ to it.

So what does Pitt do instead – jumps on the next bandwagon and is about to offer a kid from Imhotep Charter (I watched a bad movie about some dude named Imhotep a few years ago).  Here is a bit from PSN on the kid:

Pitt is still looking to add a big, athletic wide receiver for this recruiting class and Karam Cummings fits that profile.

The backstory to Cummings is an interesting one because he’s never played varsity football. 

Up until now he’s been a basketball player at Imhotep Charter in Philadelphia. However, a month ago, The 6-foot-4, 185 pound Cummings had a conversation with Imhotep Charter star safety Tykee Smith, who convinced him that he could be a star playing football.

Cummings has been working out with the team and opening some eyes. In fact, yesterday Cummings picked up a Power Five offer from Baylor.

Just like The Great Carnac I know what some Pitt fans are going to say even before they say it:  “But remember Sam Clancy – he didn’t play football in high school or Pitt and he was in the NFL!!”

Well, this kid hasn’t played a lick of football either or college BB so what does that mean…?  Maybe he’s not the best player to use an actual scholarship on?  Get him on the roster as a walk-on or something but if we offer this young man a football scholarship we’ll never hear the end of it. This smacks of desperation but its early days yet – let’s hope we find an actual WR to help us next season.

By the way – what happened to the last player who we talked about being so good even though he didn’t play much football in high school? Oh, that’s right – Thomas MacVitte.  How did that work out for us?

Pitt was pursuing 3* RB Brandon Wright but he chose PN’s old school rather than Pitt (and others).  Word is that Pitt was heavily recruiting Wright because 4* RB Daniel Carter took an official visit to Pitt last weekend then not only didn’t commit along with the bunch of other Florida recruits but went home and stated that ‘Pitt was in his Top 10’ after his visit.

That is a turn of events Pitt probably didn’t see coming.  Usually when a kid leaves his first official visit, and you know we rolled out the red carpet for him and his parents, then has less interest than before he arrived there is a problem – so Wright was Pitt’s second choice.  Next up!

The question burning through the Pitt Nation is when is Narduzzi going to get some offensive linemen committed in the ’19 class.  As of right now we have none.  Get on that Pat.  Last class we signed three of them – two of them from local areas.

Which is an interesting conundrum  – if Pitt fans keep saying there is no more talent in the WPIAL, then why are they jumping up and down about these 5.7 rated kids…from the WPIAL?

I’m confused. But you already knew that.

Pitt Athletics Creates Mental Health Partnership with Western
Psychiatric Institute to Help The Pitt POVers

Two full-time mental health counselors are joining the team of Pitt athletics/Pitt POV in a partnership with the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of UPMC (WPIC). Pitt athletic director Heather Lyke said the partnership will “provide early intervention for mental health and wellness issues in POV writers, readers and commentators.”

“The program reflects Pitt’s commitment to the POV experience and ensures Pitt’s responsiveness to POVers health and well-being,” Lyke said.  “If they aren’t happy, Pitt isn’t happy!”

The program’s focal points will include awareness and stress reduction strategies and one-on-one counseling. Counselors also will address issues such as blog addiction,  rampant optimism, too much golf, alcohol imbibing and commentator rage.

“The new partnership will expand and enhance the role of behavioral health with two full-time counselors who will be housed within the athletic department and dedicated to POV readers and commentators,” said Jack Emhoff, chief of athlete services at WPIC.

“This innovative approach will radically increase education on support options, along with access and timeliness of counseling services, while increasing Reed’s stigma against commentator rage.  If I have learned one thing in my time doing this it is that when dealing with Pitt football too much optimism is as dangerous as smoking crack cocaine while driving a school bus.”

Two-time Pitt graduate and four-year Dance Team member (woo-hoo) Laurie Wassamatta, L.C.S.W., joins the program as lead clinical counselor. Since 2015 Wassamatta has been working as a member of a team of counselors who worked with aging male POVers when they were referred directly to the WPIC facility.

She has worked on POV readers’ and commentators’ psychiatric assessments and
referrals, individual therapy, as well as treatment for mood, stress and anxiety disorders. Janice Beauhoohoo, Ph.D., N.C.C., will serve as clinical counselor.  She has provided counseling and peak performance services to student-athletes at Liberty College and offered desperately needed individual and team-based services at West Virginia University  (boo!).

WVU’s head coach Dan Hologorsen was a patient of her’s for the last five years and had this to say about Beauhoohoo:

“She really helped me a lot.  Everyone else said I absolutely had to quit drinking or I’d lose my job.  But she worked out a deal with the university’s administration so that if I quit drinking tequila in the mornings I could stay.  Boy, those POVers are getting a great asset with her in their back pocket…”

(Obviously this is a parody submitted by our great friend Hobie. Here is the real article about Pitt Athletics partnering with Western Psych…)

 

Or “How the Pitt Baseball Team + Trees Hall + an Econ Major Helped Shape My Journey to Pitt Football Fandom!”  Here is MajorMajors’ bio for all to read and enjoy…

I grew up on Mt. Washington overlooking Pittburgh’s Golden Triangle – though it wasn’t yet quite so golden when I was growing up in the 1950s. My very first memories of the Pitt Panther football team came from the local evening news on TV. When I was twelve years old, I remember seeing these dazzling highlights of guys named Paul Martha, Fred Mazurek, and Rick Leeson. When playing touch football in the playground, I wanted to be those guys, making those long, zigzagging touchdown runs, as much as I wanted to be Buddy Dial or Gary Ballman of the Steelers. (BTW, in 1963, the Martha/Mazurek led Panthers went 9-1; the Steelers had the odd record of 7-4-3.)

No one in my family had gone to college and we had no connections to Pitt. I went to Pitt as the home-town school and am a proud graduate of Pitt’s Civil Engineering program. But I attended Pitt during some really dark days for Pitt football — from 1967 to 1971. It happened that I played on the Pitt baseball team, coached for over three decades by Bobby Lewis. It was here that my connection to Pitt football was cemented for all time.

Unlike now, back then several of the football players played on the baseball team. (Though I always suspected that some of them came out just because the baseball team opened the 1968 and 1969 seasons with weeklong trips in March to play in tournaments at Riverside, CA and Miami, FL, respectively.) Back then, freshmen could not play on the varsity – so I had to play on the freshman team for the 1968 season.

I won a starting outfield job as a Sophomore and I was playing on the same baseball team with guys like pitcher Frank Gustine Jr., who played QB, and our ace pitcher George “Doc” Medich, who played tight-end. Others I can remember were Joe McCain, tailback, Jeff Barr, defensive back, John Simpson, offensive lineman, and Ray Reppert, QB.

Knowing these guys made me root for them on the football field all the more. I really wanted to play football, but as the guy in “Rudy” says, “at 100-and nothin’ and and 5-foot nothin’” that wasn’t going to happen. Even though our football team won few games during my time at Pitt, I went to every home game and rooted like crazy.

Continue reading “Am I a Lucky Guy Or What?” →