Sunday Morning Thoughts

Cleaning out the Mental In-Box while awaiting the Steelers kick-off....

• After soundly thrashing South Florida last week, Pitt fans were giddy in the seeming arrival, finally, of Todd Graham's high octane offense last week. So what happened at Rutgers, which Bill Hillgrove continually tells is is in Piscataway, New Jersey, sure came as as a shock yesterday. What a stinker of a performance that was.


• Graham was quick to place the blame squarely on himself and his staff. Guess he learned his lesson after he blamed the players and took no blame after the Iowa and Notre Dame losses. As someone suggested, while Graham may be the highest paid employee at Pitt, he still has a boss, and that that boss obviously told Graham to knock it off with the it's-not-my-fault stuff.


• Which makes me wonder about Dana Holgerson's bosses at WVU. Holgerson's reaming of the WVU fans for not showing up at game against Bowling Green two weeks ago had to have Oliver Luck wondering about this guy, who has been a loose cannon of sorts ever since he arrived at Morgantown.


• Which leads me to another prediction: If Holgerson achieves any type of success at WVU, and if WVU finds itself an odd man out as colleges keep playing the conference reshuffling game, he will leave Morgantown as soon as some BCS school comes calling with a job offer. I say he's gone from WVU by 2014.


• To anyone who says that baseball games are slow, boring, and take too long to play, I will point out that the Pitt-Rutgers football game yesterday took 3 hours and 40 minutes in real time to play. Even Hillgrove and Pat Bostick on the radio broadcast were saying how excruciating it was. The first half, in which 9 total points were scored, took and hour and forty-five minutes to play.


• The 17-10 score of last week's Steelers loss to Houston is not indicative, if you ask me, of how badly they were beaten in that game. Today the 2-2 Steelers take on the 3-1 Tennessee Titans at Heinz Field. Is it an overstatement to say that how this game goes could well determine the direction of the rest of the season for the Steelers?


• A friend of mine made the statement this week that if nothing else, Steelers losses make the sports radio talk shows a whole lot more entertaining.


• And that phenomenon is not unique to Pittsburgh. The Atlantic Highlands, NJ correspondent to The Grandstander reports that callers to New York stations are demanding that the Yankees ditch Curtis Granderson (the presumptive MVP in the American League) because "he strikes out too much." Good thing there wasn't sports talk radio back when Babe Ruth was striking out a lot for the Yankees back in the 1920's and '30.


• Watch but Don't Bet Department: The Steelers win over the Titans at home today, but it won't be easy.


• Those MLB Division Series sure were great theater, weren't they? Hope the two LCS can live up to them.


• To Absent Friends: Al Davis, who WAS the Oakland Raiders died yesterday. While he was certainly not a likable guy to the teams that opposed him, his place in football history cannot be disputed. The NFL-AFL merger was going to happen eventually, but it happened a lot sooner when Davis became commissioner of the AFL, and established NFL bigdomes realized that they had no stomach for a street fight led by Davis. And has football in Pittsburgh ever been so intense as it was when the Steelers and Raiders met so often and with so much on the line in the 1970's? Davis was as big a part of that as anyone involved. You wonder what will happen to the Raiders now that Davis will no longer be there.