Sunday, December 4, 2011

On Pitt, High Schools, Rematches, and Herman

Cleaning out the Mental In-Box.....


  • Herman Cain bows out of the GOP Presidential race after several revelations of marital infidelity come to light. OK, seeya later, Herm. Newt Gingrich, whose own checkered past regarding how sacred he has held his marital vows is well documented, soars to the top of the polls among GOP voters. What am I missing here?

  • Congrats to local high schools Montour and North Allegheny for winning their quarter-final games in the PIAA Football Championship tournament. If they win their semi-final game next week, they will advance to the State Championship games in Hershey in two weeks. This means that these HIGH SCHOOLS will have then played 16, count 'em, 16 games during their season, the equivalent of one full NFL regular season, and will finish playing football one week before Christmas. Does anyone besides me find that to be totally absurd?

  • So the BCS Championship game, which will take place 36 days from now, will be a rematch between LSU and Alabama. You all recall, even though you have probably been trying to forget, that scintillating offensive yawn-a-thon that these two teams played last month, a 9-6 overtime win by LSU. Really, has America been clamoring for a rematch of a game where neither team scored a touchdown? Will anyone outside of Baton Rouge and Tuscaloosa even care about this game five weeks from now, and after 34 other meaningless bowl games have been played?

  • And now, a word about Pitt Football....

Todd Graham became head coach at Pitt last winter, and spent the entire off-season talking about winning championships, scoring boatloads of points, and pretty much setting the world on fire. I liked the enthusiasm in contrast to the usual gloom and doom that is part and parcel of pre-season coachspeak. However, I stated in this forum before the season began that all of that hype could come back to bite Graham in the you-know-where if Pitt bombed out. Well, Pitt did bomb out, finishing their season yesterday at 6-6, and Graham has been hearing the critics loud and long over the team's pedestrian performance this season.


This is not to say that Graham will never work out for Pitt. Everyone has said that Graham needs to get "his players" in at Pitt that will be capable of running "his system" effectively, so give the guy a full recruiting class or two to make that happen. Who knows it it will ever happen, but the guy does deserve a chance. Again, I kind of like the bombast and self-confidence. However, those characteristics can and sometimes did cross over into arrogance and it-wasn't-the-coaches'-fault finger pointing, which I didn't like.


It should also be noted, that many of the people who are now screaming about Graham and saying he'll never win and should be fired (after ONE year) were last year at this time calling for Dave Wannstadt's head on a platter, which Pitt delivered to them. It should be noted that Graham was coaching a team this year that was almost wholly comprised of Wannstadt recruited players.


The season will end sometime later this month, or early in January, when Pitt plays in some completely irrelevant bowl game with some ridiculous corporate name attached to it. The god-awful bowl system in college football is a topic that is belabored ad nauseum, so I won't add to it here, other than to say that 6-6 Pitt playing in such a game is eloquent testimony to the system's god-awfulness.

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