A No Football Weekend

No Pitt football yesterday, no Steelers football today.  Talk about a lost weekend, but it prompts some Random Thoughts from The Grandstander.....

At the beginning of the season, you would certainly signed up for a 6-2 first half of the season from the Steelers, although you would have never predicted that those two losses would be to the Bears and the Jaguars.  Still, with five of the remaining games at home, the schedule looks to be much in the Steelers favor, to the extent that a twelve win season looks to be attainable.

One thing that needs to be reversed in this second half is better, and I hate to use this term, Red Zone Production.  How many times have the Steelers been in First and Goal situations and have had to settle for field goals instead of touchdowns?  Seems like about a million times, right?  That trend really needs to change.

I am also concerned about Ben Roethlisberger's performance this year.  It's not that he's been bad (throw out that freak five interception game aberration against Jacksonville), but he has just appeared to be just a bit "off" from his past seasons' capabilities.  One can hope that he can shake it off, but there is a fine line between being great and being ordinary, and perhaps at age 35 and in his 14th NFL season, Ben has come up to that line.  He spoke of retirement after last season, and maybe the end is coming.  Steelers fans can hope that both he and the team can summon in all up over these last eight games and make a run to the Super Bowl, which I predicted and I will stand by that prediction here at the halfway mark.

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Pitt now sits at 4-6 and needs to go 2-1 (North Carolina, @Virginia Tech, Miami) in order to go 6-6 and be bowl eligible.  Personally, at this point in the Narduzzi Era, I was hoping for more than merely scraping to go 6-6 and getting an invitation to some WhoCares Bowl.  I was also disappointed to see that Pat Narduzzi found it necessary to take a shot via Twitter last week after Penn State's loss to Ohio State last week.  Seems that HCPN should be tending to his own team, and at least contending for the championship of his own conference  before engaging in such schoolyard behavior.

As for that bowl eligibility, I see a win over NorthCarolina and loss to Virginia Tech.  It will all come down to that final home game against currently undefeated Miami.  I'm thinking that Pitt does not go bowling this year.  There goes those vitally important 15 extra practice sessions that coached love so much.

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Speaking of boorish behavior among coaches, Penn State got dealt a dose of humility with its second consecutive loss yesterday, this time to Michigan State.  I see in the paper this morning that James Franklin stated that perhaps his team was too concerned with things like national rankings and getting into the College Football Playoffs, and that maybe they weren't "mature enough" to handle things.  Since he, Franklin, was foremost in voicing such opinions, I hope that he was including himself among those not being mature enough to handle it, but he probably wasn't.

Franklin has convinced me that he is a pretty good football coach, but like many such coaches, he's not an easy guy to like, unless he coaches "your" team.  As such, not a lot of people outside of central Pennsylvania are going to feel too bad about this sudden two game losing streak for Franklin's Lions.

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And speaking of unlikeable coaches, how about Urban Meyer and  Ohio State getting pasted in Iowa yesterday?  With this second loss of the season, this should take Ohio State out of any talk of being one of the four teams in the CFP this year.   The Committee seemed to automatically include Ohio State int e Playoff last year, and that was wrong (and, yes, the team that should have been there was Penn State).  It is not Ohio State's birthright to be there, and it looks like they won't be this year.  Although, I guess that the Buckeyes could still win the Big Ten Championship, so who knows?

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Right now it appears that all signs are pointing to the SEC Championship Game, most likely between Alabama and Georgia, as the Game of the Year.  Both are undefeated and are ranked 1 and 2.  Unless that game is a rout for the winner, it is likely that both teams will make the CFP, and a rematch will be possible in the playoffs.  That never usually works out well.