Sunday Morning Football Thoughts

Pitt's 31-13 victory over Pitt yesterday was an impressive one and an important one.  It boosted their record to 7-3 and kept their hopes alive, however dim they may be, to capture the ACC Coastal Division and getting a chance to play in the ACC Championship Game.  It also proved that they could beat a pretty good team on the road, and do it in fairly convincing fashion.  With two home games remaining, it is not unreasonable to think that Pitt can fashion and 8-4 or even a 9-3 season, and a chance to play in an upper echelon Between-Christmas-and-New-Year's-Day bowl game.

Who saw that coming last December when yet another Pitt coach was fleeing Oakland to take yet another dream job, and the new guy would be coming in and reaping a less than complete recruiting class for his first season?  I should probably wait until the after the final game to see this, but I say that Pat Narduzzi now becomes one of the leading candidates for the Dapper Dan Man of the Year Award for 2015.

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On the Pro Side of the House, the Steelers take on the Hated Browns today.  By all rights, this one should be an easy W for Rooney U., but for the following reasons, it could also end up in disaster.  First and foremost, Ben Roethlisberger will be sitting out this one due to that injured foot, and secondly, the Steelers in recent years have shown an uncanny ability to lose to crummy teams, including these same Browns last year.  If you haven't already done so, I recommend Gene Collier's column in this morning's Post-Gazette, who spells out, in his usual entertaining manner, how this could be one big pitfall for the Steelers.

We will see how it unfolds on the Heinz Field greensward this afternoon.  In any event, the annual tilts with the Brownies are always fun to watch.

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Speaking of the Browns, for even the most hardened Steelers fans who harbor a lifelong dislike for the Cleveland football team, I am guessing that most of those people would concede that the Browns always had a classic uniform, as modeled by this guy:

As has become the case these days throughout  all sports, especially in the NCAA and now the NFL, the Browns went to new uniforms for 2015, and can we all agree that they are absolutely hideous?

I know it's all about marketing, and selling jerseys to the suckers fans who continue to put down big bucks for these rags.  The Steelers get criticized all the time for those bumblebee throwbacks that they wear, but at least they only pull those out for two games a year, and  the classic Black-and-Gold uni remains unchanged, although I do wish that they would go back to the "block" font for the numerals ("Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!")  Lifelong, die-hard Browns fans, and I know many of them, after having watched years of incompetence since the franchise came back into the NFL, have to really be sickened by this aesthetic nightmare of a uniform.

Sunday Morning Sporting Thoughts.....

The big news in Pittsburgh sports today will be the return of this guy to the playing field:

(Photo courtesy of the Pittsburgh Steelers)

The Steelers managed to go 2-2 in Ben Roethlisberger's absence, which is better than many of us had hoped, to be perfectly honest.  Here's hoping that Ben won't be too rusty today as the the Steelers take on the 6-0 Cincy Bengals today in a key AFC North match-up.  Let's face it, based on that defensive performance against the Chiefs last week, the team is going to need Roethlisberger at the top of his game from here on out.

The other thing the Steelers have going for them is that today's opponent is the Cincy Bengals.  Yeah, I know that they are undefeated, but there is always the possibility that they will revert being the, well, the Cincy Bengals.

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That was a tough loss that Pitt suffered at the hands of North Carolina this past Thursday night.  North Carolina was clearly a better team than Pitt, so that 26-19 result was probably a just one.  Still, one can look at how Pitt made adjustments and played a better second half.  The coaches seem to know what to do to make in-game adjustments, and the players are clearly buying into it.  That's a good sign.  Also, one wonders what might have been had two UNC fumbles been recovered by Pitt when they occurred, but they weren't, so it's time to move on.

Pitt now faces two straight games where they figure to be underdogs, home with Notre Dame and at Duke, before finishing up with home games with Louisville and Miami.  would be nice to see the Panthers split those remaining games and end up at 8-4 (and what Pitt fan would not have signed on for that at the beginning of the year?), but it's not going to be easy.  Still, I wouldn't discount what this team might be able to do in these remaining four games.

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Speaking of college football, let me highly recommend this book to you:

Check out the subtitle: "A Journey Through the Big Money Culture of College Football."  There's nothing in here that any serious fan didn't know or at least suspect, but Gilbert Gaul, a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, has put together a well researched and well written book about this topic. Delving into this topic oft-times makes you want to take a shower, but as I have stated before, I buy the tickets, and I watch the games on TV, so I am a part of the problem, too.

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So, Steven Matz did his job last night, as did Michael Conforto, and the New York Mets were five outs away from evening the World Series at two game apiece.  What followed is what makes baseball such a great game: two Tyler Clippard walks, a Daniel Murphy error, and a seeing-eye single by Salvador Perez, and BOOM!, the Royals are now firmly in control of this Series after a 5-3 win has given them a three games to one advantage over the Mets.  You can't take a knee in baseball.  You've got to get all twenty-seven outs.

Too bad for the Mets, but good for the Royals, who are clearly the better team insofar as the everyday eight man lineup is concerned.  Still, the Mets send Matt Harvey to the mound and momentum is the next game's stating pitcher blah blah blah, so we'll see.  Other teams have overcome being down 3-1, but the Mets are clearly rolling that rock uphill right now.

And by the way, while most of the country was probably watching the Notre Dame-Temple football game last night, they really missed a pretty darn good baseball game, even if you had to listen to Harold Reynolds in the broadcast booth.  Man, he's bad.  And on the subject of the announcers, I was pre-disposed to not like Alex Rodriguez as an analyst, but in the in-game spots that he has done, he has been pretty good.  He is well prepared and at times he seems to want to force every factoid that he has into his comments, but, all in all, I've enjoyed what he's had to say.

Pitt 23 - Syracuse 20

So, there I was, watching the Pitt game and grumbling to myself throughout the second half of the conservative play calling by the Pitt coaches when, lo and behold, Pat Narduzzi pulls a fake punt play out of the playbook and turns the tide of the game. And Pitt goes to 6-1.

Two lessons to be learned here, folks:

1. There is a reason I spent my life in the health insurance industry and was not a football coach.
2. The coaches now the talents, and the limitations, of the their players  far better than do those of us watching at home.

A really big game this Thursday night at Pitt, 4-0 in ACC play, takes on North Carolina, 3-0 in ACC play. 

Closing out with this photo of the day from yesterday's game, and the team awaits Chris Blewitt's successful FG attempt that won the game.

Hail to Pitt!

Romancing the Jones

Quite a big football weekend here in Pittsburgh, but let's start out with what might have been the biggest surprise of the season thus far.

STEELERS 25 - CARDINALS 13

That the Steelers defeated the Cardinals yesterday was surprise enough.  That they did it behind the quarterbacking of Landry Jones was downright amazing.  You know the story by now: an ineffective Mike Vick was injured in the third quarter, replaced by Jones, playing in his very first regular season action after three years as the third team QB, who then proceeded to lead the Steelers on two field goal and two touchdown drives, and a 25-13 win over the favored Arizona Cardinals.  To say that this was shocking is an understatement, but the Ben-less Steelers now sit at 4-2.  Amazing.

Some observations:

• It was thought by many, including Yours Truly, that the defense of the Steelers would be its undoing in 2015, but, amazingly, the defense has played surprisingly well.  True, they did surrender about a zillion yards to Carson Palmer and the Cardinals offense, but all that the Cards could do with those zillion yards was score one TD and two FG's.
• And it needs to be noted that coming into this game, the Cardinal's 38 ppg scoring average was the highest in the NFL.
• Forcing four turnovers can have that effect on a team.
• Speaking of turnovers, the Steelers have forced eleven of them in six games thus far.  In all of 2014, they only produced 21 of them.
• Antonio Brown needs to shut up, stop hectoring his QB on the sidelines, and be more concerned with how his team can win a ballgame, as opposed to how he can pad his stats.
• The Steelers threw only seven passes in the first half with Vick at quarterback.  Have Vick's skills as a QB eroded to such a degree that the Steelers cannot trust him to open it up and pass freely?  If so, why did they sign him as a back-up QB in the first place?
• I didn't listen to any of the post-game call-in shows, but tell me, how long did it take for some Yinzer to call in and suggest that the Steelers now trade Ben Roethlisberger, while his value is high, and install Jones as the #1 QB?  I'll bet it didn't take more than thirty minutes.
• Kuddos to Facebook friend Dave Glass for being the first to observe that we might have seen the "Wally Pipp-ing" of Michael Vick yesterday by Landry Jones.
• While legions of Steelers loyalists probably hated it, I kind of got a kick out of Troy Aikman verbally slipping and referring to the Steelers QB as "Tom Landry".  Perfectly understandable mistake.
• Speaking of Aikman, that Miller Lite commercial of him buying beer at the convenience store is quite good.

But let's not allow that Steelers win to overshadow this one...

PITT 31 - GEORGIA TECH 28

In the excitement of an unexpected Steelers win, let's not lose sight of what I feel to be a really, really nice win for the Pitt Panthers on the road against Georgia Tech on Saturday.  It was wildly entertaining game, that was eventually decided by Chris Blewitt's 56 yard field goal, the longest field goal in Pitt history (that that, Freddy Cox!).  Memories of the beatdown that Tech put on Pitt at Heinz field last year (and really, the beat down that Pitt put on itself in that game with those six fumbles), made this one especially sweet.

What I liked best about this game was this.  With the score 21-21 at the half, and Tech scoring on and making big plays against Pitt, Pat Narduzzi gave the usual coach-speak blather to the on field reporter about how "we need to make some adjustments on defense", and guess what?  Pitt really DID make those adjustments, and held Tech to only seven points in the second half.  Seeing something like that really happening before your eyes is really encouraging if you are  a PItt fan.

So, Pitt now sits at 5-1 and has cracked the Top 25 for the first time since 2010.  The schedule is going to start to get tougher with Syracuse on the road, and then North Carolina and Notre Dame at Heinz Field in the next there weeks, but it is hard not to start getting excited about we are seeing out of Pat Narduzzi and his Panthers this season.

As I said, a nice weekend for Pittsburgh football fans, although the Penn State and West Virginia fans in the tri-state area can't be real pleased about how their favorite teams fared this weekend.  I'll just let it go at that.

Pitt 26 - Virginia 19

A very busy Sunday yesterday kept me away from the keyboard, so I realize that I am at least 24 hours late with this post, but I did not want to let time pass without mentioning my impressions of Pitt's 26-19 victory over Virginia at Heinz field on Saturday afternoon.

Five games into Head Coach Pat Narduzzi's (or HCPN as the hip social media posters put it) reign, the Panthers sit at 4-1.  How good that record actually is will not be determined until the end of the season when we see (a) how Pitt finishes over its next seven games, and (b) it is determined just how good, or not so good, Iowa, Virginia Tech, and Virginia prove to be.  Still, the Panthers sit at 2-0 in ACC play and one fact is undeniable:  the defensive performance put on by Pitt over these first five games of the season is light years ahead of what we had seen over the last few seasons at Pitt, and it appears to be for real.  In this regard, the new staff under Narduzzi seems to have already made a real difference for Pitt.

One thing that is missing, and Narduzzi seemed to be saying this in his post-game presser, is that Pitt has not yet acquired the ability to definitively put teams away when they have them down.  Pitt controlled the games and was the better team against both VT and UVA in the last two weeks, but in both instances, they could not deliver a decisive knockout punch, and, as a result, both opponents had the chance to beat Pitt long past the time when each game should have been, for all intents and purposes, over.  The good news is that Pitt, in fact, did win those games.  In past years, they would have lost them.  (See Pitt vs. Houston in Whatever Crummy Bowl it was they played in last season.)

So, good times appear to be ahead in the long range future for Pitt under HCPN.  In the short range, tough games lie ahead in coming weeks, including home games with North Carolina, Notre Dame, Louisville, and Miami. It's not going to get any easier, but I, for one, am feeling much more optimistic today than I did at any point last season in the third year of the Chryst Era.

A road trip to Georgia Tech awaits next Saturday.  Tech does not have a good record, but a road trip to the heart of ACC country should be a big test, regardless of the opponent.