An H.A. Citation Is Bestowed

Today, it is time to dust off the not-so-coveted Grandstander "H.A. Citation", and award it to Arizona State University head football coach Todd Graham.  Now I know what you are saying.   Things like "Hasn't Graham already won this award multiple times?"  In fact, he has not, but only because I only began making this award earlier this year, long after Graham, who, incidentally, has no soul, more than earned the honor due to his performance at and  the manner of his departure from the University of Pittsburgh back in 2011.

So, why now, you may ask?

Did you see the story in the paper today about the airplane ride that was carrying Graham and his son, and ASU assistant coach, back to Tempe on a recruiting trip to Texas?  Seems something went wrong with the plane that caused it to free fall 25,000 feet before the pilots were able to stabilize the aircraft and make an emergency landing in New Mexico.  No one was injured.

However, while the plane was plummeting, and while the pilots were struggling mightily to right the craft and save every one's life, Coach Todd wandered into the cockpit to ask what was going on.  The pilots told him to get back to his seat.  I can imagine, and I can only hope, that they were not polite about it when they did so.

So, for taking his typical It's-All-About-Me-and-I'm-in-Charge-Attitude, and implying that trained, professional airplane pilots didn't know what they were doing, The Grandstander bestows an H.A. Citation upon Coach Todd Graham.  

This one's for you, Coach!

(Photo courtesy of Dan Bonk Enterprises)

A Football / Baseball / Golf Hodge-Podge

Some quick hit thoughts (apologies to Peter King) for a Friday morning....

With no Pirates game to occupy me, I did watch the final Steelers practice game of the year, and four things stand out:

1. Charlie Batch threw about as pretty a touchdown pass to Emmanuel Sanders as you will see all season, and he will probably end up getting released today.  Crazy.
2. Two jaw dropping punt returns for touchdowns by rookie Chris Rainey in the first quarter, both nullified by Steelers penalties.  Poor officiating by the scab refs, or poor special teams play by the Steelers?
3. An absolutely brutal looking knee injury to rookie linebacker Sean Spence.  Why do NFL teams play four of these meaningless games, other than to get two full gates for the owners?
4. It seemed that on every play, huge chunks of turf went flying through the air.  Good to see that the Heinz Field playing surface was in mid-season form.

On to other thoughts.....

Football:

• During the Steelers game I switched briefly to ESPN for the South Carolina-Vanderbilt SEC tussle.  Steve Spurrier, the Ol' Ball Coach, always seemed to me to be a "young" guy.  Not anymore.  He looked ancient last night,and what's with the voice?  If it gets any higher, he'll shatter glass.
• And speaking of voices, why is Lou Holtz still on the air?
• I see that Fraud Graham's Arizona State Sun Devils high octaned themselves a sixty-something to six win over Northern Arizona last night.  Can't wait until ASU starts playing some of the big boys in the PAC 12.  I'll even be rooting for a snake like Lane Kiffen to put the Whoop-Ass on Coach Fraud. 
• College Football begins in earnest tomorrow: Youngstown State @ Pitt, Ohio U. @ Penn State, Marshall @ WVU, Robert Morris @ North Dakota State.  All compelling games for various reasons.
• The big TV game of the week pits Michigan against Alabama in Jerry's Palace in Dallas.  That should be a fun game, and kudos to each school for being willing to open against each other rather than the traditional opening game against Cupcake University.

Baseball:

• It was fun switching to MLB Network last night and seeing the Nats hand it to the Cardinals, 8-1, allowing the Pirates to pick up a half game in the wild card race.  September baseball could be a whole lot of fun this year.
• First, however, three games in Miller Park beginning tonight.  Got to take care of those annoying Brewers.  I'm not greedy.  I'll happily settle for two out of three.
• Am anxiously awaiting to see how the Pirates will set the post-season roster by midnight tonight and whether or not that make a Waiver Deadline Deal, also by midnight.

Golf:

The PGA Tour is in the midst of their FedEx Cup playoffs, and the Ryder Cup is just around the corner, but some old news, if you don't mind.

Rory McIlroy won the PGA Championship earlier this month by eight shots, a most dominating and convincing win, not unlike his US Open win in 2011.  Congratulations to the young Irishman, who is indeed one of the top half dozen or so players on tour today.  Stop, however, with the "next Tiger" nonsense.  I will probably be dead by the time this will finally be reckoned, but I am willing to bet that Rory, who now has two Majors on his resume, will not get within sniffing distance of Tiger Woods' total of fourteen (14) Majors wins.  As I said, it will probably be another 20 or so years, give or take, (and that's if everything goes right for him) before McIlroy is not longer a factor, so I may not be around to collect my bet, but I say he gets nowhere near 14 Majors, and I'd be shocked if he gets that total to double figures.

On the subject of Woods, right now, he is 36 years old and very good golfer, just like about 50 or so other guys on Tour.  He is no longer "Tiger Woods".  He will continue to win golf tournaments, and may even win another Major or two, but the Jack Nicklaus standard of 18 Majors is safe, at least in my lifetime.  I do think, however, that Woods has a very good chance of breaking Sam Snead's PGA Tour record of 82 career wins.  Woods has 74.

Good-bye and Good Riddance

Obviously, the title of this post refers to the departed Pitt football coach Todd Graham, or, as he has been called in the cyber world these past 18 hours or so, Fraud Graham, or Toad Graham, or...well, you get the idea.

I will admit, before any of you might point it out to me, that I liked Graham at the start. I liked his hype and enthusiasm (while acknowledging that it could blow up in his face it the team played lousy, both of which occurred). I also knew that he was peddling a brand of snake oil that just about every college coach tries to sell, and I knew that based on his track record, he was never going to be at Pitt for the long haul. I figured a couple of winning seasons at Pitt and he was gone to whatever more prestigious SEC or Big 12 school that came calling. I also didn't like how poorly the team played, how he deflected criticism away from himself, and how he hung his players, Tino Sunseri in particular, out to dry.

All that said, the by now well documented manner and speed in which Graham has abandoned Pitt and his players has set new records for lowering the bar in an already sleazy world of college athletics. Graham is getting roasted in print, on the airwaves, in the blogosphere, in the Twitter-verse, and in other places with which I am no doubt unaware. All such roasting is well deserved.

The irony is that Steve Pederson - if he survives as Pitt AD, and a strong case can be made that he should not - is about to lead Pitt on a mission that will no doubt end up with some other coach under contract to some other university jumping his contract and abandoning his school and players, just as Graham did to Pitt.

And you know what will happen then? People will be hailing this as a "great hire" by Pitt.

And Sonny Bono will once again be hailed as a prophet because the beat will go on.

Oh, and to any Arizona State fans out there, good luck. When the 2012 season opens with Graham on your sideline, he will be coaching his fourth team in five seasons. He'll probably be gone by the time 2015 rolls around, and I'm being very generous with that guess.

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.

Pitt 35 - Buffalo 16

The Todd Graham Era of Pitt Football began tonight with a 35-16 win over thirty point underdog Buffalo, but it wasn't easy. In fact, the Panthers went into the locker room at halftime with a shaky 7-3 lead. An interception early in the third quarter gave Pitt a short field that led to a TD and a 14-3 lead. After that, they did manage to reel off a couple of nice touchdown drives that gave an indication of what Graham's much talked about High Octane football will be all about. Ray Graham rushed for over 200 yards, and the Panthers pulled away for the nineteen point win.

After watching the first half, my initial smart-ass comment was that you can't run Graham's high octane offense with Dave Wannstadt's low octane players. OK, it's a cheap shot, I'll grant you that, but I do think that the players that Graham inherited are not the types of players that he wants to use to run his wide open spread offense. Let's face it, Tino Sunseri will never be confused with Cam Newton. Still, the first game is in the books, the Panthers are 1-0, and the decidedly weak Big East Conference lies before them. Let's hope that it's going to be a fun season for the Panthers.

You may have noticed that I mentioned that I "watched" the game. You may ask, but the game wasn't televised and you weren't at Heinz Field, so how did you watch it? Well, I took a step into the 21st century and watched the game via video streaming on espn3.com. This was a new, first-time experience for me. The video did not come through on my iPad2 (probably has something to do with bandwith or some such thing), but it did come through on my laptop. At times the picture was quite clear, but often it was jerky, blurred, and not real smooth. It reminded me of days back in the early 1960's when we would try to watch something on Channel 6 in Johnstown or Channel 9 in Steubenville, with a snowy picture and Frank constantly jiggling the antenna wires that came down through the chimney and connected to the back of the black & white TV. It beat listening to Bourbon-Nosed Billy Hillgrove on the radio, but I'll take the sofa and my 47 inch Vizio HD over the office chair and the 16 inch laptop every time.

Broadcasting the game was former Channel 2 sports guy and Pirates announcer John Sanders. Man, was he bland. His color commentator was some former coach named John Bunting. I had never heard of the guy, but he left no cliche unturned, and every player on the field was a "young man." (Aside: college football players are always referred to as "young men" while college basketball players are always referred to as "kids." Why is that?) Sanders always addressed him as "Coach."

I heard the beginning of the game on the radio while driving home from 5:30 Mass, so, in addition to the cheer leading of Bill Hilgrove, I also heard new Pitt color guy Pat Bostick. Didn't hear enough to give an informed opinion, but I heard enough to think that he'll be a big improvement over the droning of Bill Fralic.

Also, radio sponsor Que Dobe Mexican Restaurant jumped on the Graham Bandwagon by advertising their special "high octane burrito." Now, I'm no advertising guy, but I have to think that this is something that is going to misfire big time. There are also about a half-dozen cheap laugh lines that spring immediately to mind, but I am going to take a pass on all of them at the moment.

High Octane Opener

While out driving in the rain this morning, I heard Pitt Coach Todd Graham interviewed on The Fan. If you have heard Graham and all of his "high octane" schtick, you know that he is corny and cliched, but I have to confess that I kind of like it. Certainly, Graham runs the risk of being ridiculed for all of the bluster and high octane stuff (high octane bluster?) should the Panthers stink up the joint, but you have to like his enthusiasm and optimism, especially as it contrasts to the conservative nature of Dave Wandstadt and the John Russell-like demeanor of Walt Harris.

I am looking forward to the Pitt opener this Saturday, and to the entire season ahead.

Go Panthers!

And on the subject of college football, while I will only hear the Pitt game on the radio, I do plan on being at Joe Walton Stadium on Saturday afternoon to watch the Robert Morris Colonials open their 2012 campaign against the Dayton Flyers.

Go Colonials!