Welcome back to In The Pitt, PantherLair.com’s weekly discourse featuring a roundup of everything that’s happened in the past week, with insight and inside information thrown in for good measure.
December 19, 2008
Top of the Pitt
The biggest story in Pitt sports this week - despite some concerns voiced on the message board - was the commitment of wide receiver a three-star prospect out of Brashear High School, and he comes to Pitt by way of North Carolina Tech in Charlotte where he spent the past few months getting certain eligibility issues in order.
He told PantherLair.com that his eligibility was based on SAT scores and not grades; he said that he has retaken the SAT’s and is confident he passed. Once he gets those scores back, he’ll be able to sign a Letter of Intent and enroll at Pitt in January.
Tinker returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh last month after finishing up at N.C. Tech and took an official visit to Pitt last weekend, after which he told us that had committed to Pitt.
Admittedly, the message board reaction to Tinker’s commitment was less than enthusiastic, but one thing that people should keep in mind is that Pitt was very high on Tinker no more than a year ago when he was a senior prospect at Brashear. At that time, he had offers from Pitt, West Virginia, Louisville, Colorado, Michigan State, Iowa, Minnesota, and Connecticut. He seemed to be headed for Colorado - although WVU’s ties to Brashear had him considering the Mountaineers - but the eligibility issues put him on a detour.
Once he finished prep school, the other schools appeared to lose track of Tinker, giving Pitt the best shot at landing him. That exclusivity paid off for Dave Wannstedt and company, but other schools have taken notice. I spoke to N.C. Tech head coach Tim Newman this week for some insight into Tinker’s season and to request video, and he told me that he’s been fielding calls from a number of colleges who are interested.
I think that a look at his high school highlight film gives a good idea of why those schools are interested, and what Pitt is hoping to get when he enrolls in January. At 6’2” 205, he’s got good size which he uses to break tackles and play big. His prep school coach described him as “big and physical” and “sure-handed,” he certainly looked like he had some of those skills in high school. We’re working on procuring tape from this past fall at N.C. Tech, but I would expect to see more of the same.
Tinker gives Pitt Devin Street. With the depth at receiver that Pitt will have next season, odds are pretty good that all three could redshirt, and that’s not a bad thing. Pitt will have Cedric McGee (redshirt senior), Oderick Turner (redshirt senior), TJ Porter (senior), Aundre Wright (redshirt sophomore), Jonathan Baldwin (sophomore), Aaron Smith (redshirt freshman) Mike Shanahan (redshirt freshman), and Cameron Saddler (redshirt freshman).
Baldwin was the only true freshman receiver to play this season, and quite frankly, with the depth they have, I think Tinker, Thomas, and Street would have to be further along in the offense than Baldwin was this year if they want to see the field in 2009. Now, Tinker will have the added advantage of working with the team in spring practice, and that could help his cause, but they’ll have eight returning wideouts, and that’s quite a bit of depth to work through.
Personally, I think the coaches will have a hard enough time dividing up playing time among Baldwin, Turner, Porter, and McGee, let alone guys like Wright, Shanahan, and Saddler, who can each do some pretty special things.
Tinker, Thomas, and Street each have very high ceilings, but they may have to wait their turn.
Who’s next?
It’s always the next question after a commit:
Who will be the next to jump?
Early in the week, it looked like Steelton-Highspire defensive tackle scheduled an official visit to Pitt for this past weekend.
On Friday afternoon, Hill and the Steel-High Rollers won a second consecutive PIAA Class A state title; the next morning, Hill and his family took the Turnpike to Pittsburgh.
As he rode the Turnpike back on Sunday afternoon, Hill spoke to PantherLair.com about the visit, and everything was positive.
"I'm probably going to have a decision by the end of this week," he said. "I feel pretty good about Pitt."
Hill also said that he didn’t plan on taking the official visit to Rutgers that he had previously scheduled for January. Apparently Greg Schiano decided to make another play for Hill, as he and an assistant visited Steel-High on Monday morning, the day after Hill returned from his official to Pitt.
In addition to Schiano’s visit, word surfaced midweek that Penn State assistant coach Larry Johnson was expected at Steel-High for a Thursday visit. PSU never offered Hill, although he did call the Lions his favorite early in the recruiting process. I checked in with Hill briefly Thursday night, and he said that Pitt was the only visitor to his school that day. Brian Angelichio and Greg Gattuso made the trip out to Steel-High, and I think this will be Pitt’s big push. We’ll see how Hill responds, but I expect to make a lot of calls to the 717 area code this weekend.
Other than Hill, I’m not sure if Pitt will get any commitments before the new year. If Hill jumps, that will put the number at 16, and there will probably only be about 5 spots left, if that many. I do expect there to be attrition from the current roster, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-6 players, but that would give the coaching staff as many as 20 spots (14 graduating seniors plus 4-6 departures).
Even if the list of non-graduating departures blooms to seven - which could possibly happen if Doug Fulmer doesn’t return and LeSean McCoy opts for the NFL - that would put the available scholarship number at 21; that leaves six spots for the class of 2009.
Let’s assume they don’t quite get to 21 total scholarships. Let’s go with a nice round 20. From what we have gathered, here are the top candidates for those final five spots:
DT Jordan Hill
TE Malcolm Bush
DE Bernardo Nunez
DT Isaac Holmes
QB Kolby Gray
LB Shane Gordon
CB Brodrick Jenkins
LB Dan Mason
Those are the seven main offered prospects who have taken visits or scheduled visits, and I’d imagine that a handful of them fill out Pitt’s class. Hill seems like a Pitt lean, if not a lock, and Gray certainly seems headed for the Panthers, but the rest will be battles.
Of course, there’s a handful of unoffered prospects out there who could come into play depending on how the chips fall with those seven guys; in an ideal world for Pitt, those seven will all want to be Panthers and the coaching staff will either have to find room or turn one or two away.
I’m sure Dave Wannstedt would tell you that’s a good problem to have.
Visit weekend wrap-up
Hill and Tinker were two of the six uncommitted prospects who took official visits this past weekend. Also present were Delaware’s Merrell twins, Malcolm Bush.
The suspense didn’t last long for the Merrell’s, who committed to Rutgers shortly after their visits to Pitt. In fact, they committed so soon after leaving Pittsburgh that one would have to believe that the twins got a certain impression that Pitt might have other recruits as a higher priority.
As for Bush, it might be awhile before he gives his commitment to anyone. His visit to Pitt seems to have left him focused on the Pitt and North Carolina as his final two options, although if any other schools get involved - particularly UCLA, Notre Dame, Penn State, or Maryland - that could change. Bush will visit UNC in mid-January, and he’ll most likely pick between the Panthers and Tar Heels.
Pratt was the lone unoffered prospect to take an official visit to Pitt last weekend. He said before the visit that he thought he could get an offer this week, but thus far he has been unreachable, and I don’t get the impression that Pitt will offer. For now, he’s on the back burner.
The next big visit weekend
With one big official visit weekend down, the Pitt staff wrapped up some home visits this week and stared preparing for the weekend of January 9th when they will have another group of prospects in for official visits.
There are several intriguing prospects scheduled to come in.
Chief among the visitors are five (and possibly six) of the eight prospects that we listed above as the likely candidates to fill the final spots in the class:
LB Dan Mason will take an official visit that weekend as well, but we’re working to confirm it.
We’ve been covering Nunez and Holmes for awhile, and I think most people on this message board know the story with the two defensive linemen from Hoboken, New Jersey. Nunez is a defensive end prospect who looks like he can be a beast inside. Both Nunez and Holmes have taken other visits and have other visits scheduled, but everything we hear seems to point to this being a Pitt-Maryland battle. Holmes has family at Maryland, and both of them have been very high on the Terps for awhile. The duo visited Maryland earlier in December, so Pitt will get a late shot and that should work in the Panthers’ favor.
We profiled Gray at length in from his high school coach:
"The big factor is how he and Coach Cavanaugh interact and how he interacts with the other players. If he feels comfortable, he could [commit on the visit] or come back and do it shortly thereafter.”
So it wouldn’t be a surprise if Gray is the next one to fall for Pitt in this class.
As for Gordon, his recruitment is interesting. Early on, it looked like Pitt’s best shot would be with Weston (FL) Cypress Bay’s other three-star linebacker Jason Douglas, the running back at Cypress Bay, is committed to Pitt, but it seems like Gordon has some genuine interest of his own.
Seneca Valley receiver Matt Plautz is also going to be visiting that weekend. Plautz does not have an offer, but he appears to be the top “next guy” target at receiver for Pitt. Problem is, Pitt’s already got three receivers committed. Plautz is a lanky 6’4” 192, so the potential is there for added size and a possible move to tight end; either way, the Pitt staff has kept in regular contact with him, and his natural abilities as a “gamer” have endeared him to the coaches. In a year where Pitt could take a full complement of 25, he might already have an offer. That’s not the case this year, but we’ll have to keep an eye on him as the next month unfolds.
As was the case this past weekend, the staff will surround the January 9th visitors with a handful of committed prospects. So far we’ve heard that OL Cory King.
Recruiting roundup
- Maryland, Pitt, and Michigan State. He’ll visit Pitt on January 9th and Michigan State on the 16th. I would imagine a decision will be coming after that.
- Nunez’s teammate Maryland, Pitt, and Florida. He says there are other schools he’s thinking about - such as Rutgers, where he is scheduled to visit in January - but those three are the main ones. I think it’s really down to Pitt and Maryland.
- Virginia running back committed to Rutgers. Pitt was very interested in Williams, but with three running backs on board already, there wasn’t much else Wannstedt and company could do.
The same situation applies to Baltimore running back West Virginia is his favorite. Austin is a very good running back, but you can only take so many players at any one position.
- Another Pitt target favoring WVU is Florida cornerback favoring the Mountaineers. He’s still got a visit to South Florida on the schedule and he’s considering Wake Forest and Iowa for his final official visit, but at this point it sounds like a Pitt vs. WVU.
Championship recruits
Pitt had two commits and one prospect walk away from Hershey with state titles last weekend. won the Class A title.
Senior: Tales of Pitt football
As I was thinking about the end of the season and the culmination of the fourth year of the Wannstedt Era at Pitt, I started wondering what the past four seasons have been like for those players who were true freshman during that 2005 season. You remember that season, right? Pitt was coming off a Big East championship and an appearance in the Fiesta Bowl, and the Panthers now had a Pittsburgh native at the helm. Wannstedt was going to get the program to the next level, and he would do it soon.
We all know how that worked out.
But now that Pitt has won nine games in the regular season for the first time in 26 years and is headed to the Sun Bowl, it seems only fitting to hear the story from those players who were true freshman back in 2005. Their careers have been defined by the Wannstedt Era - or maybe the Wannstedt Era was defined by their careers - and they’ve seen it all over the past four years.
So I sat down with the true seniors. There are only four of them: CJ Davis, Conredge Collins, Rashaad Duncan, and LaRod Stephens-Howling. I thought those guys would have interesting stories to tell, and I was not wrong.
Here are the links to the articles. They’re written in first-person “as told to” style so you can feel like these guys are telling the stories themselves. I did very little editing; these pieces are basically what ended up on my tape recorder.
The honesty, the frankness, and the genuine sentiment are, in my opinion, very apparent, and if you haven’t read these pieces, take some time this weekend (if you’re at work, this is the perfect way to kill some time) and give them a read. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
C.J. Davis
Conredge Collins
The Rashaad Duncan piece will run Friday afternoon, and I hope to sit down with LaRod on Friday as well, so that article should be up over the weekend.
On the air
A big “Thank you” to all the PantherLair.com readers who called into the first-ever PantherLair.com Pitt Preview Show on Fox Sports Radio 970 last Saturday. After the technical problems in the first segment, I thought the show really took off, and that was all due to the Pitt fans calling in. Luckily for me, the Pitt fans who called in were, for the most part, from this message board, which inevitably makes them among the most informed Pitt fans out there.
Anyway, the show went really well and I’m very excited for the next four months or so of Pitt talk on the radio every Saturday morning. The PantherLair.com Pitt Preview Show runs from 11 AM to noon every Saturday on Fox Sports Radio 970 AM in Pittsburgh. If you’re not in the area, you can listen live online at www.fox970.com. You can call the show at (412) 922-2874, and I’m looking forward to hearing from more Pitt fans this Saturday.
Last week we got a lot of feedback on the “assess the 2008 season” topic; this week we’re going to be looking at what we have learned about the hoops team, how the recruiting season is shaping up, what the football team needs to do in the next week, the nature of All-American teams, and more. Obviously we can’t get to all of that in one hour, but that’s the beauty of the PantherLair.com Pitt Preview Show:
As long as it’s Pitt, it’s fair game. You can talk about anything, just so long as it’s Pitt.
I look forward to hearing from you on Saturday morning.
The year in photos
Finally, I hope you’ve gotten a chance to relive some of this year’s excitement with the Season in Photos series. We went through and found the best 10 or so photos from each of the games and loaded them into a five-part series of slideshows. Here are the links in case you missed any of them:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five will run this afternoon.
I have to say, I’ve got a number of favorites in those sets. From Part One, No. 2 is a favorite, but No. 10 is pretty notable for what was happening in the game. There are a lot of good ones in Part Two, but I’m partial to Nos. 8 and 13. In Part Three, I’m a fan of No. 8 and No. 11. And in Part Four, I’ll just take every shot from Notre Dame.
What a game.
What about you? What images define the 2008 season for you?
Thanks for joining this week’s edition of In The Pitt. As always, feel free to e-mail chrispeak1@comcast.net with any suggestions, feedback, or other input.
This post was edited on 12/19 11:05 AM by Chris Peak
December 19, 2008
Top of the Pitt
The biggest story in Pitt sports this week - despite some concerns voiced on the message board - was the commitment of wide receiver a three-star prospect out of Brashear High School, and he comes to Pitt by way of North Carolina Tech in Charlotte where he spent the past few months getting certain eligibility issues in order.
He told PantherLair.com that his eligibility was based on SAT scores and not grades; he said that he has retaken the SAT’s and is confident he passed. Once he gets those scores back, he’ll be able to sign a Letter of Intent and enroll at Pitt in January.
Tinker returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh last month after finishing up at N.C. Tech and took an official visit to Pitt last weekend, after which he told us that had committed to Pitt.
Admittedly, the message board reaction to Tinker’s commitment was less than enthusiastic, but one thing that people should keep in mind is that Pitt was very high on Tinker no more than a year ago when he was a senior prospect at Brashear. At that time, he had offers from Pitt, West Virginia, Louisville, Colorado, Michigan State, Iowa, Minnesota, and Connecticut. He seemed to be headed for Colorado - although WVU’s ties to Brashear had him considering the Mountaineers - but the eligibility issues put him on a detour.
Once he finished prep school, the other schools appeared to lose track of Tinker, giving Pitt the best shot at landing him. That exclusivity paid off for Dave Wannstedt and company, but other schools have taken notice. I spoke to N.C. Tech head coach Tim Newman this week for some insight into Tinker’s season and to request video, and he told me that he’s been fielding calls from a number of colleges who are interested.
I think that a look at his high school highlight film gives a good idea of why those schools are interested, and what Pitt is hoping to get when he enrolls in January. At 6’2” 205, he’s got good size which he uses to break tackles and play big. His prep school coach described him as “big and physical” and “sure-handed,” he certainly looked like he had some of those skills in high school. We’re working on procuring tape from this past fall at N.C. Tech, but I would expect to see more of the same.
Tinker gives Pitt Devin Street. With the depth at receiver that Pitt will have next season, odds are pretty good that all three could redshirt, and that’s not a bad thing. Pitt will have Cedric McGee (redshirt senior), Oderick Turner (redshirt senior), TJ Porter (senior), Aundre Wright (redshirt sophomore), Jonathan Baldwin (sophomore), Aaron Smith (redshirt freshman) Mike Shanahan (redshirt freshman), and Cameron Saddler (redshirt freshman).
Baldwin was the only true freshman receiver to play this season, and quite frankly, with the depth they have, I think Tinker, Thomas, and Street would have to be further along in the offense than Baldwin was this year if they want to see the field in 2009. Now, Tinker will have the added advantage of working with the team in spring practice, and that could help his cause, but they’ll have eight returning wideouts, and that’s quite a bit of depth to work through.
Personally, I think the coaches will have a hard enough time dividing up playing time among Baldwin, Turner, Porter, and McGee, let alone guys like Wright, Shanahan, and Saddler, who can each do some pretty special things.
Tinker, Thomas, and Street each have very high ceilings, but they may have to wait their turn.
Who’s next?
It’s always the next question after a commit:
Who will be the next to jump?
Early in the week, it looked like Steelton-Highspire defensive tackle scheduled an official visit to Pitt for this past weekend.
On Friday afternoon, Hill and the Steel-High Rollers won a second consecutive PIAA Class A state title; the next morning, Hill and his family took the Turnpike to Pittsburgh.
As he rode the Turnpike back on Sunday afternoon, Hill spoke to PantherLair.com about the visit, and everything was positive.
"I'm probably going to have a decision by the end of this week," he said. "I feel pretty good about Pitt."
Hill also said that he didn’t plan on taking the official visit to Rutgers that he had previously scheduled for January. Apparently Greg Schiano decided to make another play for Hill, as he and an assistant visited Steel-High on Monday morning, the day after Hill returned from his official to Pitt.
In addition to Schiano’s visit, word surfaced midweek that Penn State assistant coach Larry Johnson was expected at Steel-High for a Thursday visit. PSU never offered Hill, although he did call the Lions his favorite early in the recruiting process. I checked in with Hill briefly Thursday night, and he said that Pitt was the only visitor to his school that day. Brian Angelichio and Greg Gattuso made the trip out to Steel-High, and I think this will be Pitt’s big push. We’ll see how Hill responds, but I expect to make a lot of calls to the 717 area code this weekend.
Other than Hill, I’m not sure if Pitt will get any commitments before the new year. If Hill jumps, that will put the number at 16, and there will probably only be about 5 spots left, if that many. I do expect there to be attrition from the current roster, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-6 players, but that would give the coaching staff as many as 20 spots (14 graduating seniors plus 4-6 departures).
Even if the list of non-graduating departures blooms to seven - which could possibly happen if Doug Fulmer doesn’t return and LeSean McCoy opts for the NFL - that would put the available scholarship number at 21; that leaves six spots for the class of 2009.
Let’s assume they don’t quite get to 21 total scholarships. Let’s go with a nice round 20. From what we have gathered, here are the top candidates for those final five spots:
DT Jordan Hill
TE Malcolm Bush
DE Bernardo Nunez
DT Isaac Holmes
QB Kolby Gray
LB Shane Gordon
CB Brodrick Jenkins
LB Dan Mason
Those are the seven main offered prospects who have taken visits or scheduled visits, and I’d imagine that a handful of them fill out Pitt’s class. Hill seems like a Pitt lean, if not a lock, and Gray certainly seems headed for the Panthers, but the rest will be battles.
Of course, there’s a handful of unoffered prospects out there who could come into play depending on how the chips fall with those seven guys; in an ideal world for Pitt, those seven will all want to be Panthers and the coaching staff will either have to find room or turn one or two away.
I’m sure Dave Wannstedt would tell you that’s a good problem to have.
Visit weekend wrap-up
Hill and Tinker were two of the six uncommitted prospects who took official visits this past weekend. Also present were Delaware’s Merrell twins, Malcolm Bush.
The suspense didn’t last long for the Merrell’s, who committed to Rutgers shortly after their visits to Pitt. In fact, they committed so soon after leaving Pittsburgh that one would have to believe that the twins got a certain impression that Pitt might have other recruits as a higher priority.
As for Bush, it might be awhile before he gives his commitment to anyone. His visit to Pitt seems to have left him focused on the Pitt and North Carolina as his final two options, although if any other schools get involved - particularly UCLA, Notre Dame, Penn State, or Maryland - that could change. Bush will visit UNC in mid-January, and he’ll most likely pick between the Panthers and Tar Heels.
Pratt was the lone unoffered prospect to take an official visit to Pitt last weekend. He said before the visit that he thought he could get an offer this week, but thus far he has been unreachable, and I don’t get the impression that Pitt will offer. For now, he’s on the back burner.
The next big visit weekend
With one big official visit weekend down, the Pitt staff wrapped up some home visits this week and stared preparing for the weekend of January 9th when they will have another group of prospects in for official visits.
There are several intriguing prospects scheduled to come in.
Chief among the visitors are five (and possibly six) of the eight prospects that we listed above as the likely candidates to fill the final spots in the class:
LB Dan Mason will take an official visit that weekend as well, but we’re working to confirm it.
We’ve been covering Nunez and Holmes for awhile, and I think most people on this message board know the story with the two defensive linemen from Hoboken, New Jersey. Nunez is a defensive end prospect who looks like he can be a beast inside. Both Nunez and Holmes have taken other visits and have other visits scheduled, but everything we hear seems to point to this being a Pitt-Maryland battle. Holmes has family at Maryland, and both of them have been very high on the Terps for awhile. The duo visited Maryland earlier in December, so Pitt will get a late shot and that should work in the Panthers’ favor.
We profiled Gray at length in from his high school coach:
"The big factor is how he and Coach Cavanaugh interact and how he interacts with the other players. If he feels comfortable, he could [commit on the visit] or come back and do it shortly thereafter.”
So it wouldn’t be a surprise if Gray is the next one to fall for Pitt in this class.
As for Gordon, his recruitment is interesting. Early on, it looked like Pitt’s best shot would be with Weston (FL) Cypress Bay’s other three-star linebacker Jason Douglas, the running back at Cypress Bay, is committed to Pitt, but it seems like Gordon has some genuine interest of his own.
Seneca Valley receiver Matt Plautz is also going to be visiting that weekend. Plautz does not have an offer, but he appears to be the top “next guy” target at receiver for Pitt. Problem is, Pitt’s already got three receivers committed. Plautz is a lanky 6’4” 192, so the potential is there for added size and a possible move to tight end; either way, the Pitt staff has kept in regular contact with him, and his natural abilities as a “gamer” have endeared him to the coaches. In a year where Pitt could take a full complement of 25, he might already have an offer. That’s not the case this year, but we’ll have to keep an eye on him as the next month unfolds.
As was the case this past weekend, the staff will surround the January 9th visitors with a handful of committed prospects. So far we’ve heard that OL Cory King.
Recruiting roundup
- Maryland, Pitt, and Michigan State. He’ll visit Pitt on January 9th and Michigan State on the 16th. I would imagine a decision will be coming after that.
- Nunez’s teammate Maryland, Pitt, and Florida. He says there are other schools he’s thinking about - such as Rutgers, where he is scheduled to visit in January - but those three are the main ones. I think it’s really down to Pitt and Maryland.
- Virginia running back committed to Rutgers. Pitt was very interested in Williams, but with three running backs on board already, there wasn’t much else Wannstedt and company could do.
The same situation applies to Baltimore running back West Virginia is his favorite. Austin is a very good running back, but you can only take so many players at any one position.
- Another Pitt target favoring WVU is Florida cornerback favoring the Mountaineers. He’s still got a visit to South Florida on the schedule and he’s considering Wake Forest and Iowa for his final official visit, but at this point it sounds like a Pitt vs. WVU.
Championship recruits
Pitt had two commits and one prospect walk away from Hershey with state titles last weekend. won the Class A title.
Senior: Tales of Pitt football
As I was thinking about the end of the season and the culmination of the fourth year of the Wannstedt Era at Pitt, I started wondering what the past four seasons have been like for those players who were true freshman during that 2005 season. You remember that season, right? Pitt was coming off a Big East championship and an appearance in the Fiesta Bowl, and the Panthers now had a Pittsburgh native at the helm. Wannstedt was going to get the program to the next level, and he would do it soon.
We all know how that worked out.
But now that Pitt has won nine games in the regular season for the first time in 26 years and is headed to the Sun Bowl, it seems only fitting to hear the story from those players who were true freshman back in 2005. Their careers have been defined by the Wannstedt Era - or maybe the Wannstedt Era was defined by their careers - and they’ve seen it all over the past four years.
So I sat down with the true seniors. There are only four of them: CJ Davis, Conredge Collins, Rashaad Duncan, and LaRod Stephens-Howling. I thought those guys would have interesting stories to tell, and I was not wrong.
Here are the links to the articles. They’re written in first-person “as told to” style so you can feel like these guys are telling the stories themselves. I did very little editing; these pieces are basically what ended up on my tape recorder.
The honesty, the frankness, and the genuine sentiment are, in my opinion, very apparent, and if you haven’t read these pieces, take some time this weekend (if you’re at work, this is the perfect way to kill some time) and give them a read. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
C.J. Davis
Conredge Collins
The Rashaad Duncan piece will run Friday afternoon, and I hope to sit down with LaRod on Friday as well, so that article should be up over the weekend.
On the air
A big “Thank you” to all the PantherLair.com readers who called into the first-ever PantherLair.com Pitt Preview Show on Fox Sports Radio 970 last Saturday. After the technical problems in the first segment, I thought the show really took off, and that was all due to the Pitt fans calling in. Luckily for me, the Pitt fans who called in were, for the most part, from this message board, which inevitably makes them among the most informed Pitt fans out there.
Anyway, the show went really well and I’m very excited for the next four months or so of Pitt talk on the radio every Saturday morning. The PantherLair.com Pitt Preview Show runs from 11 AM to noon every Saturday on Fox Sports Radio 970 AM in Pittsburgh. If you’re not in the area, you can listen live online at www.fox970.com. You can call the show at (412) 922-2874, and I’m looking forward to hearing from more Pitt fans this Saturday.
Last week we got a lot of feedback on the “assess the 2008 season” topic; this week we’re going to be looking at what we have learned about the hoops team, how the recruiting season is shaping up, what the football team needs to do in the next week, the nature of All-American teams, and more. Obviously we can’t get to all of that in one hour, but that’s the beauty of the PantherLair.com Pitt Preview Show:
As long as it’s Pitt, it’s fair game. You can talk about anything, just so long as it’s Pitt.
I look forward to hearing from you on Saturday morning.
The year in photos
Finally, I hope you’ve gotten a chance to relive some of this year’s excitement with the Season in Photos series. We went through and found the best 10 or so photos from each of the games and loaded them into a five-part series of slideshows. Here are the links in case you missed any of them:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five will run this afternoon.
I have to say, I’ve got a number of favorites in those sets. From Part One, No. 2 is a favorite, but No. 10 is pretty notable for what was happening in the game. There are a lot of good ones in Part Two, but I’m partial to Nos. 8 and 13. In Part Three, I’m a fan of No. 8 and No. 11. And in Part Four, I’ll just take every shot from Notre Dame.
What a game.
What about you? What images define the 2008 season for you?
Thanks for joining this week’s edition of In The Pitt. As always, feel free to e-mail chrispeak1@comcast.net with any suggestions, feedback, or other input.
This post was edited on 12/19 11:05 AM by Chris Peak
