Matt Corral out for the season…..
- Thread starter thebadby2
- Start date
…..but Kenny should have played in a meaningless exhibition game.
It's OK to say KP and/or a Kenny Walker made the smart call by sitting it out, but insisting on branding the first and only relevant bowl game Pitt has played in since 2005 after the only truly good season Pitt has had in that time frame as a "meaningless exhibition game" is disingenuous. If you wanted to say the Pinstripe Bowl or the Music CIty Bowl or the other $hite bowls we've endured due to the sustained mediocrity of the program over the past 30 years are meaningless exhibition games, I'd agree with you entirely.
If you're waiting for Pitt to make the CFP before you consider the bowl game meaningful, you're gonna watch nothing but a whole lot of meaningless exhibition games for a very long time.
I completely understand why Pickett and others sit these games out. It's the smart play. But it sucks for their coaches, their teammates, their schools, their fans and college football as an institution. If you don't agree with that I don't know what to tell you. It's the way it is now, and I can't see it changing given money involved. These top 10 bowl games weren't "meaningless exhibition games" until the best players playing in them decided to start sitting them out to protect their money.
No. Left foot this time. Lisfranc ligament injuries are nasty and are usually lifelong weight-bearing injuries.
Poor guy has had a rough go of it since Jan 1. Injuries, depression, etc. Seems like a decent kid, I hope he defies the odds and makes a full recovery from this.
It’s ridiculous that players don’t play in bowl games. The W-L gets counted for the season, as do the players’ statistics. One may disagree with the nature of them, or the quality of them, but once bid and accepted, they become a game on the official schedule of the team. If one wants to argue that coaches (such as Whipple’s) also blow off the game due to taking other jobs, that’s also wrong. Once the Revolution is complete and the NIL charade goes by the wayside (aka, when players are given contracts and salaries, this needs to be one of the first things addressed…you are contracted to play for every game that the team gets scheduled for, including bowl games or playoff games. And coaches’ contracts need to have the same.
pittdan77
Athletic Director
This is nothing. You should see the hoops board when the name Dixon or that era gets mentioned.
I think it's the month off, more than anything, that is the reason these guys sit out. If a Peach Bowl is meaningless, then so is every game after a team loses twice. But when you throw in that extra month, that's a month that guys can start prepping for the draft process rather than spending it practicing for a game that isn't going to better their own personal situation. So the whole dynamic is kind of goofy, and I can see both sides of it, I guess. Just have the 16-team playoff start two weeks after the conference championship games and call it a day. Let the bowls be for the G5 teams... and Duke.
That’s kind of like saying that an NFL player in the last year of his deal should sit out once his team hits 9 losses. That said I realize the big difference is the NFL player is under contract while the college player…well, I guess it’s not a contract per se, but if you accept a scholarship from a college to play football, I don’t know why it doesn’t insinuate an agreement to play every game that the team gets scheduled to play, including post season. But if the accepted assumption is that mere acceptance of the scholarship doesn’t come with that requirement…quite frankly it needs to include that. And coaches contracts need to have that written in as well. Or at least have the dates altered so that the deal doesn’t end Dec 1, if that is how they currently get written. It’s crazy that there is a sport where it’s generally accepted that players and coaches simply skip out of scheduled games arbitrarily because they feel like it. Why not name FBS college football the “Derek Bell Memorial League”.
pittdan77
Athletic Director
NFL is a bit of a different animal. If the team doctor says you can play, you better be out there. You're under contract. It's very different.
Another thing about college is that if you're graduating (or declaring for the draft), you're kind of "off the books" when that Fall semester ends in December. You're not going back on scholarship in January, because the teams needs to stay at 85. In fact, if you do need that last semester for academics, I believe you have to pay for it. So I kind of get it from that perspective, too. You're not really "on scholarship" in a late December/early January bowl game.
NFL teams will shut down important guys late in the year of lost seasons. If a star player scrapes his knee and isn't close to hitting any more contract incentives, he often isn't playing in week 18 for a 5 win team.
I think college football teams are doing the same thing in these bowls. It is more important for Pitt to have Pickett healthy and taken in the first round than winning the Peach Bowl.
pittdan77
Athletic Director
That's a bit different but you are correct. He was talking about a guy shutting it down because he was going to hit the FA market.
Only dead horse I want to beat at Pig Smith, Nick Marmo, and nick mangold
And how many wing Chase Clowser can eat -
The Pitt version of Wade Boggs’ beers
False. That game was the most important game for past 30 years.
No one gives a crap about the Peach Bowl. The ACCCG was 100 times bigger.
You spelled the acc championship wrong
having attended both - can definitively tell you that
like every other college QB in the history of the game not playing for a national championship. But I digress.
correct...he could have sprained a right ankle that magically caused a left foot injury 8 months later so playing out the year with his teammates in a game that would have resulted in a top ten finish and recruiting cap feather for Pitt (aka meaningless game) was simply not worth such a risk...
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Wonder how pointless you'd think it was if Pitt had played MSU with both teams at full strength and beat the snot out of them to go to 12-2 and a top 10 ranking. I'm sure you'd be the first to post how little that game meant and how stupid KP was for playing in it. You might have even gone to the MSU board to console them that it shouldn't even count as a loss for MSU. Because it was so meaningless. And so pointless.
Put another way, it was so meaningless, and so pointless, Narduzzi felt the need 8 months after the fact to go on a viral excuse rant about how Pitt shoulda, coulda, woulda won and was so clearly the better team from the better league if only.....if we just woulda.......Because obviously to him the game was so meaningless, and so pointless, that losing it was really no big deal.
Yep. Just like this guy:
https://saturdayblitz.com/2022/07/2...t-narduzzi-goes-off-big-ten-former-assistant/
Nah. Go back and read my comments from before his opt out. Silly to play in a pointless exhibition game when you are expecting to be a high draft pick.
And I’ll say again-it was the smart play by KP, and the right one—that’s what most expected top draft picks do now—but this was not a meaningless exhibition game to anyone but a handful of fans who have convinced themselves that’s what it is to justify how much it sucks to lose to an inferior opponent because we didn’t have our star QB. And then all that’s left are the excuses.
Well that's just dumb. I said it was a meaningless exhibition game long before anyone knew if we were going to win or not. And I went to the game.
The fact that the bowl people for so long have convinced so many people that most bowl games are really important doesn't mean that they are, or ever were. It just means that some people are easily fooled by men wearing really ugly sport coats.
If you think a XYZ Bowl means anything at this point- I'll suggest leave the 1980s and join the rest of us in the present who already figured this out.
You think the coaches, players, ADs, and administrators view the NY6 bowls as meaningless exhibition games?
Because if you do, well that’s just dumb.
Ask one sometime.
And context matters in this analysis. The first marquee bowl game a long-dormant program has played in in 20 years is more meaningful to that program, school, and its fans and alums than the same game is to a team that has natty expectations every year.
Some of you smarmy posters who think you have it all figured out, don’t.
I'm wondering if a player collecting NIL money changes the dynamic with them sitting out a bowl game...
Of course this is true. It’s preposterous to try to spin that it is a good thing in any way, shape or form for a player on a sports team to refuse to play in a post season game, or any regulation game for that matter. Ways can be found to compensate and insure the players. Or revamp the postseason so that everything is called a “playoff” game since that term apparently is some magic elixir. Players need to play. It’s ridiculous to think otherwise.
pittdan77
Athletic Director
Coaches love the extra practice.
AD's and administrators like the money.
Players get some nice free stuff and a trip somewhere. It's cool, for sure, when it's to a nice bowl. All except for the guys who are definitely going early in the draft. They have much better things to do and millions of reason to avoid injury in a game that everyone knows isn't worth the risk.
Quit holding on to this notion that it's a big deal when a guy sits out. It's just goofy to go out and risk an injury when you haven't played a meaningful game in over a month and especially when a win is pretty meaningless up against what you accomplished during the rest of the season and the pay check you're about to bring home.
Being competitors- of course the players and coaches want to compete and win any XYZ bowl. Put 2 corn hole boards down and they will want to compete and win. That doesn't mean either are meaningful in the big picture.
As a Pitt fan, (imo) the goals are win the Coastal, win the ACC and make the playoffs. Nothing else really matters today. The bowl game structure are dinosaurs and really should be put down.
pittdan77
Athletic Director
Of course players compete and some are auditioning for new roles. Was good to see Patti getting his shot but he also might have lost the starting job when he got hurt.
Bowl games are good money for TV and apparently the locals, too. The "nobody watches them" myth just isn't all that true. Probably driven by gambling but there is obviously enough money around these things to keep them going or they would go away.
I'm not wrong. I'm disagreeing with the opinion of a few that a NY6 bowl game is meaningless to a program, school, alum and fan base that hasn't sniffed anything that sweet or consequential from a relevance/perception perspective since the early 80s. There is no quantitative analysis that can be applied to this issue. "Meaningless" is in the eye of the beholder. I would hazard a guess that 8-9 out of 10 randomly chosen people that identify as Pitt fans would see it the way I see it, not the way a few of you see it.
If the definition of a meaningful bowl game is confined to the 3 CFP games, any game played after a team loses two regular season games is meaningless.
With that, I will move on. Maybe. Possibly. Probably not.
