Time for the few Posters that helped served the Pederson Poison of the Pitt Football Program to accept you were wrong and show you have the balls to admit you were wrong!
LINK:
Starkey: What Pitt football could be!
It's time for a key substitution regarding Pitt football: Excuses out. Expectations in. Raise the bar already. Stop accepting triumphs in pixie portions. Demand a far superior product. This city deserves it. Pitt needs more talent on the field, sure, but it also needs an energy transfusion. It needs a new vibe.
Since arriving here in 1989, I've found no sporting enterprise to be as chronically depressing as Pitt football. I've seen many of its followers succumb to the lure of low expectations and the excuses that follow. Pederson's Poison Posters! Spend enough time interacting with these types, and you come away believing the Dave Wannstedt years marked a return to glory (they never shoulda fired him!) and the Paul Chryst era was akin to the Miracle on Ice. You find yourself reciting the program's seemingly insurmountable obstacles at every turn. You start wondering whether Pitt should shorten the name of its training facility from the UPMC Sports Performance Complex to The Inferiority Complex. Or maybe The Persecution Complex. Posters We All Know?
Could it be that among its many challenges, Pitt simply hasn't had the right coach?
Chryst may turn out to be that at Wisconsin, but for now, I look at him, Walt Harris, Wannstedt and Todd Graham, and I see good football minds who don't necessarily profile as championship-winning, closer-type generals. Consider that at all their college head coaching stops combined, those four have worked 30 seasons in eight conferences without winning a single outright league title. Not one.
Time will tell whether Pat Narduzzi is the guy to change all this, but you have to like the fact he is coming from a place (Michigan State) where Mark Dantonio & Co. looked at all the built-in excuses, kicked them in the face and created an entirely new culture. And did so without batches of five-star recruits. After decades of mediocrity, Michigan State has become a bastion of positivity and big wins.
They go hand-in-hand, you know. Watch the Spartans, and you always get the feeling they have a chance — even when they're losing to Baylor, 41-21, in the fourth quarter of a bowl game. Watch the Panthers (for any portion of the past 30 years), and you know all too well the feeling of pending doom — even when they're leading Houston, 31-6, in the fourth quarter of a bowl game.
Maybe it's a good thing Narduzzi was on hand to witness Pitt's epic collapse. He experienced the full catastrophe. That was Pitt football at its cataclysmic, spirit-crushing worst. And maybe, just maybe, it was rock bottom.
I love the fact Narduzzi isn't afraid to use the phrase “national championship.” I think it says a lot about the pedigree of the Pitt coaching job, too, that even amid the upset of recent years, one of the most decorated coordinators in the country jumped at it when he did not have to.
Narduzzi was not desperate. He was the highest-paid coordinator in the Big Ten. He'd said no to other jobs. He obviously didn't view Pitt as a dead-end, graveyard kind of place. He obviously believes he can win and win big. He can. And he should.
Look at the selling points: incredible city, top-25 public university, good training facilities next to a legendary NFL franchise, an NFL stadium and a rich tradition that has produced multiple current and former NFL stars. What Pitt hasn't had is much of a game-day atmosphere, or, lately, a stable coaching situation. It has to compete for the sports dollar in a pro town. It is viewed largely with apathy. Of course it is. Do you know how many times the program has finished ranked higher than 15th in the past 31 years?
Try zero. And yet people respond when the product gets good.
If I'm Narduzzi, I'm showing recruits scenes from the 2009 games against Notre Dame and Cincinnati. Pitt had risen to No. 8. Heinz Field was packed. Or go back to Nov. 8, 2003, when 66,207 rocked the place in a big win over Virginia Tech. Many returned (60,486) two weeks later for a de facto Big East title game against Miami.
You don't need a doctorate to figure this out, but it was Dr. Randy Juhl — a key part of Pitt's coaching search committee — who put it so well after Narduzzi's introductory news conference, building on the fact Pitt people invented CPR and revolutionized organ transplantation: “If the university can do that, we can sure as hell win 10 football games.” It helps immensely that Narduzzi has fought and won on recruiting battlegrounds within driving distance of Pittsburgh. There's no reason he can't go into homes of, say, three-star recruits — the kind his Michigan State defenses were built on — and sell Pitt the way he sold Michigan State and develop impact players.
Where's the bar? That's easy: Pitt should be a consistently ranked team that wins ACC Coastal Division titles and challenges for conference titles. It should be a program that plays in nationally prominent games, goes to major bowls once in a while and even gets into a national championship discussion now and again, the way Cincinnati, Louisville and West Virginia did in the old Big East. The way Michigan State does.
It could start by avoiding horrendous losses, like falling by two touchdowns at home to Youngstown State (“But you don't know how bad it was when Chryst arrived … ”) Dantonio is 29-0 against unranked opponents when his team is ranked. Narduzzi starts next season, fittingly, with games against Youngstown State and Akron. He should go 2-0 in emphatic fashion.
No excuses.
Joe Starkey co-hosts a show 2 to 6 p.m. weekdays on 93.7 FM. Reach him at jraystarkey@gmail.com.
Link:
http://triblive.com/sports/joestarkey/7501724-74/pitt-narduzzi-football
LINK:
Starkey: What Pitt football could be!
It's time for a key substitution regarding Pitt football: Excuses out. Expectations in. Raise the bar already. Stop accepting triumphs in pixie portions. Demand a far superior product. This city deserves it. Pitt needs more talent on the field, sure, but it also needs an energy transfusion. It needs a new vibe.
Since arriving here in 1989, I've found no sporting enterprise to be as chronically depressing as Pitt football. I've seen many of its followers succumb to the lure of low expectations and the excuses that follow. Pederson's Poison Posters! Spend enough time interacting with these types, and you come away believing the Dave Wannstedt years marked a return to glory (they never shoulda fired him!) and the Paul Chryst era was akin to the Miracle on Ice. You find yourself reciting the program's seemingly insurmountable obstacles at every turn. You start wondering whether Pitt should shorten the name of its training facility from the UPMC Sports Performance Complex to The Inferiority Complex. Or maybe The Persecution Complex. Posters We All Know?
Could it be that among its many challenges, Pitt simply hasn't had the right coach?
Chryst may turn out to be that at Wisconsin, but for now, I look at him, Walt Harris, Wannstedt and Todd Graham, and I see good football minds who don't necessarily profile as championship-winning, closer-type generals. Consider that at all their college head coaching stops combined, those four have worked 30 seasons in eight conferences without winning a single outright league title. Not one.
Time will tell whether Pat Narduzzi is the guy to change all this, but you have to like the fact he is coming from a place (Michigan State) where Mark Dantonio & Co. looked at all the built-in excuses, kicked them in the face and created an entirely new culture. And did so without batches of five-star recruits. After decades of mediocrity, Michigan State has become a bastion of positivity and big wins.
They go hand-in-hand, you know. Watch the Spartans, and you always get the feeling they have a chance — even when they're losing to Baylor, 41-21, in the fourth quarter of a bowl game. Watch the Panthers (for any portion of the past 30 years), and you know all too well the feeling of pending doom — even when they're leading Houston, 31-6, in the fourth quarter of a bowl game.
Maybe it's a good thing Narduzzi was on hand to witness Pitt's epic collapse. He experienced the full catastrophe. That was Pitt football at its cataclysmic, spirit-crushing worst. And maybe, just maybe, it was rock bottom.
I love the fact Narduzzi isn't afraid to use the phrase “national championship.” I think it says a lot about the pedigree of the Pitt coaching job, too, that even amid the upset of recent years, one of the most decorated coordinators in the country jumped at it when he did not have to.
Narduzzi was not desperate. He was the highest-paid coordinator in the Big Ten. He'd said no to other jobs. He obviously didn't view Pitt as a dead-end, graveyard kind of place. He obviously believes he can win and win big. He can. And he should.
Look at the selling points: incredible city, top-25 public university, good training facilities next to a legendary NFL franchise, an NFL stadium and a rich tradition that has produced multiple current and former NFL stars. What Pitt hasn't had is much of a game-day atmosphere, or, lately, a stable coaching situation. It has to compete for the sports dollar in a pro town. It is viewed largely with apathy. Of course it is. Do you know how many times the program has finished ranked higher than 15th in the past 31 years?
Try zero. And yet people respond when the product gets good.
If I'm Narduzzi, I'm showing recruits scenes from the 2009 games against Notre Dame and Cincinnati. Pitt had risen to No. 8. Heinz Field was packed. Or go back to Nov. 8, 2003, when 66,207 rocked the place in a big win over Virginia Tech. Many returned (60,486) two weeks later for a de facto Big East title game against Miami.
You don't need a doctorate to figure this out, but it was Dr. Randy Juhl — a key part of Pitt's coaching search committee — who put it so well after Narduzzi's introductory news conference, building on the fact Pitt people invented CPR and revolutionized organ transplantation: “If the university can do that, we can sure as hell win 10 football games.” It helps immensely that Narduzzi has fought and won on recruiting battlegrounds within driving distance of Pittsburgh. There's no reason he can't go into homes of, say, three-star recruits — the kind his Michigan State defenses were built on — and sell Pitt the way he sold Michigan State and develop impact players.
Where's the bar? That's easy: Pitt should be a consistently ranked team that wins ACC Coastal Division titles and challenges for conference titles. It should be a program that plays in nationally prominent games, goes to major bowls once in a while and even gets into a national championship discussion now and again, the way Cincinnati, Louisville and West Virginia did in the old Big East. The way Michigan State does.
It could start by avoiding horrendous losses, like falling by two touchdowns at home to Youngstown State (“But you don't know how bad it was when Chryst arrived … ”) Dantonio is 29-0 against unranked opponents when his team is ranked. Narduzzi starts next season, fittingly, with games against Youngstown State and Akron. He should go 2-0 in emphatic fashion.
No excuses.
Joe Starkey co-hosts a show 2 to 6 p.m. weekdays on 93.7 FM. Reach him at jraystarkey@gmail.com.
Link:
http://triblive.com/sports/joestarkey/7501724-74/pitt-narduzzi-football
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