Are you people serious? This is big boy football. And I'm thinking Narduzzi has the Big Ten "win at any cost" mentality. I'm guessing that Michigan State didn't start dominating that league with choir boys. Joe Starkey is demanding game suspensions for Boyd and Blair but so what? Why should Pitt be playing on an unlevel playing field? This stuff never gets reported in other places but at Pitt, we have to penalize ourselves. I'm upset Boyd was suspended a month. I thought that was far too harsh, I realize it was the off-season but what if the DUI was in October? Would it still be a month suspension?
Boyd should either have no suspension or maybe it should be that he doesn't start against YSU. What he did is absolutely no big deal. He wasn't drunk and he passed a car that was slowing down to make a right-hand turn. It was a minor traffic violation and his DUI has an asterisk on it, for me, because had he been a few months older, he wouldn't have received one.
Blair's is a bigger deal obviously but anything more than a game or 2 is excessive. Pitt can't be disciplining players for things that go un-charged and un-reported in other places. Hopefully Narduzzi realizes this.
I'm not suggesting kicking out Blair because of his act (though it was pretty extreme). I'm suggesting it because he's likely to be a gibrone as a player. He was a nice story due to his recovery from a serious condition. It was heart warming he got in the field. He ran around,looked kind of fast. Whoo woo all around. But he wasn't considered much of a prospect in the first place, and true to that thinking, wasn't effective. And now that he's a PR nightmare due to this stupid move, he's not worth sucking up a valuable scholarship.
Dump his ass and see if there are any late uncommitted Juco DEs still out there eligible for the fall. Any of them would likely be just as useful as Blair. Or give a marginal local kid who was on the fringe, to engineer some goodwill with his hs coach.
By doing so Pitt can then go gloriously light on the discipline of Boyd ... miss the intro to the first game and first series, max. Absolutely no more than that.
Then, when he inevitably bleats, Pitt can more legitimately tell Ron Cook to go to hell and die an egregiously painful agonizing death (well, maybe not the latter part, out loud anyway).
Don't feel bad for Blair. He made his own bed. He is from a rich area so likely has no worries for the future (well, other than health, if he keeps this idiocy up). Worst case, our friends at Cal U will likely welcome him. As others have shown, it's a place a legit player can make a name for himself.
Pitt needs to be strategic about crisis management, scholarships and PR, like the big teams do.
