Blogs

If there is one thing about which Pitt fans should be reminded, it’s that the spring football scrimmages are relatively meaningless. The Blue-Gold Game is usually the most meaningless, considering that it’s a controlled scrimmage sometimes designed to favor one unit. The game can be, and sometimes is, manipulated. When there were major concerns about [...]

Dave Wannstedt let the news slip before he actually announced that Pitt has a leader in its competition for the starting quarterback job, even if the coronation came with the following caveat: Today, if we were playing, Billy Stull would start. Of course, the Panthers aren’t playing a meaningful game until Bowling Green visits Heinz [...]

After a sub-par scrimmage Saturday afternoon was followed by several off-field incidents that night, you would think the Pitt football team got the message that this wasn’t the time to slack off. If Dave Wannstedt wasn’t happy about the run game or the interior defensive line play – and he wasn’t – you can only [...]

Twenty-five years after his graduation from Pitt, Hall of Fame quarterback Dan Marino will be the featured speaker at the school’s commencement April 27 at Petersen Events Center. Marino, an Oakland native and Central Catholic graduate, earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in communication science at Pitt in 1983 and was drafted in the first [...]

Watch Pitt scrimmage from the sidelines while trying to follow the ball, as I did, and you wonder whether the Panthers will have time to utilize their passing game. The offensive tackles are getting tortured by the defensive ends, which says something about the inexperience of Jordan Gibbs and Joe Thomas and the explosiveness of [...]

Pitt is holding its coaches clinic this weekend and on the eve of its second scrimmage, the Panthers conducted one of their most lively practices of spring drills on Friday. Early on, Pitt ran red-zone drills with Bill Stull and Pat Bostick splitting first-team repetitions and Kevan Smith handling most of the second-team snaps. Bostick [...]

The center position has been an area of major concern at Pitt, but Dave Wannstedt is getting more and more used to the idea of Robb Houser in the starting lineup. That’s comforting, considering Houser was a junior-college recruit brought in to compete for the starting job. The 6-foot-2, 285-pounder has had troubles hiking shotgun [...]

Dave Wannstedt promised that Pitt’s first scrimmage of spring drills would warrant some depth-chart changes, but the Panthers coach wasn’t necessarily talking about starters. Although neither a starter nor a backup has been named at quarterback, it’s obvious that redshirt junior Bill Stull has created separation as the frontrunner for the starting job and the [...]

Pitt coach Dave Wannstedt expected nothing less, this being the first scrimmage of spring drills, when the Panthers’ defense dominated from the outset Saturday afternoon at the South Side facility. In its first three possessions, the first-team offense ran seven plays for minus-3 yards, not counting Adam Gunn’s sack of quarterback Bill Stull, before Shane [...]

Dave Wannstedt has been emphatic that Pitt won’t form a depth chart until after Saturday’s first scrimmage, but by limiting the participation of two players the Panthers coach let slip that a pair of positions are set in stone. Wannstedt said Pitt will run 80-to-90 plays, giving every player 25-to-30 snaps in the scrimmage. Everybody, [...]