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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 3608, member: 289"] Saturday, December 3rd Noon at Pittsburgh TV: ABC or ESPN or ESPN 2 Pittsburgh was the conference favorite last year and looked it in blowing SU out of it’s own Dome, 45-14. But they couldn’t maintain that level of play and finished 8-5. Coach Dave Wannstedt, an alum who had done some powerful recruiting for Pitt. But Wannstedt has a long history of getting off to promising starts and then frustrating his employers with underachievement: he’d been fired by the Bears and then the Dolphins for the same reason. A lack of offensive imagination has been the culprit and the Panthers more than made up for that by hiring Todd Graham, who had set some offensive records at Tulsa. Scoring as much as 661 points in a season. Graham will be inheriting a lot of talent but how well will Wannstedt’s recruits acclimate to Graham’s very different system? Graham inherits a good quarterback in Tino Sunseri, (223/346 .645 2572 16TDS 9 int. He has some good receivers in Mike Shanahan, (no relation to the Redskin’s coach and good for him), and Devin Street. They lost star tailback Dion Lewis but his back-up, Ray Graham, was actually better last year, gaining 277 yards rushing in one game. He also caught 24 passes, which he’ll have to do in Graham’s offense. There’s some rebuilding in the offensive line, which lost three starters. The question is are they ready to get a play off every 15 seconds, as Graham’s Tulsa team did last year? The Panther defense was one of the best in the country last year. They were among the country’s leaders in sacks and tackles for a loss despite the fact that Wannstedt rarely blitzed. Graham has a totally different concept, a 3-4 instead of a 4-3. “The objective is to attack from all angles with the best eleven athletes on the field.” The entire defensive line is back- but will be contracted, as well as three linebackers- but there will now be four of them. They have one starting defensive back returning. End Brandon Lindsley will go for Pitt’s third straight Big East defensive player of the year award. It will be interesting to see how the Panthers adjust to having a totally different type of coach. They will go from being the tortoise to being the hare. If they make the adjustment, they can be very good. Their stats from last year: Offense- rushing 165.7 (45th) passing 201.2 (73rd), total 366.9 (72nd) scoring 26.3 (67th) Defense- rushing 120.0 (101st) passing 185.1 (19th) total 305.1 (19th) scoring 19.0 (15th) Turnover margin: 0 (55th) Last year the Big East was down and the conference’s poor performance in games against other BCS conferences was much commented on. It was actually a fairly tough conference because there were no bad teams in it but there were no really strong teams in it, either- nobody to carry the flag nationally. It had a similar year in the first year after the ACC raid in 2004. But it came back pretty strong in subsequent years. I think it will be stronger at the top this year and continue to be very competitive throughout the conference. It won’t be easy to get a much better record than last year’s 8-5 in this conference yet it will be easy to do worse. We are unlikely to win four conference road games again. We’ve got to play much better at home and we’ve got to get off to another strong start. We have a good chance to be 5-1 though the first half of the schedule and we may need to have the kind of season we need to keep our momentum going. [/QUOTE]

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