Just Watch the Game Blog

Losing your season opener in overtime is never a good thing.

Or is it? I think Pitt is a better team today than it was last night at 8:00. Tino Sunseri was a better quarterback at 10:30 last night than he was at 8:30.

It will never get tougher for Pitt this season than it was last night in Utah.

It’s easy to see why Utah now has an 18 game winning streak at home. That is one tough place to play and it was an especially tough place for a kid to start his first college game at quarterback.

Pitt’s offensive line didn’t have a good night. There were way too many false start penalties, but, with that crowd and Sunseri’s and their inexperience it’s not surprising.

And it’s not just the five-yard penalties that hurt the offense. The fear of getting one causes offensive linemen to be a little less aggressive coming off the ball and that’s going to effect the running game even more than the passing game.

The loss last night shouldn’t drop Pitt in the stupid polls but it probably will and it doesn’t matter. Pitt is better prepared for the rest of the season because of that loss than it would have been by a 54-3 win over Younstown State.

Pitt plays Utah tonight.

Penn State plays Youngstown State on Saturday.

Here’s my question for you if you’re a Pitt fan:

Which would you rather see, an exciting, high scoring double overtime loss to Utah tonight or a 56-3 win over Cupcake State at Heinz Field on Saturday?

If you’re a Penn State fan:

Would you rather see Penn State beat YSU 63-10 on Saturday or see an exciting, double overtime loss to Utah on the road?

Forget the stupid poll ramifications. I’m not interested in that nonsense.

I’m talking about you as a football fan. Would you rather see your team play in an exciting, evenly matched game and lose or watch it beat a hopelessly over matched opponent?

Call me crazy, but if I were a Pitt fan, I would much rather see a competitive loss to a real team than a blowout over a cupcake.

If the polls and the idiotic BCS system have made it so you’d rather see your team beat Youngstown 63-0 than see it lose to Utah 42-41 in double OT, that should be all the argument anybody needs for getting rid of them.

I’m really looking forward to watching Pitt tonight. The Steelers game will be on the DVR. If Pitt were playing Youngstown, I’d choose the Steelers pathetic fourth preseason game because I’d be expecting it to be more entertaining.

Pitt fans and local football fans who wouldn’t necessarily refer to themselves as Pitt fans yet tend to have short memories.

They don’t realize that it was not that long ago–before Walt Harris resurrected the program–when there was actually serious discussion about Pitt joining the MAC or some other lesser conference.

There may not have been any serious discussion about that coming from the athletic department or the chancellor’s office but there were lots of people in town who thought it was time for Pitt to just give up on the idea of maintaining a big time football program.

Harris was run out of town unfairly and the fans haven’t had a lot of patience for Dave Wannstedt.

His teams have lost a few games that they should have won, but he has the Pitt program in the best shape that it has been in since Foge Fazio left in the early ’80s.

I think tonight is Wannstedt’s biggest game since taking over as head coach.

That doesn’t necessarily make it a must win because winning the Big East is still the most important thing, but this is the year when Pitt is supposed to establish itself as a legitimate top 10 team.

Not top 20.

Not top 25.  Top 10.

And a loss tonight will stir up all the critics and change the entire dynamic of the season.

It’s the toughest opener Pitt has had in a long, long time and it won’t be easy and Pitt is the underdog, but it’s time for a Wannstedt team to show that it has become what he promised it would become.

By the way, it occured to me the other day that I have never heard anybody say a bad word about Dave Wannstedt the person. Not one.

I’ve never heard a complaint from anybody in the media who felt he or she was mistreated and I’ve never heard stories about unhappy assistants.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some negative stories out there, but the fact that I’ve yet to hear one tells me what a solid guy he is.

USA Today has a cover story today on what could become a major problem for the NFL.

Fans are beginning to think that going to NFL games isn’t worth the hassle when they can stay home and watch their 60 inch, high definition TV.

I’ve never believed watching a game on TV was better then being there and HD hasn’t changed my mind.

I would always rather be there, but that doesn’t mean that I think it’s worth the hassle that begins with paying $65 for a seat next to a guy who will be puking on himself in the middle of the second quarter and then sitting in post game traffic for 45 minutes.

The USA Today story talks about ways that the NFL is trying to compete with the home experience.

Sorry, but I just don’t get it.

When I go to a game, I’m not sitting there wondering what’s happening in other games and I don’t need a special screen to show me six different replays of the play that I just saw.

Being in the middle of the crowd and being part of the spectacle is what got me interested in sports.

Are the fantasy geeks responsible for this need to enhance the game experience?

When I was a true fan (a long time ago), I could never imagine, as I sat there and watched Terry Bradshaw throwing to Lynn Swann, feeling a desperate need to know how many catches Paul Warfield had for the Dolphins.

The game was enough.

If NFL fans are so much in need of other-than-the-game stimulation, that doesn’t say much for the product that’s on the field.

Has the NFL product become so boring and predictable that fans have to have a stake in the games in order to stay interested?

Maybe, instead of thinking about all the electronic and digital ways to keep fans at the stadium entertained, the NFL should start looking at ways to make the games more exciting.

I’ve been in favor of eliminating the goal posts for years. Field goals are boring and no goal posts would create a lot more exciting goal line stands.

I would also limit substitution and take the speaker out of the players’ helmets.

Dime defenses that were invented to cancel out five wide receiver sets have turned the NFL into a dink and dunk league.

As I’ve pointed out here before, according to the NFL’s official play by play sheet, 56 of the 62 completions in last season’s Super Bowl were officially classified as short.

I think the NFL should also copy the Canadian League and reduce the time between plays from 45 seconds to 20 and stop the clock on every dead ball in the last three minutes to reduce the number of games that end with quarterbacks genuflecting.

The need for the electronic distractions would be reduced if there were fewer TV timeouts and the networks wised up and started sneaking 20 or 30 second commercials into the game during natural delays instead of making people at the stadium sit during a 2 1/2/ minute commercial break while the people at home, who are supposed to be watching the commercials, are switching to the other game.

The ball is only in play for about 8 minutes out of the three to three and a hlf hours that it takes to complete an NFL  game.

That leaves a lot of time for fans in the stadium to fixate on their cell phones and agonize over not knowing how their fantasy teams are doing.

Drop the puck.

‘I never miss the NBC show, “America’s Got Talent”.  It’s not as good as “American Idol”, which is the most brilliantly conceived show in the history of television, but it’s close.

A couple of weeks ago, a 10 year-0ld girl from the North Hills of Pittsburgh, Jackie Evancho, put millions of people in shock with her performance.

It was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen on television.

Check out the link if you’ve never seen this kid and listen to her on some good speakers.

Last night she did it again only she was even better.

If you’re not blown away by this kid, check your pulse.

Now, just in case you’re wondering why I like these shows so much.

I stumbled upon American Idol four or five years ago while channel surfing.

I heard them introducing a 16 year old girl who was one of the 10 finalists. The theme for that night was old standards and this kid came out in front of an auditorium full of people and a live television audience of 20 million and absolutely killed “Teach Me Tonight.”

I assumed that she had probably never heard that song until she had to pick it from a list of songs that she could sing in the competition.

She didn’t win the title that year but it got me wanting to see more.

Maybe it’s because I worked in TV, but I’m just blown away by the people who come from nowhere–working as beauticians and bartenders—and have the guts to get up there on live TV and perform the way they do.

American Idol is the perfect TV show. It’s live. The music is good. It’s interactive–the viewers decide who wins, it’s competitive, it’s unpredictable and it has a soap opera element that keeps viewers coming back to see what happens each week. It also runs during two sweeps periods, February and May, which means tremendous ratings for Fox.

There is also the “Up Close and Personal” element that works so well for the Olympics. Each performer has his or her own story and the producers to a great job of getting the audience interested in the performers as people.

“America’s Got Talent” has many of the same elements with more variety. I think it’s a close second to “American Idol” only because I think too many of the dancers, magicians and other performers are boring.

Just check out Jackie Evancho.  You won’t be sorry. After she sang last night, they should have declared her the winner and said “See you next year.”

JOE BUTLER OF METRO INDEX SCOUTING HAS MORE TO SAY ON COLLEGE FOOTBALL AND BOWL GAMES.

Just a few minutes ago, I finally submitted the final draft of Just Watch The Game, the book.

The purpose of this website that I started in March was to promote and sell the book. I can honestly tell you that I never expected the site and the blog to generate so much traffic.

My original intention was to release the book this Summer but I was advised by the distributor to wait until October/November because 90% of books are bought during the Christmas season.

I finished the book a few months ago and have been tweaking it a little bit since then. Writing it was easy.

The difficult part is publishing it and promoting it.

I haven’t been posting as much as usual here the last few days because I’ve been dealing with getting the book ready to be printed. That involved getting pictures scanned, going over the design with the printer and fighting with my computer.

If I were not bordering on computer illiterate, I’m sure it would have taken me 1/5th the time.

My two brothers gave me the idea for the book and at first I dismissed it.

Then I went to Barnes and Noble and checked out the Pittsburgh Sports section and decided that I could write something much different from what I saw there.

There are a lot of good local sports books, one if which is “Steeler Nation” written by Jim Wexell–who helped me tremendously when I was looking for advice on how to self-publish mine.

But almost all of the books that I saw were celebrations of Steelers Super Bowls and Penguins Stanley Cups. Those books are great and they’re all well done. There really haven’t been many (if any) local sports books that take a critical look at recent Pittsburgh sports history and sports culture.

Just Watch The Game does.

My brother Bill told me that the way to get started on a book is with an outline. (He reviewed books and worked as a newspaper editor for 30 years.)

He told me to write down everything that I thought I could use from my experence to make an interesting book.

It was when I started writing everything down that I realized all the places I had been, things that I had seen and people I had met.

How many sportscasters get assigned to cover a local team in four Super Bowls, a World Series and four Stanley Cup finals?

I believe that I covered the best pro football team of all time and the most talented hockey player ever. As a fan, I was around for the greastest home run in Major League Baseball history and I saw the most famous play in NFL history in person.

I also spent three years riding buses as a minor league baseball announcer. I spent a day in Wichita, Kansas working as Satchel Page’s driver.

I had Bob Feller work as my color man on two broadcasts and spent time with other Hall of Famers like Carl Hubbell and Ernie Banks.

I co-hosted a week’s worth of World Series pregame shows with Bob Prince and I had two amazing up close and personal encounters with Howard Cosell.

I started in local TV news when they were shooting stories on film and lasted long enough to make it into the digital age.

I don’t know how many books I can sell and, to be honest with you, I’ll be happy to sell enough to break even. I enjoyed writing it because it gave me a new appreciation for the career that I too often took for granted.

The book is in my computer and will be going to the printer soon. I hope to have it available as an e-book also.

When I do, I’ll let you know.

Could somebody please explain texting to me?

Not the actual act of texting. I get that and I do it every once in a while.

I think it’s a great tool for when you want to send a quick message to somebody but don’t want to get involved in a conversation.

What I don’t get is people carrying on conversations by texting.

You’re holding one of the grestest inventions of all time in your hand–the telephone. It allows you, by pushing 10 buttons to, you know, TALK to another person.

Why would anyone carry on a five minute “conversation” by texting instead of just talking to the person on the other end?

We had something that wasn’t much different from texting 150 years ago. It was called the telegram. Back then, people used to fantasize about being able to actually hear someone’s voice come down one of those lines.

Now we’re back to sending wireless telegrams.

For the past 25 or 30 years we’ve been turning out a generation full of way too many effeminate men. Looks like what’s coming next is a generation of people addicted to text messaging.

Have I ever mentioned that words can’t describe how glad I am to have grown up when I did?

At least my generation had the good sense to get addicted to drugs.

I don’t know anybody who had worked in TV news who didn’t think that Katie Couric would be a disaster as anchor of the CBS Evening News.

Now she’s finally hit rock bottom with the worst ratings in CBS News history.

The suits in New York are famous for outsmarting themselves.

They saw somebody who was cute and perky and really good at doing recipes and fawning over celebrities and they thought that they had found the perfect replacement for Dan Rather.

They deserve exactly what they got.

Some of the golf pros I knew in the past liked to have fun with their members and students and when they were asked for their advice, they would say, “Take two weeks off and quit.”

I actually took that advice 10 years ago and quit and only recently went back to the driving range to see if I should come out of “retirement”.

I hit the ball better than I could have expected but I haven’t gone back on to a golf course yet.

I quit because of a bad knee that would have prevented me from practicing and would have caused my scores to go up.

I was about a 15 handicap at the time. I had been as low as 13, even though I didn’t start playing seriously until I was 31 years old.

This is a roundabout way of asking why Barack Obama doesn’t take lessons.

Obama’s been playing a lot of golf lately and that’s fine with me. If he’s playing golf, that means he’s not spending time thinking about more ways to spend my money.

By all accounts, his golf game stinks. Never is security tighter around him than when he has a golf club in his hand.

If he had a nice swing, he’s be making sure that as many cameras as possible were there to see it.

I have a feeling that Obama is one of those guys who could be a lot better if he took a lesson, but refuses to do so because that would mean he’d have to cut back his playing time.

I could be wrong. Maybe he is taking lessons. I just have my doubts based on some of the descriptions of his game.

He’s obviously a pretty athletic guy. Lessons could save him years and years of aggravation.

I don’t know how many men still use the president as a role model, but, if he’s sending a message that it doesn’t matter how bad you are, just so you’re on the course, that’s not good.

The courses are already overrun by people who shouldn’t be there. They hold everyone else up and they don’t score any better with clubs than they would if they were playing with a shovel.

Those people need to get off the course and stay off.

And based on the accounts that I’ve heard and read about his golf game, he should, too, before he encourages more hackers like him to clutter up all the courses.