Pittsburgh Sports, Opinion and Politics | Just Watch the Game Blog

I should have gone with my gut. On TribLive radio we have a football prediction competition and I went into the weekend in second place.

Last Thursday, my gut told me to go with Pitt but I was talked out of it and went with South Florida.

I picked Pitt over Rutgers early in the week and then my gut told me on Friday to go with Rutgers.  I stuck with Pitt.

From now on I go with my gut.

Pitt laying worse than the 34-10 score indicates makes you wonder how overrated South Florida actually was.

As you probably know, around here we don’t count rent-a-victim wins. Those games only count when the renter loses.

That makes Pitt 1-3 and I’m sorry, but that stinks.

How many years and under how many coaches has this been going on?

Why can’t Pitt stand prosperity? Why does an embarrassing loss always pop up just when the program looks like it’s making progress?

Pitt doesn’t stink anymore. For me, beating a legitimate opponent in a must game was all that was needed to remove the smell.

That happened last night.

I have a feeling we’re going to find out that South Florida was ridiculously overrated, but that was the 16th ranked team in the country last night.

I said that the quarterback play was the difference in the losses to Iowa and Notre Dame and last night the team that won had the better quarterback.

Tino Sunseri was the best quarterback on the field last night and it wasn’t close.

The best throw that he made was a drop by Mike Shanahan, who’s not known for drops.

Todd Graham’s high octane offense played a huge role in the win, too.

South Florida’s defense was out of gas in the middle of the second quarter.

I’ll be shocked if Ray Graham doesn’t touch the ball at least 30 times a game for the rest of the season.

Give Pitt’s defense some credit, too. South Florida came in here with a reputation for putting up big numbers. After a shaky start, it shut down SF’s QB B.J. Daniels.

So, at least for now, the stink is gone. History tells us that there’s a good chance that it will come back.

There’s also a chance that the team will get better as it gets a better understanding of Todd Graham’s system.

If you’re a Pitt fan, how can you not like the move to the ACC?

Call me crazy, but I’ll take Florida State, Miami, Virgina Tech over South Florida, UCONN, Louisville and Cincinnati in football and I’m OK with trading UCONN and Georgetown for Duke and North Carolina in basketball.

The Big East has been a football joke for way too long and Pitt has enough challenges when it comes to selling tickets without trying to get people excited about South Florida and Rutgers.

It will be a lot harder for Pitt to win the ACC football championship, but the ACC should make Pitt a better sell to recruits and that should mean better players coming here in the long run .

Any chance we could get Pitt in the Big East for this football season?

Until further notice, Pitt stinks.

If you’re going to bore people to death by playing teams like Buffalo and Maine, you had better bore them with ridiculous blowouts.

If you can’t do better than one touchdown in the first half against Buffalo and you need two dropped TD passes to help you win the game, you stink.

Just as you stink when you win seven games and two of them are against teams like Buffalo and Maine. That means you actually won five games and that means you stink.

Sorry.

It’s the first game with a new coach and blah, blah blah and maybe the two exhibition games will make Pitt a much better team and blah, blah, blah, but that doesn’t change the fact that this team picked up where it left off last year under Dave Wannstedt.

Right now it stinks.

If I were the athletic director at Pitt, Todd Graham would have been fired at half time.

That’s because I would have made it clear to him when he was hired that, if he ever punted from inside his opponents 40-yard line, he would be fired.

He did it twice in the first quarter.

Against a team that was 2-10 last season and shouldn’t be on his schedule.

That’s disturbing.

Now there is talk of Pitt moving to the Big 12 conference.

The Pitt Athletic Department released a big no comment and that’s a lot different from releasing a “no way that’s happening.”

Put me down for being in favor of Pitt joining whatever major conference comes calling. Anything to get out of the Big East.

I’ll trade South Florida, Rutgers, Cincinnati, and UCON for Texas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and Texas Tech any time. And the basketball ain’t bad, either.