a 10 year assesment is not out of line in any way. As also mentioned, it would be nice to show that the program is on the upswing since 2005 but we have to accept the fact that not everyone is going to look at things in that type of manner. If people want to throw out stats as their big argument, fine. But, I think anyone who looks at the records of PSU by season will see that obviously the program is moving in a positive direction in relation to the early 2000’s.

The question posed wasn’t how healthy the program has been over the last ten years though. It was how good the program is now. If we were talking about the team HISTORICALLY and decided we wanted to assess the program over the last ten years, then it’d be fair game. But no one who took the field Saturday had anything to do with what happened in the five years preceding the resurgence, so how can those games have anything to do with the program today?

That’s all I’m saying.

To prove I’m not cherry picking, I’ll even say that after this season is over, 2005 will be a thing of the past as well. No one who plays for us next year will have any connection to that championship team, so we can’t look at it and say “Hey! We’re good! We won a Big Ten Title in 2005!”

The problem is that until this year, in any coverage of Penn State’s record in the Pitt-centric media, the time period cited was ‘since 2000’. This year and next, they can use the nice round number, but then any further discussion whose aim is to paint Penn State in a bad light in 2011 and beyond will go back to quoting the record since 2000.

I think 10 years may not be an arbitrary statistic, but it certainly catches the exact window of the worst years in team history, and as such is worth mentioning in the article. Since he gave the 10 years statistic without any caveat, leads me to believe he’s banging on PSU a little bit unnecessarily.

If his article was meant to simply say PSU isn’t an elite program, there are plenty of way to say it that would better represent where we actually are as a program, too.

That is to say, we may not be USC, but we aren’t as bad as Pitt, either.

What does their big game this weekend have to do with us though? Were we sitting here last week talking about Pitt’s record against the Big East’s best over the last 10 years?

I’m sick of Pitt fans (and this guy is clearly one) trying to validate themselves against us by trying to knock us down a peg. Does anyone here think we’re elite? And if we’re not, how does that make Pitt any better?

It’d be like sitting here and saying that Penn State basketball really isn’t that bad because Pitt hasn’t made a Final Four while being good. It’s irrelevent to how good Penn State actually is.

If you don’t like it don’t read it. I stopped reading Post-Gazette coverage because I got tired of every Q&A being about Penn State playing Pitt and the overall Pittsburgh pronvincialism.

Yeah, I kind of cringed when I saw that, I am hoping that there was a hint of sarcasm attached.

my whole problem with what was said on the #1 cochran sports show was they don’t compare it to anything. and i have wondered what Pitts record was during the same time frame.

Now THAT is responsible journalism. Good research, tapped from in-depth reporting, bringing real news to the masses!

Love me some spake….

I don’t know the guy personally or anything, and his email is available publicly. It’s also a Post-Gazette address, so I don’t feel as though it qualifies as private correspondence, but I could be wrong.

I hear what you’re saying but people email reporters all the time without giving their implicit permission to make their emails public, yet they show up in mailbags and such. I think this is just the opposite direction of that.

I mean, I didn’t say anything in my post that I didn’t say to him directly…

But hey, if you’re not cool with it, feel free to take it down.

Are we talking about gauging the success of a presidency, or college football, or just in general? 20 years seems like a very long time in the up-to-the-minute nature of college football.

if you try hard enough, you can manipulate any stat to make it fit your story. It makes it easier when you don’t research the facts thoroughly, and just arbitrarily pull random numbers out of your behind.

We do it also. Ziese is the PITT “beatwriter”. It’s his job to report on PITT but it is to the PG’s, the City’s, Ziese’s, UP’s, etc. to put them in a good light. And as much as PITT is not important to much of PSU’s fanbase, PSU is extremely important to PITT’s. We are what they strive to be.

If PITT can’t ascend to PSU’s level (and they never will) they have to try to bring PSU down to their level. So their fanbase takes all the potshots they can at our cupcake schedule, our “outside the lines” issues, our "failures against quality opponents, etc. hell, some of our fanbase does the same thing.

Ziese just fits into that mold. He is paid to create interest in the Pantheroos and make arguments that bring PITT up to our level.

saying they were conveniently picking a time period that makes Pitt look bad.

I remember a professor once saying “Numbers, when tortured, will confess to anything!”

Unfortunately, we Penn Staters like to dismiss the early 2000’s as the Dark Years and they shouldn’t count, or that QB14 hadn’t been in charge in 2006-2007 or we would have won more games. Unfortunately, it is what it is.