Football season is here. It’s the greatest time of the year. The high school season opened up this past weekend. This coming Friday Indiana High opens its season. I’ll be back on the sidelines for the fourth year in a row working the games with Jack Benedict and Scott Mossgrove. Good luck to all of our local teams.
• The Steelers’ third pre-season game, the so-called dress rehearsal against the Colts wasn’t much to write home about. Ben Roethlisberger and Antonio Brown showed what they can do in limited action. As a whole, however, the first team offense didn’t do much at all. Landry Jones, who missed most of camp and had yet to play, looked pretty good to cement his place as the Steelers’ backup. Rookie JuJu Smith-Schuster suffered his fourth injury of the preseason, but did come back to finish the game. And fellow rookie James Conner made it two straight games in which he performed well when getting the ball.
• The secondary continues to look bad. Let’s hope that doesn’t carry over to the regular season. Rookie Cam Sutton, making his first appearance due to injury, did look pretty good, however.
• The Steelers’ secondary is a major question mark heading into the season. So, what does it say when the team picked up cornerback Antonio Crawford one day, cut him injured the next day and then made a trade for another corner, Dashaun Phillips later in the week? The Steelers finally invested a first rounder in Artie Burns last year and he looks like the real deal. They took Senquez Golson in the second round in 2015, and he has yet to see the field due to injury after injury. Right now I’m not overly confident the secondary will be that good, or who will even make it onto the opening day roster.
• The toughest battles for jobs will come at wide receiver. It’s a given that Brown, Smith-Schuster, Eli Rogers, and Martavis Bryant will be four of the six receivers on the roster. That means that Darrius-Heyward-Bey, Sammy Coates, DeMarcus Ayers, Justin Hunter and Cobi Hamilton will fight for the last two spots. I believe Coates will make the team, because he’s simply too talented to give up on at this point. The final spot should come down to Heyward-Bey and Justin Hunter. You can make a good argument for either player to earn the final spot. The coaches will have a tough decision to make.
• The Pirates are done. They went 3-5 on the recent homestand against the Cardinals and Dodgers. But they’re out of the race and it’s now time to start thinking about next year. I’m anxious to see how the Buccos compete over the final month of the season. Will they pack it in, or show up every night? One thing I know for certain is that fans in this area are now focused on the Steelers, not the Pirates. Baseball season still has a ways to go, but for Pirates’ fans, the season is over.
• I will give the Buccos credit for their weekend performance in Cincinnati, a place where they hardly win. The Pirates took the series from the Reds. Gerrit Cole, who had never beaten the Reds before, was terrific in his Saturday outing and even hit a home run for the only run of the game. If only he could pitch like that all the time.
• I’ve often heard it said that the longer you watch baseball the chances are you will see something you’ve never seen before. That pretty well sums up what happened the other night at PNC Park. The Dodgers’ Rich Hill no hit the Pirates through nine innings, and almost had a perfect game through nine. Josh Harrison’s homer in the tenth was the only hit allowed by Hill. What a way to lose a game. It’s the first time a no hitter has been broken up by a walk off homer in extra innings. This is one game I would love to have seen.
• Andrew McCutchen is slumping again. Cutch was red hot in June and July after struggling in the opening two months of the season. Entering the weekend series versus the Reds he had only four extra base hits in August, and just one home run. After going one for nine in Cincy, McCutchen is hitting just .227 in August, nearly one hundred points below his July average. He’s also seen his average fall nearly twenty points. I still believe McCutchen is a candidate to be traded in the offseason. If he continues to slump in September, will teams even be interested in him again?
• I didn’t watch the Floyd Mayweather fight. You couldn’t have paid me to watch that despicable woman beater. So what, the guy won. That makes him a great fighter, but that’s all.
• So let me get this straight: ESPN is pulling an Asian-American announcer named Robert Lee from the upcoming University of Virginia telecast because of the recent events in Charlottesville. I seriously doubt the ESPN announcer will ever be confused with the Confederate General Robert E. Lee. But ESPN didn’t want to take any chances. You simply can’t make this stuff up.
