Pitt’s training camp officially broke this weekend, even though the team still has another day of practice on Monday. From there, the team will be off Tuesday and begin focusing on Utah starting on Wednesday.
Dave Wannstedt seemed pleased with the camp when he addressed the media:
“It’s been a good camp; I thought it was a very physical camp. I think that every coach likes to stand there and say that this is the most physical camp that we’ve had, and players like to say that too. I don’t know, I just know that the faster that you get, and the stronger that you get, for some reason practices become more physical. We banged it around pretty good. I thought that we really got a good feel for our younger players. We did some things to really look at our incoming freshmen.
Some good news for Pitt is that assuming Greg Romeus’ and Ray Graham’s injuries are not serious, the team escaped relatively unscathed. The injury to freshman DE Bryan Murphy was unfortunate as he would have been up for some playing time. But Pitt has capable starters at defensive end and the team should be okay.
Questions still abound including injuries to key parts Romeus and Graham. Romeus only managed to participate in full pads one day of the camp and while Wannstedt thinks he’ll be ready for the opener, he’s not so sure about Graham:
“There’s nothing really new to report on Ray Graham and Greg Romeus except to say that they’re making great improvement, and day-to-day, they’re getting closer and closer. I expect Greg to be fine for opening day. Ray is running straight ahead right now, tomorrow will be the first day that he’ll start making cuts so we’ll see where he’s at there. He’s coming along, we just don’t want to do anything faster than what we need to.”
If Graham isn’t ready, Pitt, of course, still has All-American Dion Lewis. But if Graham is out for any extended period of time, Pitt can ill-afford an injury to Lewis.
All in all, Pitt used this camp to do what they needed to do – get in good, hard work and sort out position battles. It also helped that QB Tino Sunseri was named the starter in the Spring and had all of camp to work with the first-team offense. The team now has a little over a week to prepare for its opening game against Utah.