Dec 27, 2014 5 min read

Good luck to Pat Narduzzi.

He’s going to need it.

Narduzzi is Pitt’s fifth head football coach since 2010. He comes with a great résumé. If you’re going to hire somebody else’s assistant to be your head coach, you might as well hire the best assistant in the country. Narduzzi laid claim to that title last year when he won the Broyles Award.

Narduzzi looks like a perfectly good hire. He’s a young, energetic 48 years old and a longtime defensive coordinator whose Michigan State defense was ranked first in the country this season in total defense. He’s from Youngstown, Ohio, which is more Pittsburgh than it is Cleveland, and he has done a lot of recruiting in Western Pennsylvania.

With the possible exception of Mike Haywood, who turned everybody off at his introductory news conference and lasted less than three weeks on the job, every Pitt hire of the last 30 years looked like a good one.

Twenty-five years ago this week Pitt fired Mike Gottfried, who had a 26-17-2 record in four years and was 7-3-1 in his last year. Gottfried didn’t get along with the academic community.

Other coaches were fired for not winning enough or moved on to what they considered better jobs. Walt Harris averaged eight wins per season his last four years and that wasn’t enough.

Only one coach in the last 30 years – Dave Wannstedt – managed to lose less than 3 games in a season, and he was fired.

So, again, good luck, coach.

• Was Santa good to your little athlete this year?

By athlete, of course, I mean video game player.

Were there lots of video games under the tree that could be the first step toward your son or daughter getting an athletic scholarship?

There was a time when boys and girls (mostly boys) would be thrilled to get a new football or football helmet, shoulder pads or a new basketball for Christmas. Parents could dream of the day when they watched their kids playing in high school or college.

Or they could just be happy watching the kids hurrying outside to join friends in the backyard.

Call it the nerdification or the wussification of America, but that’s becoming more rare every year.

Video game playing has been slowly replacing the actual playing of the games for a long time and the proof might be coming to a college near you.

Robert Morris University (Illinois) gave athletic – that’s right, athletic – scholarships to 35 students this year as part of its new e-sports program.

As reported in the New York Times, they trained this fall in a room, “Decked out with jet-black walls, mood lighting and leather game chairs with red piping.”

What athlete doesn’t appreciate mood lighting?

Yep, people who play pretend versions of sports are now officially being considered athletes.

Actually, the e-athletes aren’t playing pretend sports. They’re League of Legends players. It’s the most played PC game in North America and Europe, with 27 million players per day.

It’s about superheroes fighting other superheroes and trying to destroy the other team’s nexus. Or something.

It ain’t electric football.

Madden Football scholarships can’t be too far away.

Riot Games produces the games, and according to Wikipedia, organized the League of Legends Championship Series, which consists of eight professional teams on each continent.

So, while you might think the video game you bought for your son or daughter is just another Christmas toy that will end up on a shelf in the garage, it could be your kids’ ticket to a college scholarship.

The kids at Robert Morris (Illinois) are getting half their tuition and room and board paid for each year – about $20,000.

The school competes in the Collegiate Star League, and according to the standings I found, is in first place in the North-Illinois Division with an 8-0 record. There are 23 divisions in the North American Region.

Game companies are contributing money for scholarships.

Last February, the University of Washington team won the North American Collegiate Championship. It was watched by 169,000 people online.

Athletic Directors around the country are concerned by the decrease in attendance at college football games. Pretty scary to think more and more kids would rather watch virtually real competitions between fictional characters controlled by joy sticks than actual humans playing a real game, but that might be what we’re looking at here.

As the New York Times points out, Twitch, the most popular website for watching people play video games was bought by Amazon for $1.1 billion.

Apparently, the next crisis for American parents won’t be getting their kids away from their video screens to go outside and play. It will be getting their kids to play their own video games instead of watching other kids play.

And now for the money quote from Kurt Melcher, the Associate Athletic Director at Robert Morris (Illinois), who told the Times he received more than a half a dozen calls from athletic directors at other universities who are interested in developing e-sports programs.

Sorry, the quote actually came from Melcher’s wife, who asked, “Why should (athletic scholarships) only be given to some kid who can put a ball into a hole?”

The fact Melcher agreed with her is more than a little disturbing.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday sports column for the Observer-Reporter.