Tino Sunseri: A look back

I've tried to let the Tino Sunseri stuff die, but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced we'll still be talking about him years down the road.

But as I was looking into some recruiting stuff, I came across this. The more I read, the less true it sounded. And for that reason, I figured it deserved a post of its own. I preface this with the statement that this just goes to show how far off the recruiting sites can be. This was Scout's breakdown of Sunseri when he was still a recruit:

He is an outstanding dual-threat quarterback that has a strong and accurate arm. He's also very quick and can do a lot of damage running the football. Sunseri is a very poised QB, he can take a team on his back and lead them to greatness. He is a tremendous leader. He is very accurate and can thread the needle. His lack of ideal size causes people to relax until they see his arm strength and it is a lot better than most think.

Now, look - I don't do this to kill Scout. The recruiting sites that we all read up on do an amazing job of trying to not only rank high school kids that don't play against each other, but projecting how they may be in college. But this is pretty much the opposite of what many Pitt fans would say about him.

This also isn't meant to kill Sunseri. If you've read this blog during the past two years, you probably know that I actually rate the job he did much better than many fans do. He's had three head coaches to deal with not counting Mike Haywood and had far more success this year than many want to give him credit for.

But if we're being honest, I don't think any of us would call him an 'outstanding dual-threat quarterback.' As we saw with some bad decision-making in 2011 taking bad sacks and throwing bad interceptions, he wasn't incredibly poised. I can't recall him putting the team on his back and leading them victory, let alone greatness. You could even call his leadership into play a bit after he practically called out Kevin Harper after the Notre Dame loss. And while his accuracy was high on short to intermediate routes, he never got the deep ball figured out.

In other words, don't ever read too much into these sorts of things.