Pitt AD Scott Barnes talks West Virginia, logo/branding at ACC spring meetings

New Pitt athletic director Scott Barnes is at the winter meetings and while he's still getting his feet wet, he addressed two of the more popular topics among Pitt fans - rivalries and logos. Sam Werner of the Post-Gazette has some of what Barnes had to say on both.

On the West Virginia front, still nothing - and I wouldn't expect that to change anytime soon. Barnes was pretty non-committal a few weeks ago when asked after his hiring and as the PG article notes, he's not even officially going to be on the job until June 15. Barnes is learning more about the rivalry with the Mountaineers but I hardly think it's going to be a quick decision.

Barnes also talked a little about Pitt's branding and didn't throw out the idea of an overhaul/rebranding effort like he managed at Utah State. That too, however, is up in the air.

"You value the history and the accomplishments of the past in terms of respecting the history at Pitt. How do you take that and mold it into an exciting new look and vision to move forward. We want to look at it, we want to explore it, and if we did want to move forward in a partnership with Nike, as an example, that process is a long process. We'll definitely evaluate it. Now will that be one of our top priorities? I don't know yet."

The depth of rebranding could be anything from tweaks to a major overhaul. Pitt's branding is all over the place right now with the reintroduction of the script last year so you should expect at least some changes. I mentioned this in the comments of another post recently, but I don't particularly care which direction Pitt goes (in terms of block vs. script). If you forced me to make a decision, I've been keen on keeping the block and using the script for big games/opponents as an alternate logo. But the more important thing to me is seeing consistency among all of the programs.

There's been plenty of talk on this site and elsewhere about using the script only for football, and I'd be fine with that. But the mismatch of all of the various logos (Pitt block, Pitt script, Pittsburgh, Dinocat head, etc.) isn't something I want to continue to see down the road. There's got to be a better way to get some more consistency.

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