Vol. 105 Issue 60
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Thursday,October 30, 2014
SEW MUCH TO DO
Cindy Albert, the costume manager for Pitt Theatre Arts, works on a dress for Avenue Q in the basement of the Cathedral of Learning Theo Schwarz | Visual Editor
Business schools to create new scholarship Harrison Kaminsky Assistant News Editor Two new scholarships will be available for business students after a family-owned, Pittsburgh-based realty company donated $1 million to Pitt. The Howard Hanna family donated the money last week to the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration (CBA) to offer
“need-based financial support” to graduate and undergraduate business students, according to a release. Howard Hanna Jr., founder of Howard Hanna Real Estate Services, is a Distinguished Alumnus of the Katz Graduate School of Business. His family members, including his son, Howard Hanna III, his daughters, Helen Casey and Annie Cestra, and five grandchildren — four of whom are Pitt graduates — all work in the man-
agement of the company in different capacities. University spokeswoman Cara Masset said in an email that the Hanna family’s donation is their first major scholarship gift, although the family has been a supporter of Pitt in the past. According to Masset, Pitt will award the scholarships as part of the admissions
Scholarship
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New acting opportunities coming to Pittsburgh Page 2
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October 30, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
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to open in McKees Rocks SCHOLARSHIP New movie studio having to leave the city. Island Studios among others, can apply for tax credit process without a separate application. “The gift is endowed, so it will provide scholarship support in perpetuity,” Masset said. “The principal amount of $1 million will be kept intact and investment income will be distributed to scholarship recipients.” According to Masset, the CBA will have $750,000 to distribute to students through the fund, while Katz will have the remaining $250,000 to award. Hanna III, chairman and CEO of his family’s company, said in the release that Pitt has been an important cornerstone in his dad’s life, in his family and in their company. “His abilities allowed him to graduate from Pitt with both undergraduate and master’s degrees in business,” Hanna III said. “The Howard W. Hanna Jr. scholarship funds are a small repayment so that future generations can receive the same grounding in leadership that our father received from [Pitt].”
Kathy Zhao Staff Writer
A transition from Steeltown to an eastern Tinseltown may be on Pittsburgh’s horizon with the construction of a new film studio that began last week. Island Studios EXP broke ground for the project on Oct. 23 at the P&LE Railroad brownfield redevelopment site in McKees Rocks, three miles from Downtown. The construction of the “brand new, state-of-the-art, 75,000-square-foot, sound-proof multi-stage and a 20,000 square foot office and entertainment complex ... will further solidify western Pennsylvania as one of the foremost production hubs for commercial, television and feature films,” the Island Studios EXP release said. In recent years, several high-profile films, including “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Jack Reacher” and “Foxcatcher,” which was partially filmed in the Peterson Events Center on Pitt’s campus, have offered Pitt students acting opportunities without
EXP will provide aspiring actors, like Pitt theatre arts students, another avenue to secure roles. Mike Dolan, president of Island Studios EXP, could not be reached for comment because he was traveling. He said in the release that he feels the new studio will “continue to attract and retain the major studios and production companies who have frequented western Pennsylvania.” Jenna Simmons said has capitalized on acting opportunities in Pittsburgh in the past. Simmons, a senior majoring in theatre arts, said she had a speaking role in Shane Dawson’s “Not Cool” as part of “The Chair,” a television series filmed in Pittsburgh that debuted on Starz in September. One possible factor for Pittsburgh’s popularity as a filming and production location is the Film Tax Credit Program that was signed into Pennsylvania law under Gov. Ed Rendell in 2007. Projects, including feature films, television films, television game and talk shows,
worth 25 percent of their total production budget, provided that at least 60 percent of their production costs were spent on “Qualified Pennsylvania Production Expenses,” according to the Pennsylvania State Film Tax Credit Guidelines for October 2014. Those expenses include things like the cost of travel to, from and around the state, as well as costs for construction, lighting and visual effects. Simmons said Pittsburgh’s size can also be an advantage to production companies and actors when compared to larger cities like New York and Los Angeles. “Pittsburgh is large enough to support a movie but small enough that you really have a chance to stand out [as an actor],” she said. Claire Sabatine said she thinks it’s “wonderful” that there’s a new studio
Studio
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EDITORIAL
October 30, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
OPINIONS SIMON SAYS
Preparing for college Women and minority inclusion What we can learn from the humanities too costly Tuition, housing, meals, books — we all know the steep expenses of college. But what about the costs of getting accepted? Preparation for the SAT and ACT, the country’s two primary college admissions tests, is too costly, as a recent article in The New York Times highlighted. Students have increasingly turned to prep courses and individual tutoring to boost their scores. How can you blame them? As Robert Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, a nonprofit that advocates against the overuse and misuse of standardized tests, has said, students and parents are engaged in a college admissions “arms race.” The free market reflects this. Companies such as The Princeton Review and Kaplan provide this service. A 30-hour group session with The Princeton Review usually costs between $1,000 and $1,600. Furthermore, according to The New York Times, individual tutoring has become popular. But this is where costs skyrocket. ArborBridge, which provides online tutoring via video conference, offers a 60-hour test prep package for around $9,000. The average cost of paying in-state tuition at a four-year public university is $8,700. That means for some, ArborBridge’s 60-hour prep package equates to more than a year’s tuition. Yet, this number is diminutive compared to another private tutoring option. New York-based tutor Anthony-James Green has made head-
lines for his hourly prep price — roughly $1,000 per hour. Green promises to increase his students’ SAT scores by 400 points. Even so, such a rate reflects the prep industry’s high market value. Tutors and companies have every right to charge these prices, but students should have efficacious and economical alternatives. The New York Times article states that The College Board, the nonprofit organization behind the SAT, is working with Khan Academy, a free online tutoring service, to construct a free preparation program for students. Khan academy is free, efficient and easily navigable. Its broad subject scope allows students to effectively learn a multitude of information and skills. Khan Academy’s entrance into the test prep industry is advantageous to all students striving to cost-effectively increase their scores. The College Board and Khan Academy’s collaborative project is set to debut next spring, in time to prepare for The College Board’s new SAT, which will arrive in 2016. College students already face an abundance of costs while in college. The least we can do is work to lower costs beforehand. Free or lower-cost alternatives to high-priced prep courses and tutoring are the best way to counter the college admissions arms race and diminish the economic burden placed on students applying to college.
Simon Brown Columnist In a decade of declining enrollments in humanities classes with a limited attention to public discourse, the question of how the humanities can learn from the sciences has taken on a particular pertinence. It may be a bold claim, then, to assert that historians and literary scholars can teach biologists and physicists anything meaningful about their own fields. When it comes to the inclusion of women and minorities within their academic community, however, scientists can learn a valuable lesson from their tweed-clad colleagues. The pronounced disparity in opportunities for women and racial minorities attempting to enter academia received public confirmation with a well-publicized study by three business professors. The team measured how 6,548 professors from 259 universities representing the breadth of the disciplinary spectrum responded to emails from students interested in meeting to discuss graduate-level research opportunities. The emails were uniform, with one important difference: The names in the email signatures differed based on senders’ genders and ethnicities. The response rate from the professors revealed a significant bias, favoring those emails with signatures indicative of white, male students. Professors positively responded to such emails 26 percent more often than they did for their female or minority peers. In the midst of this undeniably
bad news, one positive note resonates. Not all academic departments responded with the same degree of bias. While business and education professors represented the most significantly discriminatory respondents, some other departments did not respond in any significantly biased way. Specifically, the report cites the humanities and, to a lesser extent, the social sciences, as the two fields that did not ignore women or minorities by any significant margin more frequently than they did white men. The natural sciences, including computer science, life science and health science, did discriminate to a statistically significant degree, though less so than business and education professors. I don’t cite these numbers to indulge in humanistic back-patting. Discrimination still exists in the humanities, and in some disciplines more than others. Philosophy departments, for instance, have recently grappled with several scandals that could reveal gender biases underlying the discipline. When professors at the University of Colorado’s flagship campus brought in an outside review of workplace behavior, it was concluded that “inappropriate, sexualized, unprofessional behavior” was rife within the department. I cite these results rather as a cause for hope that entrenched discrimination can subside when scholarly communities take active steps against it. In the past three or four decades, humanities departments have done that admirably by studying women and racial minori-
ties for their prominent place in literature and global history. Natural science and pre-professional departments can and should follow suit in their own ways. Fifty years ago, English majors still read a literary canon composed entirely of the writings of white, European males — from Homer to Heidegger. Historians overwhelmingly studied the political elites of European nations and consigned the rest of the world to the peripheries of colonial history. By the 1980s, however, attention toward underrepresented literatures and historical actors within the humanistic disciplines began to flourish. The feminist and post-colonial schools of humanistic thought decried unrepresentative literary canons for their celebration of white, male imagination at the expense of the rest. The white man was no longer the paragon of intellectual and artistic accomplishment, according to the curricula of many humanities disciplines. The mere presence of women and minorities within humanities faculties alone cannot account for the limited discrimination in these departments — the study found that female and minority-identifying professors did not, on average, respond more readily or favorably to emails from those within their same demographic. The difference could lie, rather, in the presence of women and minorities in the curricula, not necessarily in the faculty. Curricula in most natural sciences, of course, do not address racial and gender distinctions within
Simon Says
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October 30, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com FROM PAGE 4
SIMON SAYS
their lesson plans. Men and women both fall at 9.8 meters per second. These fields do not address social constructs in the same way the humanities do. They do, however, lionize certain “geniuses” in the histories of their fields. This begins at the K-12 level but may not be explicitly contradicted at the university level. The well-known great thinkers of physics, biology and chemistry are overwhelmingly recorded as European
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men. Ada Lovelace is largely remembered as a footnote in the history of computer science, which Charles Babbage dominated. Rosalind Franklin is a sympathetic victim to James Watson and Francis Crick, but her experimental accomplishments never receive the attention of her male competitors. No one has encapsulates this general negligence of female and minority accomplishment more explicitly than acclaimed Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker when he opens his article on the humanities’ debt
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to the natural sciences by arguing that the “great thinkers of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment were scientists.” He proceeds to enumerate the classic pantheon of western philosophy, “Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz, Kant, Smith.” This “genius-based” history of science obscures the important place of women as laboratory assistants, organizers of scientific presentations and independent philosophers throughout the Enlightenment. Moreover, it obscures Arab and Chinese
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Today’s difficulty level: Medium Puzzles by Dailysudoku.com
5 influences on the great thinkers of the time. The discrimination against women and minorities in the natural sciences is inextricably linked to these deep-seated assumptions about the identity and appearance of great thinkers in these fields. The natural sciences can follow in the steps of the humanities by throwing out the great thinkers narrative and adding new names — not just those of white males — to a more inclusive pantheon. Write to Simon at spb40@pitt.edu.
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ARTS and ENTERTAINMENT TPN's guide to the city's best spooky spots Stephanie Roman Staff Writer
moning,” “Pittsburgh Zombies: Black Out!” and “Creepo’s Christmas in 3-D” iterations. The Scarehouse exhibits top-of-the-line makeup and prosthetic work, dark, claustrophobic paths and frighteningly loud sound effects and screams. Each attraction tells a story, with the guests usually ending up as fodder for the characters. “Creepo’s Christmas” is likely a no-go for anyone with clown phobias, but “The Basement,” a brand new 18-and-older attraction, will really test its visitors. Before entering, a waiver must be signed and cell phones surrendered. In “The Basement,” the staff touches, hoods and restrains you, while exposing you to extreme violence, sexual situations and profanity.
r an patience fo ne, e th e v a h ’t If you don Haunted Holland” li extensive “ one of Pittsburgh’s oth perhaps tryhouse options. Hallown er haunted ge might be focused o ll een in colle rties, but, if you’re sti e costume pa scares, here are som. looking forplaces to get spooked of the best
ouse The Scareh St. t s 118 Locu Etna, Pa. : $24.99 Admission until Nov. 1 Open daily urgh the Pittsb The f o e id r p ess, The ouse busin rhaunted he inhabits a 100-yeage s n u a o h c h e s tion Scar ill g. Its attrac old buildin en previous visitors w v m e u o S The yearly, s rills in its “ find new th
Phantom Fright Nights 4800 Kennywood Blvd. West Mifflin, Pa. Admission: $32.99 Open Fridays and Saturdays until Nov. 1 In 2014, Phantom Fright Nights celebrates 13 years of fear. It’s like an ordinary trip to Kennywood, but with one major difference — all of the rides’ lights are shut off. It’s a trip into utter darkness, and you never know when you’ll run into a machete-wielding madman. Kennywood even supplies a few new amusements, such as haunted mazes, a park filled with fog, strings of electric orange lights and a drained Raging Rapids, retitled “Voodoo Bayou” for the season’s duration. Although it’s more costly than a regular day at the park, there are more than just jump scares and elaborate costumes to make up for the price difference. Phantom Fright Nights encapsulates almost the entirety of Kennywood Park, rather than just segments from its previous forms. As of this year, special openings for Noah’s Ark — “Ark in the Dark” — take place between midnight and 1 a.m. for an additional fee of $10. Creepy enough in the daylight, “Ark in the Dark” flips all the lights out on the ride, forcing a descent into darkness where someone or something may or may not be waiting.
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October 30, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com PREVIEW
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Redeye Festival: Rehearsal to stage in 24 hours STUDIOS Sabrina Romano Staff Writer
Ridiculous. Hilarious. Tongue-in-cheek. This is how the Redeye Theatre Project describes a typical performance. Serious. Musical. Professional. Highbrow. This is the way Pitt’s Musical Theatre Club views itself. Even though they couldn’t be more different, their members will take to the stage together for the first time on Friday, Oct. 31, for this year’s Redeye Festival, a 24-hour performance extraordinaire. Brittany Coyne, Redeye’s artistic director, paints the Redeye performances, which have been going on for 10 years, as casual and freewheeling. “It doesn’t matter if you forget a line or miss a joke, because the audience is always riled up in a good way,” Coyne said. The Redeye Theatre Project is not your traditional theater club, in which students spend weeks reading lines and producing a play. During the Redeye Festival, Pitt students cast, write and direct a play in 24 hours. About 10 short plays are performed during a Redeye Festival, each based on a roughly 10-page script with one-minute auditions. The play will not be an original one, but one that is already known, according to Tim Kaniecki, vice president of Pitt’s Musical Theatre Project. “It is a glorified stage reading,” Coyne said. “The show is real, and you all have costumes, but you all have your script in hand, because you don’t have time to memorize it.” One of the twists is that the actors won’t know what play they are auditioning for, said Coyne, a senior theatre arts major. Auditions begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, the official opening of the festival. “After auditions have been finished, the actors go home and sleep for the night,” Coyne said. While they snooze, the writers get to work, using a card game to pick the actors, usually three to five for each play,” said Kayla Martine, Redeye’s casting director. The writers have until 6 a.m. to finish their scripts. “At 6 [a.m.] the directors come in and choose the play they want to work on. At 8 a.m. the actors come in,” Coyne said. “There is a big team breakfast at 8 a.m., and then the writers go home.” Martine, a senior fiction writing major,
said that, during the day, the actors and directors practice their plays. Coyne said the dress rehearsal is at 6 p.m., and it’s show time at 8 p.m. The actors have 10 minutes to act their hearts out, and then it’s over. The best part of being part of the production? Everyone who auditions gets a part. “People have done a monologue, or made sandwiches or anything because [they] have to get cast,” Coyne said. Vicki Hoskins, one of the two graduate advisers, said that she likes the tight, crazy schedule. “It is a good way of keeping everyone fresh,” Hoskins said. “Everyone has their opportunity for sleeping.” All Redeye Festivals have a theme chosen by graduate advisers, Hoskins said. The last festival’s theme was fairy tales. They haven’t chosen the upcoming festival’s theme yet. At the last Redeye Festival, there was one play in which “a prince and a princess meet on an online dating site,” Kaniecki said. “I was cast as Julie Andrews in someone’s head — so like an imaginary friend. I had to
run around the stage with a British accent. It was bizarre,” Coyne said. Martine said she acted in a tragic performance titled “Dead Baby Red Eye.” “I was the mother of a child. You see me with the baby in the beginning,” Martine said. “As it goes on, you learn the daughter is a figment of my imagination.” Coyne said that the short time commitment gives students the freedom to experiment. “I suppose anything is possible, but, in 10 minutes, you couldn’t do a huge tragedy of all of ‘Hamlet,’” Hoskins said. “You could do a short version of Hamlet, but it is going to be pretty comedic, because it’s not going to have all of the character growth.” Students can be or do almost anything related to the production — a true learning experience. “You see people be out of their element. You can write for the first time or you can act for the first time,” Coyne said. “It’s funny to see your friend, who is usually a tech person, act for the first time.”
coming to the city. “[It] will attract more producers,” Sabatine, a junior marketing major and theatre arts minor, said. “Pittsburgh is already full of opportunities, but, since the industry is very tough to break into — that’s an understatement — gaining as much audition experience as possible is important.” Caitlin Young, a Duquesne University senior who was an extra in both “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Me and Earl and the Dying Girl” agrees with Sabatine. “I’m hoping to get an internship with Disney after I graduate,” Young, an integrated marketing and communication and theatre arts major, said. “But, if that doesn’t work out, I’m definitely going to try to stay here and build my resumé. It seems like the opportunities are endless.” Young said she is thrilled about what the new studio could do for the city. “I think it’s helping the incredible creative side of Pittsburgh to shine,” Young said. “It’s shattering the image of us as the foggy, industrial city and showing off how glamorous we really are.”
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October 30, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
6 Hundred Acres Manor 1 Hundred Acres Dr. Bethel Park, Pa. Admission: $18 Open daily until Nov. 2, events Nov. 7-8 Set in the expansive one-mile estate of the Acre family, Hundred Acres Manor features six vastly different attractions, all connected narratively to the principal family. Some of the stuff inside is positively nightmarish — mazes complete with chainsaw-wielding maniacs, human slaughterhouses in the basement and even a new attraction called “Torture Tank” that tours guests through a seemingly innocuous program of living out sickly brutal fantasies. If blood splatter on your clothes isn’t visceral enough, Hundred Acres Manor also hosts a video game-style “Zombie Paintball.” Fend off the hordes alongside your teammates, make it to a checkpoint and receive an armor and weapon upgrade. But, if you’re overrun, you don’t get a second chance — in real life, there are no do-overs.
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October 30, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
FOOTBALL
SOCCER
SPORTS
Injured Dickenson makes mark off field
Some NFL penalties better left uncalled
Mark Powell Staff Writer
Alex Wise Staff Writer Well, the National Football League has done it once again. The league has found yet another way to make watching its product absolutely intolerable. As if watching a professional football game wasn’t an hours-long commitment already — and as if watching my horrendous fantasy team collapse week in and week out wasn’t bad enough — the league’s insistence on calling “illegal use of hands” or “illegal hands to the face” penalties has made Sunday afternoons unwatchable. The NFL emphasized enforcing the hands rules before the start of the preseason, and they have done that and then some. To start, I’m beyond impressed with the league’s referees. Not only have they gone above and beyond the call of duty when instructed to more strictly enforce these penalties, refs also have shown the brain capacity to memorize a section of the NFL’s rulebook called “Use of Hands, Arms and Body,” which is longer than papers I’ve written for English classes. Who knew that there would be so many rules against using your hands, arms and body in a game in which every player regularly uses his hands, arms and body? For a local example, look no further than the Pittsburgh Steelers. In their home game against Indianapolis last weekend, the Steelers received two illegal use of hands penalties and two illegal contact penalties. The Colts, in return, committed multiple hands violations, but Pittsburgh declined all of them, as
NFL
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With the Pitt men’s soccer team in the middle of its ACC schedule, most fans are fixated on the product on the field . However, it’s what one player is doing in the classroom and off the field that has received national attention, including nomination for an NCAA award. Senior Julian Dickenson has been a shoein for the Panthers’ center back position for four years. While he has been sidelined for a large part of this season with a foot injury, he attends every practice, training session and workout while maintaining a 3.86 GPA and studying actuarial mathematics. The life of a student athlete is more hectic than glamorous, consisting of early morning classes, afternoon practices and late-night homework and studying. It’s a pattern that can lead to struggles on and off the field. “It’s definitely really tough. One of the things I keep in mind is priorities. For me, it’s school and soccer over everything else. It’s a lot of sacrifice,” Dickenson said. “There are a lot of times when friends are going out, and you have to stay in and study, and then you have to wake up and do the same thing. There aren’t many breaks ... you have to keep what’s important in mind.” While most schools — including Pitt — provide tutors and other checks to make sure student athletes maintain a productive schedule and balance their time equally with both school and athletics, it is still largely up to the athletes to utilize the system put in place for them. This is what separates Dickenson’s case from countless other student athletes’ — with the recent NCAA scandals regarding cheating on assignments and tests, his is a rare success story. Regarding his day-to-day motivation for academics, Dickenson said “it’s all about the future.” “Sacrificing a couple years in college ...
I think it’s worth it,” he said. Dickenson’s determination isn’t going unnoticed, as he’s one of 30 men’s soccer players nationwide nominated for the Senior CLASS Award by the NCAA. The award goes to the senior who excels in four areas — community, classroom, character and competition — on and off the field. “Julian, on and off the field, is a class act,” Pitt head coach Joe Luxbacher said. “He’s a great student and a self-motivated guy. You never have to keep tabs on him doing what’s expected off the field ... he’s a very mature young man.” Dickenson does more than what is expected out of most students, let alone one who spends half his time on a soccer pitch, working tirelessly both there and in the classroom. However, those who know him suggest otherwise. “His dedication and how much he’s committed to anything that he does [impresse s me],” senior teammate Chu Chu Onyeukwu said. “When he wants something, he doesn’t let anything get in the way. It’s kind of like tunnel vision.” On the field, Dickenson is a prime example of what Division I athletes can accomplish, starting games in all four seasons with the Panthers. As a defender, he doesn’t fill up the stat sheet, but his presence on the field is essential. His absence is noticeable this year, as Pitt’s defense hasn’t been the same in the games he has missed. The team currently has the third-highest goals against average in the ACC. “On the field i t ’s the
Dickenson injured his foot earlier this year, but continues
10 to thrive academically. Bobby 0 |Senior Staff Photographer
same:
He’s accountable and responsible. There’s a reason he’s been here for four years,” Luxbacher said. With the recent student athlete cheating scandal at North Carolina, critics in the media are suggesting that universities and the NCAA demand too much of their student athletes and leave them very little help along the way. While Dickenson agrees that the workload can be stressful at times, he said he also sees the upside in gaining real life experience in college. “I like to think that this helps us develop a lot of skills that w e can u s e for later,” he said. “When you get into the real world, a lot is going to be expected of you by your boss and your family, so I think it’s a good way to prepare you for the future.” With just two games remaining on Pitt’s schedule, Dickenson will take the field for the final time in a Pitt home jersey against Notre Dame on Nov. 1, the team’s senior night.
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October 30, 2014 | The Pitt News | www.pittnews.com
FROM PAGE 9
cussion, brain damage or Alzheimer’s. There are bigger, safety-related issues at hand. Solve those first and worry about unintentional games of duckduck-goose later.
NFL
each play went for more than the five yards that the penalty would’ve given the Steelers. Those four — six, really — were more than the total holding calls in the game, and holding is, far and away, the most imposed penalty in football. I don’t understand the zeal for policing the rule. Guys will use their hands in all kinds of ways because it’s an indisposable part of the game. Punishing linemen who push, shove, grab and hit each other for a living for putting their hands near someone else’s head is like punishing your dog for sniffing another dog’s behind at the park: they simply don’t know any better. This doesn’t solve any legitimate strategic problems, nor does it address player safety issues. It does, however, keep drives alive. And we all know that it’s sexier when a team’s first downs come from excessive penalty yardage instead of from punts. On the bright side, we’re all on pace
Hands to the face penalties are becoming more and more prevalent in the NFL MCT Campus
to be present for NFL history. According to Pro-Football-Reference.com, there were 79 illegal hands to the face penalties called league-wide in 2012. Last year, there were 73 illegal hands called. We’re already at 54 this year, and we’re only halfway through the regular season. Add playoffs on the end, and
we’re on pace to surpass 100 illegal use of hands penalties called. We are all witnesses. To the NFL, I beg you: we don’t need a penalty to rival holding. If a defensive tackle happens to incidentally high-five a quarterback’s overly-cushioned ear pad, so be it. He’s not getting a con-