In a Thursday morning press release, Pittsburgh announced that Wisconsin assistant football coach Paul Chryst has agreed to become its head football coach.

Chryst will be introduced to the public at a 3pm ET press conference at the Panthers’ practice facility.

Multiple sources also confirmed that Chryst will retain his duties as offensive coordinator of Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl, with one source indicating to SbB that will entail Chryst spending “three days in Pasadena.”

Wisconsin Athletic Director Barry Alvarez played a key role in Pitt’s decision to hire Chryst, as a source close to the Pitt program told SbB that the former longtime Badgers football coach convinced longtime friend and influential Pitt booster A.C. Dellovade to champion the Chryst candidacy to other prominent Pitt donors and officials.

Chryst, who is credited for an impressive makeover of the Wisconsin offense dating to 2005, replaces Todd Graham, who coincidentally got the nod over Chryst for the Pitt job last year - before abruptly departing for Arizona State a week ago.

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Ted Greenstein of the CHICAGO TRIBUNE reports today:

According to a league official, the Big Ten will release a statement Tuesday saying the matter has moved to the front burner. The first sign of change came from former Wisconsin coach Barry Alvarez, who told Wisconsin’s athletic board on Friday that Delany “is going to take this year to really be more aggressive about it. I just think everybody feels [expansion] is the direction to go, coaches and administrators.”

Alvarez also noted, “We’re irrelevant for the last three weeks of the football season because we’re not playing.” If Big 10 expanded two 12 teams, it would create two six team divisions and facilitate a lucrative Big 10 championship football game.

Penn State’s Joe Paterno said last May: “Everybody else is playing playoffs on television. You never see a Big Ten team mentioned. So I think that’s a handicap.”

Wisconsin Coach Bret Bielema previously said to ESPN.com that, “everybody would welcome a 12th team in the league and maybe having a championship game.”

Six months ago, Commissioner Jim Delany went on the record about the issue: “I’m agnostic. I could live with two divisions and a championship game, but I think that has a tendency to devalue the season-ending game and have a negative impact (in terms of at-large BCS selection) on your losing team in season-ending games.”

Now for the fun part, what team would join the league? Notre Dame is the elephant in the room, but Paterno now wants no part of the Irish in his league. Read more…

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Here’s a mostly sad story: Former University of Wisconsin defensive back Leonard Taylor has been taken into custody for making “specific death threats” to two popular sports personalities, two who couldn’t be any more different. The first at least makes some kind of weird sense - UW Athletic Director Barry Alvarez - but the second takes quite a few leaps of logic to get there: tennis babe Maria Sharapova.

(Beauty and the Beast, both threatened)

Of course, we’ll probably not get much in the way of “logic” when it comes to getting a reason for that second death threat. Taylor is a “paranoid schizophrenic, has been off his medications for three months and was not seeing his therapist”. Not a good mix.

And what, pray tell, exactly constitutes a “death threat”?

Read more…

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• The WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL finds Barry Alvarez unapologetic for the Badgers’ soft non-conference slate, claiming that Joe Paterno & Bear Bryant have done the same thing.

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Read more…