Multiple sources close to the football programs at Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh have indicated to SbB that acting Penn State head football coach Tom Bradley is the leading candidate for the defensive coordinator position under new Pitt head football coach Paul Chryst.

(Fit for Pitt? Bradley coached under Joe Paterno for 33 years at Penn State)

One source close to the Pitt program told SbB that Bradley is Chryst’s first choice for the job, but because of Bradley’s longtime association with the Penn State program - and his reported close ties to Jerry Sandusky - the Pitt coach will have to get school athletic director Steve Pederson and other Pitt officials and donors to sign off first. Read more…

Before the Steelers-Jets game last Sunday, at least one nameless Pittsburgh tailgater* got the bright idea to hang a dummy of Mark Sanchez off a billboard.

And then burn it.
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Here’s a fun photo of Mike Tomlin recently sent in by a reader:

(Andy Rooney wants his hat back)

Harmless fun. I posted the photo because I thought the ALTOONA (PA) MIRROR, reporting from Steelers training camp today, summed up the pic rather nicely: Read more…

At least one official Pittsburgh civic enterprise has traded in Ben Roethlisberger for Mario Lemieux as the city’s favorite son: The Pittsburgh Zoo.

(Photo Credits: WPXI, Mondesi’s House)

Zoo officials today took down Roethlisberger’s name from a prominent park display that compares the heights of elephants to other species. Roethlisberger’s name was replaced on the display by Penguins hockey hero Lemieux. (Both are 6-foot-5.)

Apparently the folks running the zoo weren’t the only reason for the change. Read more…

Steelers Owner Art Rooney II confirmed today that he’ll be making the call, with consultation from Roger Goodell, on the discipline doled out to Ben Roethlisberger.

Also Thursday, TheSmokingGun.com posted documents from the investigation into the sexual assault allegation made against Roethlisberger in a Georgia bar on March 5. Some of those documents are disturbing, to say the least. Excerpt:

One witness, Ann Marie Lubatti, told investigators that she saw one of Roethlisberger’s bodyguards guide the alleged victim to a side door. Lubatti said that she immediately approached another bodyguard and said, “This isn’t right. My friend is back there with Ben. She needs to come back right now.” Lubatti, who described Roethlisberger as “noticeably intoxicated,” said she was rebuffed by the bodyguard, who remarked, “I don’t know what you are talking about,” according to the below statement.

When Lubatti later spotted her friend, the alleged victim said, “We need to go now.” Lubatti said the woman told her that Roethlisberger “walked back to where she was with his penis already out of his pants. She told him that they shouldn’t be doing this and that it wasn’t right.” The woman told Lubatti that Roethlisberger had followed her into the bathroom and shut the door. “She continued to say she didn’t want to have sex, but he kept saying, “No, it’s OK.” Lubatti said that her friend told of having unprotected sex with Roethlisberger. After hearing her friend’s account, Lubatti and another woman, Nicole Biancofiore, “walked up to the first cop we saw and told them what happened.”

Sounds almost as if Roethlisberger and his bodyguard buddies had themselves a system. If those witness accounts are true, what Roethlisberger and his associates did was mind-bogglingly sick.

If I’m Rooney, Roethlisberger is gone. You can’t have that guy representing a franchise like the Steelers. As Mike Singletary once said about Vernon Davis: “Can’t do it.“

UPDATE: Attorney Manion has now seemingly backed off his strong comments from this morning, which characterized an allegation against Roethlisberger by a young woman in Las Vegas six months ago as “absolutely identical” to what happened between the quarterback and a woman on March 5 in Georgia.

With no record of law enforcement involvement and apparently no evidence to speak of, it’s obvious that Manion spoke out of turn - which I hinted at this morning.

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Harry Manion, a partner at Boston law firm Cooley Manion Jones, guested on WEEI-AM’s The Dennis and Callahan Morning Show in Boston this morning and said he was hired to investigate an incident involving Ben Roethlisberger six months ago that was “absolutely identical” to the recent sexual assault allegation by a Georgia woman.

(The latest on Big Ben’s ordeal in realtime: Brooks on Twitter)

Manion:

“Six months ago I was hired by a client of mine, a good friend, to investigate allegations against Ben Roethlisberger in a Las Vegas nightclub that were absolutely identical to this Georgia girl’s story. The outcome was that the young woman did not want to proceed and we never took any action. There is a history here, and I can’t say any further, that is super troubled. Wow.”

I can’t imagine Manion would bring this up unless his investigation netted some evidence that Roethlisberger may have done something inappropriate and/or illegal.

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21-year-old Anshonae Mills last week filed a civil lawsuit against Steelers wide receiver Santonio Holmes. Mills is seeking $15,000 in damages for battery, assault and intentional infliction of emotional distress stemming from a March 7 incident at a central Florida nightclub.

(”I love money” part of Mills online dating account)

According to court papers, Mills accused Holmes of harassing her in an attempt to force her to exit a VIP area of the club. That harassment allegedly included Holmes throwing a glass at Mills, which cut an area of her face above her right eye.

After Mills was injured, she initially demanded to attending Orlando police that Holmes be arrested. Mills claims Holmes then stated that he was “an NFL football player and could not face criminal charges,” before the Steelers receiver then offered to give Mills money.

Mills alleges that eventually she was pressured so much by Holmes and police that she did not press charges, giving only a largely incoherent statement to the presiding cops. Read more…

TMZ.com reports Friday that the owner of the Georgia club where Ben Roethlisberger was accused of sexual assault, Rocky Duncan, “repeatedly” claimed to the website that he had surveillance video of the quarterback and accuser together during the night in question.

Duncan told TMZ the video clearly showed Ben and his 20-year-old accuser hanging out before the alleged incident — and cops speaking with Ben afterward.

But the attorney for Duncan, Carl Cansino told the PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW that the security video has been erased and is irretrievable.

“The DVD system overwrote itself,” Cansino said. “Had it just been deleted, they might have been able to save some of it.”

More bad news for the accuser from the Tribune-Review:

Cansino shared with investigators copies of the driver’s license Capital City’s bouncers seized from Roethlisberger’s accuser weeks before she was seen with him. The date on the license was scratched and reworked to indicate she was born in June 1987 — two years before her actual birth.

The woman’s Atlanta attorney, Lee Parks, did not return messages seeking comment.

“She presented the ID, but the security saw that it clearly was a fake birth date,” said Cansino, a former county prosecutor. “Because she never got the chance to drink, security confiscated it and didn’t turn her over for other charges.”

According to Cansino, authorities told him the woman’s blood alcohol level was above 0.20 percent — more than 10 times the legal limit for drivers younger than 21 in Georgia and more than twice the limit for older motorists.

With that information, now public thanks to Cansino, it’s no surprise that the accuser did not show up for a recently scheduled interview with police. Read more…

Ari Hait of Pittsburgh-based WTAE-TV files a report from Milledgeville, GA.,  that includes comments from a woman who claimed, “she was one of about 20 who partied with Ben Roethlisberger at a nightclub last week on the night that a female college student told police she was sexually assaulted by the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback.”

Excerpts of Hait’s report:

“Everyone keeps talking about how nice he was. He was not nice,” the woman said.

The woman — who asked not to be identified — told reporter Ari Hait that people who were with Roethlisberger invited her into the VIP area of the the Capital City club.

“A bunch of big guys were like, ‘Come back in here,’ and I was like, I’m just trying to have fun, whatever,” she said.

“He bought a round of shots for girls and said, ‘All you bitches, take my shots,’ and I got pissed because that’s very rude and disrespectful to call girls a bunch of bitches,” she said.

Before she left, she said she saw Roethlisberger with the woman who would eventually become his accuser.

“The fact that people are talking about how he’s such a nice guy at the bar, buying us a bunch of shots, because there’s a bunch of drunk girls happy that they’re getting free shots — he was very arrogant,” she said.

This woman isn’t the first to claim that Roethlisberger was more than a little inelegant that night.

More damning though than a random account from an alleged witness was a recent blog post about Roethlisberger’s off-field behavior by Pittsburgh media member John Steigerwald, who started covering the local Pittsburgh sports scene before Roethlisberger was born.

Read more…

Tough day (again) for Steelers fans, so I’ll leave it to Jeff Reed (who else?!) lighten the mood:

How does Donnie Shell keep the weight off?