In a surprise move, Pitt Athletic Director Steve Pederson announced today that the Pitt Script logo would return to the Pitt football helmets for the remainder of the 2014 season.
After nearly 20 years of dormancy, the Pitt Script was removed from Pitt’s athletic uniforms starting with the 1997 season and Pederson’s first year on the job.
While the Pitt Script did make one cameo appearance for Pitt football during a September 24, 2005 home game against Youngstown State in a 41-0 Panther victory, it hasn’t been seen otherwise except “illegally” when former Pitt QB Tyler Palko and LB HB Blades sported the logo on their helmets during the 2007 Senior Bowl.
The Pitt Script that appeared during the Youngstown State game was also used in conjunction with the team’s throwback colors of royal blue and mustard gold.
In that respect, perhaps Palko and Blades deserve some credit for today’s announcement as they were the first to wear the Pitt Script with the current Pitt colors (Navy blue and Vegas Gold) as Pitt plans to do starting this Saturday (10/25) against Georgia Tech at Heinz Field. The logo will be used only on Pitt football helmets and no other Pitt athletic uniforms.
However, Pederson deserves more credit for putting the iconic logo back into action into the foreseeable future.
Sometimes its better to just admit defeat and give the fans what they want. Today, Pitt and Steve Pederson got it right with the return to the Pitt Script logo.
- Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
- Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
- But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
- It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.