Welcome To The Friday Freebie

Where whatever's on my mind ends up on the page

Welcome to what I would like to become a recurring feature on Nine Straight Threes, and that’s the Friday Freebie. If you’ve not noticed, the early days of this newsletter have yielded two steady features: A Monday morning column about whatever the Steelers did the day before, and the Wednesday NFL Power Rankings.

I’m certainly going to keep both of those going throughout football season, and will no doubt morph the Power Rankings into something else when the NFL year is done, but the goal has always been to have three or four newsletters sent out each week, with one or two of them being free. I don’t think anyone does a Friday “variety”-style newsletter better than Scott Hines over The Action Cookbook Newsletter. Over a year ago, when I started thinking about starting a newsletter of my own, it was the ACBN that served as my primary inspiration.

I will be thrilled if someday in the future I can look at the Friday Freebie and think it provides one tenth the enjoyment I get from reading Scott’s Friday newsletter.

(This is the part where you should pause and subscribe to the ACBN. You’ll be happy you did.)

Structurally, my goal for the Friday Freebie is a little bit of everything, presented in such a way that you never feel like you’re lingering on any one topic for too long. There will occasionally be recipes, there will be recommendations (like the one above, or the few that are about to come below), and there will be occasional random musings that can’t be categorized.

What I’m getting at here is that I want this to be a fun, breezy read that hopefully sends you into your weekend in a good mood.

Today’s Agenda:

-An introduction to “Pitting,” and the joy of watching it happen to someone else.

-The first of many chili recipes.

-A stray thought on the NBA.

-An embarrassing bit of musical incuriosity.

Before we get to all that, though, two local sports newsletter recommendations:

Dan Hopper is undertaking the necessary, sometimes ugly task of chronicling each Penguins game this season at The Only Pittsburgh Sports Page. He’s very sharp on hockey, and an excellent writer. Even better, his newsletter is totally free.

Adam Gretz has been getting paid to write about sports since some of you were in diapers (possible exaggeration on my part). He’s writing all things Pittsburgh sports, and I’m proud to be an annual subscriber. Definitely check out Adam’s Sports Stuff.

When Pitting Happens to Someone Else

A fun bit of trivia about me: I graduated from Penn State in 2007, and have spent precisely zero days of my life rooting for Penn State football. Actually, that’s not totally true. I would say that I rooted for Penn State twice, in 2003 against Ohio State and again in 2005. That’s it, though.

No, I am the rare sports obsessive for whom sports played no role in the college selection process. I wanted to go to Penn State because it seemed like a good school for what I wanted to do, and a place where I’d have a lot of fun (both of those things turned out to be true). The truth of the matter is that I grew up rooting for the Tommie Frazier Nebraska teams of the mid-1990s, which put me directly at odds with Penn State in 1994. (Nebraska would have pummeled them had they ever played, for what it’s worth.)

After Nebraska, I moved on to rooting for Pitt in the late-90s, mainly because it was a lot easier for me to identify with a program that always seemed to shoot itself in the foot, and whose fans were a pessimistic, self-loathing bunch. If you’re a Pitt fan, and have been one for any significant length of time, you know what the experience is like. You expect the worst, and you tend to get it, and typically in the sickest, gut-punchiest way imaginable.

That’s where the term “Pitting” comes from. It means a lot of things, from simply losing a game against an opponent you have no business losing to, usually when you’re riding high otherwise, to losing a specific game in unimaginable fashion, like this vintage effort in the Armed Forces Bowl. Gaze in horror and awe at that box score. It was a quintessential Pitting.

As it happened, current Panthers head coach Pat Narduzzi was in attendance for that Armed Forces debacle, though he wasn’t yet officially coaching the team. He had been named Pitt’s head coach the prior week, but Joe Rudolph was coaching the team on an interim basis for that game.

To Narduzzi’s credit, Pitting has become less frequent under his watch. The team hasn’t always been good – see last year, for instance – but when they’ve been bad, they’ve been mostly bog-standard bad.

Pitt went into Thursday night’s game against Syracuse undefeated and ranked 19^th, but the Orange were 5-1 and Kyle McCord was leading the nation in passing, throwing for 360 yards per game. In other words, it was the kind of matchup that had “Pitting” written all over it. McCord would scorch Narduzzi’s defense and Pitt would go down in flames against a team they hadn’t lost to at home since 2001.

Guess what? The opposite happened! Syracuse Pitted! And in spectacular fashion, no less. McCord played quite literally the worst game a college quarterback has played all year. He threw five interceptions, three of which were returned for touchdowns, all in the first half. It was a glorious reversal of the usual script. Pitt had the ball for less than 19 minutes of game time and won, 41-13. I have never seen a player implode so completely and spectacularly in such a short period of time. That it helped Pitt cruise to 7-0 for the first time since 1982 made it all the sweeter.

Each week that passes with Pitt finding a way to win instead of a way to lose makes me believe a little more that maybe, just this once, we can have nice things.

And Now, Chili

It’s no secret that I love chili. I love making food that comes together in one pot. I love stuff that has a wide margin for error for the cook. I have made hundreds of batches of chili in my life, and I can honestly say that maybe three of them were so bad that I didn’t want to eat them. Once was in college, once was immediately post-college, and the other was an attempt at turkey chili that involved way too much spice and not nearly enough understanding of how that spice would affect me. I am constantly on the lookout for a new recipe.

Being that I’m nearing 40 and trying to eat a little healthier these days, red meat isn’t as prominent in my diet as it used to be. I discovered a very tasty Chicken Chili recipe a while back, and while it is technically for Instant Pots, you could make it work easily on a traditional stovetop by just giving the carrots a lot of time to simmer and soften. If you have an Instant Pot, though, full speed ahead.

The heavy cream is a nice change-up, the overall taste isn’t threatening for those who aren’t as into spicy food, and it reheats very well. Highly recommend it.

Too Much of a Good Thing

The Boston Celtics tied an NBA record by making 29 threes in their season-opening demolition of the Knicks. They shot 61 of them overall. That’s impressive marksmanship, but add me to the growing list of basketball fans who are very tired of the “dunks and threes” turn that the NBA has taken over the last decade or so. These are the best players and most astonishing athletes in the world – just watch a game up close if you doubt the second point – and somehow, the league is putting out a product that is unwatchable. I don’t want to see a ton of threes. I want to see cool stuff. I want shot-making to be tough again. It’s not. And it’s driving me away from what was always my favorite sport growing up.

Finally, An Embarrassing Admission

Was driving to work earlier this week and heard a song I liked while I flipped through satellite radio channels (yes, I am a terrestrial radio employee who has satellite and listens to it, sue me). It had an instantly recognizable guitar hook and haunting vocals. I had heard it a million times before. I also NEVER bothered to find out what it was called, which could have presented an issue had I ever wanted to add it to a mix. Am I alone in this incredibly incurious approach to information gathering? Really hoping not. By the way. This is the tune.

Again, I’d like to stress that I’m very embarrassed by this. If you’ve got a song you love and you went an embarrassingly long time not knowing what it was called, drop it in the comments.

Have a hell of a weekend, won’t ya?