Kovacevic: Hoping for another Pitt-Penn State classic, but ...

Penn State will beat Pitt by pretty much any score it wants.

I write that with zero malice. I picked the Panthers to win at Heinz Field last year and was roundly ridiculed, but that group had bona fide offensive talent to offset its defense. This one doesn't, as the overtime win over Youngstown State painfully illustrated. Max Browne and Qadree Ollison aren't Nate Peterman and James Conner, plain and simple. And defensively, for Pat Narduzzi to allow his secondary to get scorched by strikingly similar wheel routes all afternoon long ... that strongly suggests he learned nothing from watching his team engage in basketball-type scores last winter.

The Nittany Lions, by contrast, absolutely overwhelmed Akron. Which they should have.

• I'd love to be wrong. I'd love for it to be a tight, intense game. Because what's invariably going to come from a lopsided outcome are the always annoying Penn State claims to not care about Pitt, or Pitt not being a rival, despite ample evidence -- and history -- to the contrary.

• The Steelers' latest acquisition, the Sunday trade for J.J. Wilcox from the Buccaneers, bolsters their depth at safety by bumping Robert Golden down the depth chart.

This is welcome. This is awesome, actually.

But I'm still not buying into any notion that the Steelers are going for it, or that they're all in, if only because they're like that every year. The lone difference with this unprecedented summer splurge is that, thanks to the superlative draft of 2016 and the belief in Vince Williams' ability to replace Lawrence Timmons, they have the cap space and capability to add like this.

Which, again, are all great things.

• So wait, Neal Huntington's only regret about the Juan Nicasio fiasco is that, per his public accusation Sunday, some unnamed other team "leaked" that he was on waivers?

Because we wouldn't all have found out that Nicasio was on waivers when, you know, the Phillies claimed him?

And his explanation for why that team would leak was that they "wanted to embarrass us."

So the regret was that they were caught doing something embarrassing?

That's what he came up with after several days to prepare for this?

• Oh, and I don't want to point fingers here about that mystery, amoral, unethical leaking team among the National League contenders that's shed all this additional light on the Nicasio fiasco, but ...