No team in college football is really thinking much about the punter right now. No one is even really planning to punt, frankly.

It's the first half of August. They're unbeaten. They're opening against Eastern Duckberg. They've got battle-tested running backs, can't-miss recruits, burners at wideout, beastly tight ends, a refurbished, furbished, or ultra-furbished offensive line, and a quarterback ready to come into his own if not somebody else's.

How can they possibly be forced to punt?

Of course, then you blink and it's third-and-11, and here comes whatzisname, whom we'd rather not see, don't know much about, and reflexively regard as the walking symbol of fresh, hot offensive failure.

But not at Pitt.

At Pitt, the sweetest image of last football season was that of brawny punter Dave Brytus, standing at the Panther 2, taking one last reliable snap from Mark Estermyer with four seconds on the game clock at Morgantown, turning to his left maybe 140 degrees and running purposefully into his own end zone, slicing through the "N" in West Virginia and across the back line to take the safety that made the final Pitt 13, WVU 9.

If you can't appreciate a punter's role in beating a 28-point favorite on its home field when it has an invitation to the national championship game in the unopened mail, when can you appreciate one?

But long before and since that little epic, people are generally glad to see Dave Brytus, whether he's left-footing one 45 yards downfield, dropping another inside the 20, or just kicking and/or punching someone's head in on YouTube in one of those mixed martial arts matches he keeps turning up in.

Brytus has won the majority of those manic skirmishes, but in that exploding sport, even when you win, you lose. Or at least it feels like it.

"It's been awhile since I've done that," Brytus laughed as Pitt got started on its earnest 2008 preparations last week. "I'm really concentrating on football now. Mixed martial arts [MMA] is something I really enjoy and it helps me tremendously with leg strength and flexibility. I practice it daily, but it's time to concentrate on football."

A black belt in karate and a former Western Pennsylvania super-heavyweight Golden Gloves champion, Brytus has occasionally entertained the Panthers with demonstrations in the not-so-ancient arts of board breaking, brick breaking and even cinder block smashing, but in the coming months, he'll be glad to settle for a different kind of adrenaline surge.

"It's two different kinds of adrenaline rushes," said the senior out of West Allegheny High School. "In fighting, you're just really fired up, all my energies are focused on destroying my opponent. In football, I try to be more relaxed. I try to enjoy the atmosphere."

The atmosphere around these Panthers is the kind of charged hopefulness Brytus hopes will translate into national conspicuousness for Pitt football, the kind that can bring some NFL scouting attention to a veteran punter who's 6 feet 4 inches and 230 pounds, who placed better than one in four of his 66 kicks last year inside the 20, who has never had one of 181 punts blocked in college.

His average (39.6) will have to improve pretty dramatically for that to happen, and there's a certain hopeful urgency about that as well, because there's a lot of financial and, um, atmospheric difference between the NFL and UFC, Ultimate Fighting Challenge.

"UFC is like the NFL of MMA," Brytus said acronymically. "The top guys in UFC are getting six-figure salaries, but, obviously, you could do better in the NFL."

In the NFL, you can casually wander the sidelines most of the week, learning stupid punter tricks such as throwing the ball to the grass and making it bounce back into your throwing hand (no known application), then actually kicking a few times on Sundays and occasionally being called on to make a tackle, which Brytus would love.

In UCF, you train exhaustively and more or less constantly for the opportunity to enter a caged octagon against a single opponent carrying payloads of excess testosterone and who knows what else.

"Football's better for a career, I guess," Brytus said. "It'd certainly be better as far as my parents are concerned. My mom's not a big fan of MMA, but you know, if I have to take a couple of punches to the head to make some money, so be it."

Uh-huh. But I'd be kind of hoping for a big autumn in the whole-swift-left-foot-to-the-old-pig-bladder thing.

I mean if Pitt has to punt at all, of course.