Since Tony Wise has been coaching some of football's most legendary blockers for most of 35 years at both the college and professional levels, and since Dave Wannstedt has repeatedly absorbed his counsel along the roughly parallel tracks of their coaching lives, one of the new Pitt offensive line coach's first observations when he rejoined Wannstedt in January somehow failed to stop the head coach in his tracks.

Wise wanted Pitt's offensive linemen to be smaller.

At least, that's what it sounded like.

Wannstedt did his best not to cock his head like a dog looking at a ceiling fan, but hearing a coach intimate that your offensive linemen are too big happens about as much as one of your players saying he wished his date wasn't so hot.

"Tony just made the observation in spring practice that [defensive tackle] Gus Mustakas makes every play and that [defensive tackle] Mick Williams was unblockable," Wannstedt explained as training camp was getting started. "Mick was a fullback at Monessen High School. Tony just observed that the best players we've had to block around here are players like Gus and Mick, that the best players we have to block in the Big East Conference are not like the best players the Steelers have to block. They're guys like [Terrill] Byrd with Cincinnati and [Eric] Foster at Rutgers, not 300-pounders, but guys who have great instincts and can move.

"What do we have to do to counter this? If we've got nothing but 6-6, 325 guys up front, how are we going to match up?"

The answer seems so counterintuitive -- to be lighter and quicker at a position where most coaches would line up five pregnant Clydesdales if they could get them eligible -- that it's little less than fascinating. As Pitt begins preparation for its Saturday opener against Bowling Green and a season of acute promise, its offensive line remains far from a solidified entity. The one thing that can be said definitively of it is that it is ... smaller.

"When we got here two years ago this was a very fat, unfit football team," said strength and conditioning guru Buddy Morris, the man who built monuments named Covert and Fralic and Grimm and Marino and Stepnoski and Martin in a previous Pitt lifetime. "Joe Thomas was 320 pounds and had 30 percent body fat. Really, a third of his body was fat. Fat does not produce force. Now, he's under 295, and his body fat is 23 percent on its way to 21 or 22.

"I've never been one of those bigger-is-better guys. My concern is for the general overall health of the athlete. I know Terrell Davis very well, and I'm sure he didn't mind winning a Super Bowl behind an offensive line that had no 300-pounders."

Though that seems impossible today, it seemed almost as impossible only 10 years ago, when the Super Bowl XXXII champion Denver Broncos started Tony Jones, Mark Schlereth, Tom Nalen, Daniel Neil, and Harry Swayne across the offensive front, five superior athletes who averaged a relatively diminutive 285 pounds.

Pitt will average about 294 up front to start the season, likely less than a few WPIAL teams, and, if what Wise, Wannstedt and Morris are doing is in no way a trend, it's certainly a notion that deserves some traction.

"I get letters from people telling me, 'My son is 6-6, 335,' " Wise was saying the other day. "They're wondering if they should get him up to 340. I write back and tell them just let him play. I'm not looking for 340. I'm looking for someone who can move his feet, who can change direction. We had Mark Stepnoski when we were in Dallas, a very successful player who weighed 268 pounds. In our situation here, with who we play, if you can't move your feet, you're going to get embarrassed."

Morris believes you will still see a 400-pound offensive lineman play regularly in the NFL. Aaron Gibson, whom Dallas once listed at 6-6, 410, played briefly in the league after being taken in the first round out of Wisconsin in 1999. Shoulder injuries, not necessarily that extra 100 he was carrying around, took him out of the league.

The college game, however, might be headed the other way, especially with the proliferation of spread offenses.

"With so many spread offenses, you have to be able to make plays in space," Wannstedt said. "With us, we need quickness to block quickness."

Pitt actually needs a lot of good things to happen with an offensive line that's still an arrangement of interchangeable, unproven parts. If it looks any less like a week-to-week season-long headache today than it did at the start of camp, no one is saying so emphatically.

"This is something that takes more skill than meets the eye," Wise said. "Hopefully, they can discover something off the Bowling Green game and start building on it. We'll wait and see, but the guys have worked extremely hard."

Hard and harder, smart and smarter, quick and quicker, smaller but not small. If it's ultimately successful, the whole approach might wind up doing a lot of good.