You never want to be presumptuous about the way college football programs work, but generally speaking, teams that are desperate to fill emergency linebacker vacancies do not look first to the university's prestigious graduate school of public and international policy.

If they even have one.

Pitt has one, it happens, which is pretty much why it has Austin Ransom, a grad student who grew up 10 minutes north of the airport in Buffalo with an academic aptitude that exceeded his athleticism comfortably. He was fast enough in football and faster still at ringing up lacrosse goals, but his mind was what went fastest and in multiple directions simultaneously.

"I'm realistic about it," Ransom was saying the other day. "I could have gone to college to play football, went somewhere where I was just taking courses to keep myself eligible, all that. But I wanted a great education, a place where if football didn't work out, I'd still get a great education, and that's why I'm at the University of Pittsburgh."

Ransom had that basic plan working more or less perfectly around here for four years, hanging on the fringes of Pitt's football roster after walking on as a wide receiver, clinging to the sub-floor of a 2004 depth chart with Greg Lee at its apex. He played on special teams, got switched to defensive back, made a handful of tackles, and got designated special teams captain a year ago, but he never started a game.

Then came August, when an injury to starting weakside linebacker Shane Murray took the cap off the depth chart, revealing a list of kids who just got back from their high school proms, and Pitt coaches started searching desperately for anyone who could learn the position almost overnight. If that person could actually play it, so much the better.

"I was in the process of losing weight," Ransom remembered. "I was maybe 205 pounds. Now I'm between 215 and 220."

Murray never made it back from his knee injury. No one with a linebacker's frame and a Division I pedigree ever even got a handle on the job given to Ransom. Three games into it, the coaches selected him the Panthers' defensive player of the game against Iowa. And now Pitt, with a no-experience, undersized linebacker carrying all graduate courses, is 7-2 with an evident path to a BCS bowl.

"We've played against mostly smaller, shifty backs, although Iowa had some big ones," Ransom explained. "My weight's really not much of an issue. It's more of a mindset. You just have to be willing to lower the boom on people."

For the record, only Scott McKillop, the All-American standing next to Ransom in Pitt's defense, has lowered the boom more frequently than Austin Ransom, who has started every game, made 4.5 tackles in the backfield, gotten 1.5 sacks, and merely been a critical component of the most productive autumn of the Dave Wannstedt administration.

"I love football; it's never a burden, and it's a game that means a lot to people because it's a release," Ransom said. "It helps people develop a pride and a unity."

And that's where Ransom finds his rhetorical and intellectual groove, where what things mean collide with the culture's larger purposes. This is who he is. At Williamsville East High, he founded, with his brother Zach, now also a Pitt grad, the organization known as S.P.E.A.K., which stands for Students Promoting Equality Acceptance Knowledgeably.

"Our school was not very diverse," he said. "So my older brother and I came up with this idea for this organization, and for Diversity Day, when we'd examine ways for everyone to understand and respect everyone else's equality. I heard from a teacher recently that since we've left, some of the other high schools in the area have started diversity days. That's a nice milestone.

"I had a really great upbringing, good neighborhood, good schools, and I don't see any reason why everyone can't have a similar experience. That's why in four years at Pitt, I've taken advantage of programs like Panther Game Plan and Panther Paws, where we've worked with city schools kids and underprivileged youth. That's why in grad school I'm going to be concentrating on non-profit management, urban development. The possibilities are endless."

Austin Ransom might regard it as a rather mundane illustration of limitless possibility that Austin Ransom has helped Pitt's football program become part of bowl season again, but he's really not all that surprised at the way these last three months have played out.

"It's like Coach Wannstedt says, 'it's not the 11 best who play, it's the best 11," Ransom said. "On this defense, I feel we all have a connection. We play the way you played when you were playing with your friends. We're having fun, and when you have fun playing this game, that's when you can be really good."

Very high concept stuff right there. Fun at football. Can't say that I've heard of it. Then again, I've never been to grad school.