The Pitt offense was totally out of sync on Saturday in the team’s loss to Virginia Tech. The Panthers were shutout by a score of 28-0 and the offense was limited to just 177 yards of total offense. When an offense struggles that much, there are plenty of factors that go into it from play calling to execution.
One of the hot button issues surrounding the Pitt football team this season have been dropped passes. It is something that has plagued this team from game one against Virginia all the way until game 11 against Virginia Tech. The Pitt wide receivers and tight ends have simply not caught passes that hit them in the hands on a consistent basis this season. There is no way to sugarcoat that.
It really came to light against the Hokies last week. Pitt started out the game with multiple dropped passes and just never really got into a rhythm. Pat Narduzzi lamented about the poor offensive performance on Monday during his weekly press conference.
“We've got opportunities to make catches, we’ve got to make the catches,” he said. "We’ve got to make the block. There's a lot of things. We've got to make the throw. There's all kinds of things. We just weren't in rhythm.”
Chris Beatty is in his first year as Pitt’s wide receivers coach. He has an impressive resume and is regarded as a strong assistant coach. He’s coached multiple first round draft picks in his career and has done some good things with the Pitt wide receivers this season.
Pitt’s top two wideouts, Maurice Ffrench and Taysir Mack, are having career years in terms of receptions. Shocky Jacques-Louis and Jared Wayne have emerged as two promising young receivers, but mixed in with all that promise, these players have dropped too many catchable passes in 2019 and it bothers the Panthers first-year assistant.
“Sometimes you have days like that and obviously we started off rough with a couple of drops,” Beatty told reporters on Tuesday. “I don’t think we dealt with the weather that well as a group, as an offense, and in particular as receivers. We didn’t do a good enough job adapting until the second quarter. We started making some plays and moving the ball a little bit, but early in the game we just didn’t do a good enough job at adapting."
So how do you address it? Pitt senior wide receiver Aaron Mathews is a leader in the room and on the team. His mentality is just to keep moving forward, sort of with a 'don’t let one drop turn into two' mentality.
“Just worry about the next play, really,” Mathews explained. “You can’t worry about that play because we’ve got 50 more plays ahead of us. That play isn’t going to change anything, the next one can though. Saturday was rough as you said, there were a lot of dropped balls. Me being a senior I’m just trying to keep everyone’s head focused while things are flying and people are screaming, just worry about the next play and let’s move on.”
Chris Beatty shares that mindset, and even watching the NFL over the weekend, he noticed some of the best can even drop a pass.
“We practice wet balls, we do all that stuff, but it is what it is,” he said. “It’s like I told our guys, I was watching the Cowboys for a second in a break and I saw Jason Witten, he’s a hall of famer I think, and Amari Cooper, they both dropped one in the same series. It’s one of those things you keep playing, that’s part of the game. You do what you do, we catch a million balls everyday, so it kind of is what it is. You don’t want to let a bad quarter fester a bad half or a bad game or fester into two bad games, so you move on and try to get better from it.”
Pitt is treating that dropped ball mentality the same way it plans to treat this Boston College game. Aaron Mathews is a senior and wants to go out a winner at Heinz Field in his final game there.
“We’re on to the next game,” the Clairton native said. “We can’t do anything about it now, but we can do something about it Saturday, but we can’t do nothing about last Saturday.”
