The Pitt offense threw for 1,849 yards last season, and that ranked as the 120th ranked passing offense in the country. Despite winning the ACC Coastal, Pitt’s power running game stalled a bit in the team’s final three games and the passing game was not there to pick up the pieces.

It simply wasn’t good enough.

Pitt made some coaching changes in the offseason to fix that issue, as it brought in Mark Whipple to be the offensive coordinator and Chris Beatty to coach the wide receivers. Both guys are veterans in the coaching business with extensive resumes.

Despite the lack of a passing game in 2018, Pitt does return some veteran receivers and those guys believe they can make plays this season. Pitt senior Aaron Mathews and junior Taysir Mack believe the new coaching can make them better players and make this offense better.

It starts with Beatty, as he is taking a hands on approach in all facets. He is a discipline, attention-to-detail type of coach, and that style is taking hold with his group.

“It really changed our outlook on the game and we managed to become students of the game,” Mack said of Beatty taking over as their position coach. “We got to understand the plays more, as we get to know the defenses are doing, what the quarterback is thinking, certain drops. We understand how much time we have on certain routes and the leverage we have to have, just everything is down to details"

"He’s a big details guy, it starts from us pushing in our chairs in the room, so he’s on top of everything.”

Yes, it starts with a simple task like pushing their chairs in after practice.

“I think that’s the first step to anything you want to try to do is you’ve got to do all the little things right and the big things kind of clear themselves up, so every little detail we try to cover and that’s from the top of the route, to the start of the route, to making a block, to tucking in our chairs, to having our notebook nice and neat - it’s all the little things that matter,” Beatty explained.

So what happens if you don’t push in your chair after a meeting? “That’s the first thing we’re going to hear in the meeting the next day,” Mathews said.

“I feel like we’re just learning more as receivers, more about the game and more about what we need to know to get more catches - more production.”

It’s an old belief, but probably true one: wide receivers always want the ball. Whipple is someone that wants to throw it based off his background, and for Mack he can see it right away.

“Coach Whipple, he’s just brilliant man,” Mack explained. “He just walks around all day thinking of ways he can get us open and different mismatches, putting us in the best way to be successful. He really cares about the guys, he cares about winning. He cares about getting the ball to talent, like he made certain packages that exploits all of us receivers. It just helps us.”

Beatty knows the position he coaches, and agrees with that notion.

Yea, I mean they want the ball,” he said laughing. “Any receiver that’s worth it, he wants the ball and so these guys want the ball and they want to prove that they should get the ball and thus far in camp they’ve done a nice job of that really.”

Mathews is a senior and has played quite a bit in his career, but only has 31 catches during his three seasons at Pitt. He was always noted as a blocker, but under Whipple he thinks he will be used more than that in 2019.

“It’s practice nine and I feel like I have more catches already than I had in the past three years, so I’m looking forward to it,” Mathews said.

After hearing Whipple was the team’s new coordinator, Mathews went to his computer right away.

“I went straight to ESPN and looked up his stats at UMass to see what they were working with, and right away I was excited,” he said.