Pitt's cornerbacks look to drop reputation as 'weak link'

They hear what’s said about their performance over the last few seasons. They know that many Pitt fans have held them and the safeties responsible for the shortcomings of the team in the three years since Pat Narduzzi brought a defensive scheme that relies on strong secondary play.

They haven’t forgotten the repeated breakdowns of the pass defense in the 2016 season. They are keenly aware of what you think of their performance against Oklahoma State last season.

And they’ve got plans for a different outcome in 2018, when a defense with nine returning starters is looking to build off a strong finish to the 2017 schedule and potentially be a key element in whatever success the team enjoys over the next three months.

“We are definitely putting the weight of how the defense goes on us,” redshirt senior cornerback Phillipie Motley said Tuesday. “We know that people have said we’ve been the weak link, so we’ve really pushed ourselves to step up and dominate every day.

“That’s our goal every single day. It’s not, ‘Oh, we had a great day yesterday;’ that was yesterday, so now today we need to have a better day than we did.”

The corners certainly need to have better seasons than they have had in recent years. 2016 was arguably the worst pass defense in Pitt history, as the Panthers gave up an average of 333.2 passing yards per game; no Pitt team has allowed more (at least, no Pitt team since 1970, and the chances of opponents averaging 300 passing yards per game pre-1970 seem slim).

That year was low-lighted, as it were, by performances against Penn State’s Trace McSorley (332 passing yards in a Pitt win), Mason Rudolph (540 passing yards in a Pitt loss), Mitch Trubisky (453 passing yards and five touchdowns in a Pitt loss), Jerod Evans (406 passing yards in a Pitt loss), Brad Kaaya (356 passing yards and four touchdowns in a Pitt loss), DeShaun Watson (580 passing yards and three touchdowns in a Pitt win) and Zack Mahoney (440 passing yards and five touchdowns in a Pitt win).

If you’re counting, that’s seven opposing quarterbacks who threw for at least 300 yards against Pitt in 2016, five who threw for at least 400 yards and two who topped 500 yards.

Last season wasn’t quite as bad. Rudolph still put up 497 yards and five touchdowns in a blowout at Heinz Field and Syracuse’s Eric Dungey threw for 365 and two scores in a Pitt loss at the Carrier Dome, but those were the only two opposing quarterbacks who went over 300 yards against the Panthers. But the defense still allowed an average of 254.2 passing yards per game - one of only six Pitt defenses since 1970 to give up more than 250 passing yards per game (2016, 2004, 1999, 1997 and 1995 are the other five).

And while there are multiple reasons for those gaudy passing stats, from the ineffective pass rush to inexperience at linebacker (last season) and issues at safety, the cornerbacks have taken the brunt of the criticism.

“We’ve heard it and we’re kind of tired of hearing that,” Motley said. “We know that we have the experience. We have so much experience in the secondary. It’s crazy. You don’t even realize how much experience we have back there.

“I mean, you hear it, but you don’t. We need to work on ourselves. It’s not what other people think; it’s about what we’re doing in the moment, how are we making ourselves better, how are we making the team better.”

Motley isn’t wrong about the level of experience in the secondary. Despite losing multi-year starters in Avonte Maddox and Jordan Whitehead, Pitt returns a starter at cornerback (Dane Jackson), a redshirt senior who started two games last season (Motley), two sophomore corners who played last season (Jason Pinnock and Damarri Mathis) and five safeties who started at least one game last season (Damar Hamlin, Dennis Briggs, Phil Campbell, Bricen Garner and Therran Coleman, who logged a start as a nickel back at Syracuse).

“There are always going to be struggles,” Motley said, “and I definitely think we’ve learned a lot over the past - this is the fourth year that Coach Narduzzi has been here, so over those four years, me and Dennis have been here for all four years, Dane has been here a long time, D-Ham has been here a long time; we’ve definitely built up a lot of experience from situations that haven’t always gone our way in the past. So we’re really just using those, learning from those situations and making ourselves better now.”