Every year, Rivals.com ranks recruits and recruiting classes. But starting today, Panther-Lair.com is looking at Pitt's recruiting classes over a 15-year period and ranking them against each other.
Specifically, we're looking at the classes that Pitt signed from 2003-17 and ranking them based on what the players did in college. There's not enough evidence to judge the classes of 2018 or 2019 yet, so we cut off the rankings there and counted back 15 years.
Today we're starting with No. 15 on the rankings: the class of 2011. Here's the list of players who signed with in 2011. They are listed below as they appear in the Rivals.com database, including position and hometown.
If you know your history, you know that the class of 2011 was the Todd Graham class - the class that Graham inherited when he was hired in January 2011. Typically, recruiting classes are built over time; coaches start recruiting prospects when they are sophomores or even freshmen and develop those relationships over the course of several years.
So while classes are identified by their signing year, the reality is that a recruiting class is a product of multiple years of work.
Pitt's class of 2011 is an exception. At one point, it was a class that had been built over time. Dave Wannstedt and his staff recruited that class, but their involvement came to an end when Wannstedt resigned in December 2010.
Michael Haywood was hired to replace Wannstedt and took over the recruitment of the 2011 class. He even experienced minimal attrition and seemed to be on track to keep the class together.
But when he was fired after getting arrested on New Year's Eve, things fell apart. Nearly the entire class bolted, leaving Graham with about a month to build something. That's not much time, particularly considering the fact that half of that month would be spent in a recruiting dead period, so Graham and his staff couldn't host visits or go visit recruits.
Still, they managed to cobble a class together, signing 21 recruits (including four who had been committed to Wannstedt). The class was ranked No. 58 nationally by Rivals.com, and the results on the field more or less reflected that.
Of those 21 recruits, just six finished their eligibility at Pitt, and while the class produced starters in Lafayette Pitts, Khaynin Mosley-Smith, Nicholas Grigsby, Artie Rowell and Isaac Bennett, it's hard to say that there was a true "star" in the group.
The coaching upheaval of 2010-12 set Pitt football back considerably, and the class of 2011 epitomized the Graham era: like the coach who signed them, most of the recruits in that class didn't stay at Pitt very long.
