In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about Pitt’s 2020 ACC opponents, Elliot Donald, the WPIAL, Philadelphia recruiting and more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

ACC schedule
The big news this week came on Wednesday when the ACC announced the schedule model for the 2020 season.

Gone are the eight-game conference schedules; in their place, each ACC team will play 10 league games and one home or in-state non-conference game (although that non-conference game might not happen). The conference schedule is set up on a five-home/five-road basis, and it seems like the ACC ditched the idea of having each team play five opponents on a home-and-home basis.

Personally, I would have liked to see that five-opponent season where you play each of them twice because, hey, if we’re gonna get weird, let’s really get weird. Let’s break the conference into three five-team pods and see what happens when a team gets to face five opponents twice each in a regular season. We’ve never seen two teams face each other twice in the regular season; let’s lean into it and see what that road looks like.

But I digress. Instead, we’ll have to settle for a truly unique 10-game conference schedule where the weirdest thing is that the league is dropping divisions for a year. No Atlantic, no Coastal: just one division of 15 teams.

Oh yeah, there’s that, too: the ACC consists of 15 teams in 2020 since Notre Dame is formally a part of the conference for this year.

I’m all for getting weird with it in whatever ways we can, so I’ll take the one-division plan for a year and see what it looks like when the ACC selects the top two teams overall for the Championship Game in Charlotte.

Of course, Pitt’s path to becoming one of those two teams got a little bit tougher with the new schedule announcement. Gone from the Panthers’ slate of opponents are Virginia, Duke and North Carolina. The Tar Heels figured to be one of the best teams in the Coastal, so that’s not a bad one to drop. But Virginia and Duke both should have been penciled-in wins for Pitt, so those are unfortunate to see go off the schedule.

Even more challenging, though, are the teams that got added to the schedule. There’s Boston College and N.C. State; the Eagles are likely to be rebuilding under first-year head coach Jeff Hafley and the Wolfpack is in a perilous spot after going 4-8 last season. But there’s also Louisville and a road game at Clemson. Those are tough additions.

Pitt also had one home game (Georgia Tech) moved to the road while keeping previously-scheduled road games at Florida State and Miami. Throw in the trips to Boston College and Clemson, and Pitt’s travel schedule in the year of COVID-19 will feature five of the longest road trips possible.

There are a lot of things about the Panthers’ schedule in 2020 that don’t look very favorable. It’s a more difficult schedule than the original slate, it features more travel and it has cut out half of Pitt’s annual Coastal Division opponents.

But at this point, the most any of us can say is this:

It beats not having football at all, right?

The upside
Okay, let’s look at the upside for a minute.

Pitt’s 2020 schedule, as it is currently constructed, is definitely more challenging than it was supposed to be. Pitt wasn’t supposed to play Clemson this year, at least not during the regular season, and dropping Duke for Louisville isn’t a fair trade when the Cardinals look to be on the rise.

Flipping Georgia Tech to a road game concerns me, too, if for no other reason than Pitt’s five road games this season are literally the longest possible road trips the Panthers could have in conference play. You’re not going to travel further than Pitt will when it goes to Miami, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Clemson and Boston College.

That’s the geographical south of the ACC and its northernmost point, with none of the medium-distance trips - Syracuse, either Virginia school or even the Triangle - to balance it out.

Whatever, though. Pitt charters its flights, so getting the team to Tallahassee is not going to be nearly as much of a pain as it would have been to get me and you there (I ended up booking a flight to Jacksonville back in January because it was cheap, but hotels are ridiculous because Florida was scheduled to be home on Halloween weekend, too; I’ll have to change those plans).

The most challenging part of the updated schedule is, well, how challenging it is. But there’s an upside in there, too. Remember when Pitt won the Coastal Division and went to the ACC Championship Game? There wasn’t a whole lot of respect given to that accomplishment, for a few reasons.

For starters, Pitt went into Charlotte as a 7-5 team with a losses to mediocre teams in North Carolina and Miami and blowout losses to Penn State and UCF. That wasn’t very much of an endorsement of the Coastal champs, but they also suffered from the stigma of being just that:

Coastal champs.

Nobody thought much of Pitt getting to the ACC Championship Game because “all they did was win the Coastal.” And there was some merit to that. I don’t think Pitt backed into the ACCCG; they earned their spot against Clemson by taking control of a division that was up for grabs. But because the division itself was viewed as the lowest in the Power Five conferences, being the champion of said division didn’t earn Pitt a lot of respect.

This year should be different.

If the Panthers find themselves in Charlotte this season, it will hard to say they didn’t earn it. The way I see it, the team that faces Clemson in the 2020 ACC Championship Game is probably going to have to go 8-2 in ACC play; with 15 teams vying for two spots, I just don’t know if 7-3 will cut it, and if one of the teams in the title game gets there with a 7-3 record, they’ll probably have benefited from something like the sixth or seventh tiebreaker.

So I’m saying 8-2 is the minimum for a spot in the ACC title game. If Pitt goes 8-2, it’s possible they could get that record while losing to the two most prominent teams on their schedule - Clemson and Notre Dame - but that would mean they’d also have defeated Louisville and Virginia Tech at home and Florida State and Miami on the road.

Those would be, to varying degrees, solid wins. And I think that’s the potential upside of a schedule like this: If you succeed, if you win eight games or more, you’re inevitably going to get some respect nationally, because this schedule presents an opportunity for Pitt to show just how good this team can be.

Would it be preferable to have a 10-game slate featuring Syracuse, Virginia, Virginia Tech, Georgia Tech, Duke, Wake Forest, N.C. State and Boston College alongside Notre Dame and one other team? Sure. The easier the path, the better. But this year’s team should be aiming a little higher than old-fashioned win-stacking. This year’s team should be anxious for this opportunity.

You know that old line about being the best by beating the best. Well, Pitt will get a few shots at that idea this season.

A big commitment from the WPIAL
This news is already a week old at this point, but we have to make mention of it anyway.

Four-star defensive tackle Elliot Donald committed to Pitt last Friday - a few hours after the last 3-2-1 Column was published. We knew Donald was committing that day and we were fairly certain that Pitt would be his choice, so we discussed his impending commitment and its impact in last week’s column.

But there’s still another thought or two that I have, and here’s one:

I wish there was a way we could talk about Elliot Donald without mentioning his uncle.

His uncle, of course, is Aaron Donald, the former Pitt star and current best-player-in-the-NFL. And it’s virtually impossible to find an article about Elliot Donald that doesn’t mention Aaron Donald.

That’s inevitable, of course. When you are a college football prospect playing the same position as your famous NFL uncle, the mentions are going to be made and the comparisons are going to be drawn. It’s really hard to get away from it, because whether anybody likes it or not, that’s going to be part of Elliot Donald’s story.

He may eventually make his own name and build his own reputation, but it’s going to take a long time before he stops being referred to as “Aaron Donald’s nephew.” That’s not entirely a bad thing; it’s part of his story. It’s part of who he is, and he certainly isn’t ashamed of his mother’s brother. Far from it.

The problem is when the story becomes something more than just background information. The problem is when it becomes an expectation.

We saw a bit of that this week when Rivals.com National Recruiting Director Mike Farrell tweeted a link to an article and used this as the teaser:

That’s not really fair to Elliot Donald, and his uncle made sure to point that out.

Now, Farrell and fellow analyst Adam Gorney - they participated in the “Fact or Fiction” article that was linked in that tweet - both said that comparing Elliot Donald to Aaron Donald and setting the expectation for Elliot at Aaron’s level was unfair, and it looks like the tweet was more a quick-hitter headline to get people to click while the article itself was a bit more balanced.

But that’s far from the last time we’ll see people talk about Elliot Donald in the context of his uncle. He probably won’t be able to get away from it anytime soon; hopefully, people don’t base their opinions of his career at Pitt on how it compares to Aaron Donald’s time as a Panther.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

What’s up with the WPIAL?
We often ask that question:

What’s up with the WPIAL?

But usually when we say it, we’re asking why WPIAL players are looking away from Pitt and pursuing their fortunes elsewhere. Right now, I’m asking that question again, but for a different reason.

Right now, I’m asking what is up with the WPIAL because I’ve been digging into the class of 2022 and I’m finding out that there’s not a whole lot there.

According to the Rivals.com database, not one recruit in the western Pa. class of 2022 has an offer from a Power Five school. There is a handful of recruits - literally less than five - who have FBS offers, but none have gotten a scholarship from the ACC or the Big Ten or the SEC or the Big 12 or the PAC-12.

That’s crazy to me.

These kids just finished their sophomore years of high school; that’s still really early in their recruitments and they have plenty of time to pick up Power Five offers. By the end of the process, I’m sure at least a few of them will be going to Syracuse or some place. Recruiting happens at different paces for different prospects, and not everybody gets offers before their junior years.

But to not have a single prospect in the 2022 WPIAL class holding a Power Five offer right now? I count more than a dozen recruits in the 2021 class from western Pa. who have Power Five offers, and most of them had at least one or two before their junior years started.

And while Pitt’s offer numbers in the WPIAL and City League have gone down in recent years, the Panthers have still offered some guys in each class, as opposed to the 2022 class, where they haven’t offered any.

In the 2021 class, for instance, Pitt has offered seven players from western Pa. The coaches only offered a dozen or so total in the 2019 and 2020 classes, but they offered eight in the class of 2018, and that has more or less been the standard since Pat Narduzzi arrived.

Like I said, though, the 2022 class is empty so far. Pitt hasn’t offered a single local player. There’s probably a decent chance that will change - it would have helped if some of these guys could have gone to a Pitt prospect camp in June, and it would really help if they can play football this fall - but I can’t remember the last time we were sitting at the end of July and Pitt hadn’t offered a single rising junior from the local area.

The situation looks better in the 2023 class, where Rodney Gallagher and Ta’mere Robinson are already targets on the board for Pitt. But 2022 looks pretty lean, for whatever reason.

What has been the best WPIAL class recently?
Talking about the WPIAL got me thinking about the WPIAL and what it has turned out in recent years.

The last couple classes are a little too recent to call. The class of 2020 hasn’t even been through a training camp, let alone enough seasons to make a judgment. The class of 2019 is too recent, too; a bunch of those guys redshirted last season, so we don’t know what to make of them.

Even the class of 2018 is still pretty young. For Pitt, that’s guys like Devin Danielson and Jake Kradel and Blake Zubovic and Noah Palmer; two of them have played a decent amount - Danielson and Kradel - but not enough to determine how good the class is (and the other guys in the WPIAL that year, like Phil Jurkovec and TJ Banks and Kwantel Raines, are similarly in the TBD boat).

I’d have to go back to 2017 for a class we can really judge. Here’s what the top ten in western Pa. looked like that year:

Lamont Wade
Paris Ford
CJ Thorpe
Josh Lugg
Donovan Jeter
David Adams
Kurt Hinish
Zane Zandier
Kenny Robinson
Noah Hamlin

At first blush, that’s a pretty strong group. Really strong, actually. Wade and Ford will both play the NFL and Robinson is already there. Zandier is a starting linebacker at Virginia. Hinish is a starting defensive tackle at Notre Dame. Thorpe and Lugg are both in line to be starters in 2020.

That’s seven out of the top 10. Adams retired from football due to injuries and Hamlin transferred from Cincinnati after getting arrested, but Jeter still has two more years of eligibility to play himself into the starting lineup at Michigan.

Even if nothing comes from those three, the other seven more than make up for it. You’re looking at 5-7 NFL players in one class from the WPIAL, and it’s tough to find another class to compare to that, at least in the last decade. 2014 was probably the closest. That class had Montae Nicholson (Washington, 4th round), Dravon Askew-Henry (New York Giants, undrafted), Alex Bookser (Detroit Lions, undrafted), Chase Winovich (New England Patriots, 3rd round) and Malik Hooker (Indianapolis Colts, 1st round).

It’s pretty good when you have a first-round pick, so 2014 has the edge for now. But I think the 2017 class might end up rivaling that one; even if none of those guys goes in the first round, it’s a safe bet that most of that top 10 will end up in the NFL.

ONE PREDICTION

Pitt will make up for the WPIAL being down by looking east
This is kind of a guess on my part, but we’ll see how it plays out.

There may not be much in the WPIAL for the class of 2022, but that doesn’t mean Pennsylvania is thin overall. In fact, 2022 is shaping up to be a pretty strong year - it’s just all happening on the other side of the state.

According to the Rivals.com database, 22 recruits in the state of Pennsylvania’s 2022 class already have offers from Power Five schools. Four prospects in the state are ranked as four-stars, and more will likely join them.

Pitt definitely wants to get in on the action, and the staff has offered 17 rising juniors in Pennsylvania (again, none of them are in western Pa.). It’s not likely that the Panthers will get those top guys in the state, but their efforts east of Harrisburg have been notable. Pitt has been targeting Philadelphia-area prospects early and often for the last few years, and it started to pay off in the current class with a commitment from Imhotep safety Javon McIntyre.

The Panthers coaching staff hopes that’s the start of something more. Safeties coach Cory Sanders is leading the charge in Philadelphia, and he deserves some credit for the work he has done there. Philadelphia is known more for basketball, but it has always produced a decent amount of football talent. Previous Pitt staffs have tried to break in and grab some Philly kids, but the success rate has been low.

Sanders has been tasked with that same challenge, and it hasn’t been an easy one. He’s been recruiting Philadelphia for Pitt since he joined the staff in 2018, and he has put in a lot of hours working the area.

Now it seems like the work is paying off. Sanders was key in landing McIntyre, who visited in January as part of a sizeable contingent of Philly recruits; getting McIntyre to commit on that visit was the big score, but even getting all of those kids on campus was a win, and Sanders gets the credit for it.

It’s also worth noting that Sanders has been working on the western side of the state, too. He was the lead recruiter for Westinghouse defensive end Dayon Hayes last year and he took charge on Elliot Donald this year. He’s one of the rising stars on Pitt’s staff, and I think his reputation as a recruiter will only grow from here.

Over the next 18 months, I expect to see more fruits of his labor in the form of additional Philadelphia-area commitments for Pitt. They could represent the bulk of Pitt’s Pennsylvania haul in the 2022 class.