MORE HEADLINES - FREE COMMITMENT ARTICLE: Yarnell picked Pitt for 'the coaches and the city' | Fugar: 'I just felt like it was the right place' | Coach says Jeffress can put Pitt at 'the top of the ACC' | Anatomy of a position: How Pitt's tight end roster came together | Reaction: What Jeffress means for Pitt | Capel made the difference for Jeffress
In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about another big week of recruiting, a rising star on Pitt’s staff and how the Panthers can crack the top 20.
THREE THINGS WE KNOW
An endorsement
There are more than a few angles and storylines to this week’s big news, but for me, William Jeffress’ commitment to Pitt this week means one big thing:
It’s an endorsement.
An endorsement of Jeff Capel and an endorsement of the direction of the Pitt basketball program under Capel.
Now, for the vast majority of Pitt fans, I don’t know if an endorsement was necessary. The vocal minority will always be present with drop-of-the-hat skepticism when things don’t go according to plan. But for most Pitt fans, I think there is a belief in Capel and his vision for the program.
Still, times can be trying. Winning three ACC games in Capel’s first year wasn’t too troubling; that was a huge improvement over the previous year, of course, and it was an easy and obvious indication of the instant upgrade Capel was expected to bring.
But this past season wasn’t quite as palatable. Pitt’s six ACC wins should have been much closer to 10, and the team’s key players didn’t seem to improve as much as they should have (which led to that six-win total). There were games that got away, and while Justin Champagnie was a revelation as a freshman, Capel’s second recruiting class wasn’t exactly star-studded.
So there was maybe a bit of unrest. Nobody gave up on Capel, for the most part, but there were feelings of missed opportunities and questions about why the 2019-20 season wasn’t better than it was.
William Jeffress committing didn’t change all of that or answer those questions, but his decision did provide some interesting perspective, because it shows that he and his family believe in what Capel is doing.
And while I know that you are probably pretty emotionally involved in Pitt basketball, I don’t think it’s out of line to say that William Jeffress and his family have a bit more riding on the future success of the program than you do.
Jeffress is thinking about his personal future and where he wants to be in his career, and he made his college decision based on the school and the coach that can get him there. That shows a level of trust and confidence that should be encouraging to Pitt fans. Very encouraging.
Of course, there’s also the on-court impact, which is the important part, right? Jeffress is a really good wing prospect who will likely be a reserve as a freshman before moving into a key role for the next few years of his career.
He’s also the top-rated recruit to commit to Capel as the No. 75 prospect in the nation. That makes him the highest-rated recruit to sign with Pitt since James Robinson was No. 59 in the class of 2012.
Any way you slice it, Jeffress is a huge pickup for Pitt.
Another big day
Turns out the recruiting success for the Pitt football team wasn’t limited to last week.
After picking up four commitments last Wednesday and Thursday, Pat Narduzzi and company added two more on Thursday. The duo was led by the quarterback, as Pitt got its man for the 2021 class in Austin (Tex.) Lake Travis three-star Nate Yarnell.
Yarnell’s story has already become something of a Pitt recruiting legend: he was the backup to a four-star Texas commit last season, but when that four-star Texas commit got hurt, Yarnell stepped in and led his team to a perfect 6-0 record in six starts.
Now that four-star Texas commit is off to be a freshman Longhorn, leaving Yarnell as the No. 1 quarterback at a prominent high school football program - and, as of Thursday, a future Panther.
It’s clichéd to go too far in proclaiming the importance of a quarterback, but it’s still true: you have to get one in every class and ideally it would be a good one. After skipping on signing a quarterback last year - although getting Joey Yellen as a transfer kind of makes up for it - Mark Whipple now has one on the board for 2021.
The other commitment was Marco Fugar, an offensive lineman from Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale. He’s the second offensive line prospect in the class, joining Terrence Rankl, who committed last week, and with Fugar and Yarnell committed, Pitt has nine verbals for the class of 2021. While there is only one four-star prospect in the bunch, it’s good enough to push the Panthers to No. 26 nationally in the Rivals.com team recruiting rankings; things will probably even out as other teams get more commitments, but that’s a good place to be at the beginning of May.
Interestingly, I think the pandemic and resulting NCAA recruiting dead period have actually boosted recruiting for Pitt. That’s not to say this situation has been good for the Panthers, but in lieu of having practices and recruiting visits and on-the-road evaluations to tend to, the coaches really have one big thing to occupy their time professionally:
Recruiting.
That means lots of text messages, lots of direct messages, lots of FaceTime calls and regular phone calls and Zoom sessions and every other means of virtual communication. And I think it’s paying off. I can’t remember another time in the last 15 years when Pitt got six commitments in the month of April. But that’s what has happened this year, and as far as I can tell, it’s not happening for any particular reason other than the coaches and the recruits don’t have anything better to do.
So the coaches are recruiting like crazy and the recruits are buying in, and the result is a half-dozen April commitments.
Now, Pitt probably would have gotten most of those commitments in June anyway, so this has mostly just accelerated the cycle. But of all the memories we’ll take from the COVID-19 pandemic, one has to be that time Pitt recruiting got kind of nuts in the final week of April.
A rising star
One other recruiting news this week actually happened last week, but it became public this week when Virginia Beach (Va.) Ocean Lakes receiver Myles Alston had a Monday announcement for the commitment he made last Wednesday.
Alston is a good recruit on his own, but we’ll talk about him in a minute. First, I want to focus on the guy who recruited him:
Receivers coach Chris Beatty
We’ve talked about Beatty in this column before and he certainly gets a lot of good pub on the message boards. He deserves that good pub, too, because the guy has been every bit of the recruiter he was hyped to be when he was hired.
Pitt added him to the staff last January and he made his first impact when he was responsible for getting a bunch of top underclassmen from Virginia to visit spring camp two months later. Alston was one of those recruits who visited; so was Rodney Hammond, who committed to Pitt last fall.
Beatty was hired to help Pitt establish inroads in Virginia, a talent-rich state that has never been a stronghold for the Panthers. Now, after getting just three commitments from Virginia in the last six classes - and none since Wendell Davis in the class of 2018 - Pitt has three commits from the commonwealth with Alston, Hammond and Hampton Phoebus defensive end Trevion Stevenson.
Pitt’s never going to build entire classes on Virginia recruiting, but there’s enough talent there and it’s close enough to merit the investment of resources - provided you have a good recruiter working the area. And that’s what Pitt has in Beatty.
He’s not just good in Virginia, though. That’s where he’s from and it’s where he has the most connections, but he’s got natural talents as a recruiter that extend beyond geographic territories. Take last year’s class, for instance: Pitt didn’t sign anybody from Virginia, but that doesn’t mean Beatty wasn’t key in getting several members of the class.
Like Jordan Addison and Jaylon Barden. Neither of those receivers is from Virginia, but both cited Beatty as a key reason they committed to - and stuck with - Pitt. Those players stand out as two of the best recruits to sign with Pitt in the 2020 class, and a whole lot of the credit goes to Beatty.
The same could be said for this year. DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville (Md.) is Andre Powell’s territory, but Beatty was involved in getting a commitment from receiver Jaden Bradley last week.
Not surprisingly, Beatty is one of the members of Pitt’s staff who was approached about other job opportunities earlier in the offseason, but he’s worth every penny the Panthers are paying him.
TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE
Are the receivers being rebuilt?
The big appeal of hiring Beatty, at least for the public, was his recruiting prowess, and that has been proven out in the last 15 months. But he wasn’t brought in just for his abilities on the recruiting trail. He was also charged with rebuilding Pitt’s receiver room - both in recruiting and in coaching.
When Beatty joined Pitt’s staff, he inherited a position group that had Maurice Ffrench, Taysir Mack and a bunch of guys with not much on their resumes, either due to youth or a lack of productivity. Some of the younger players showed flashes last season, like Jared Wayne and Shocky Jacques-Louis, but an overall talent upgrade at the position is needed.
Last year’s class was a start. Addison and Barden are both ranked as three-star prospects, but they look like they could be the stars of the class, at least on the offensive side of the ball. Addison enrolled at Pitt in January and impressed coaches and teammates alike in the three practices the Panthers held before everything got put on hold.
Barden won’t get to Pitt until next month - if all goes as planned - but expectations are high for him, too. Mack, Wayne and Jacques-Louis figure to be the top three receivers for Pitt in 2020, but Addison and Barden will be on the field and have a chance to contribute quite a bit.
Throw in Aydin Henningham from the 2020 class and Myles Alston and Jaden Bradley for 2021 - plus probably one more receiver in this class - and you see what I’m talking about:
Six receivers over two classes represents a total rebuilding of the room, and the future of the position at Pitt is going to be born from those two classes, plus Wayne and Will Gipson in the 2019 class.
Really, I think there’s every reason to be optimistic about what those players can do at Pitt. Not all of them will be hits, of course; nobody bats 1.000 at a single position over three classes. But the potential is sky-high in that group.
And it’s needed, because Pitt’s receiving corps has been less than impressive since Tyler Boyd left early for the NFL after the 2015 season. Jester Weah put up impressive numbers with 870 yards and 10 touchdowns in 2016, but he only caught 36 passes and never really developed into a complete receiver. Quadree Henderson scored 10 touchdowns that season, too, but only one of those was a receiving touchdown.
Rafael Araujo-Lopes led Pitt in receiving each of the next two years before Maurice Ffrench set a school record with 96 receptions this past season. But even that number came with the caveat of Ffrench producing just 850 yards on those 96 catches.
Quite simply - and I’m not breaking news on this one - Pitt needs a lot more from its receivers. Beatty’s efforts in that regard will play out over the next few years. Ideally for the Panthers’ offense, that will start this year.
Why the holes on offense?
Carrying over that last theme and connecting it with a theme from last week…
I might be something of a contrarian by nature, but contrarians never like to think of themselves in such terms. I think we probably prefer to imagine ourselves as objective thinkers, if we’re being fancy, or simply skeptics. We hear a narrative and consider the counter-argument, perhaps even more than we consider the merits of the original narrative itself.
I fall into this category and I readily admit it. This is particularly true with Pitt recruiting, which probably isn’t surprising. I spend a ton of time on the message boards and I see the narratives that emerge among the fanbase. I agree with some of them and I find faults in others.
The notion that Pat Narduzzi’s offensive recruiting has lagged behind his staff’s work on defense…yeah, I can’t really argue that one.
This has been throw into particularly stark relief for me this week as I’ve been working on our Anatomy of a Position series. In that series, I’ve been tracing the origins of each position on Pitt’s 2020 roster to determine how it came to be in its current state.
Going through the offensive positions has been a bit rough. Quarterback is okay, but running back, receiver and tight end, in particular, have been kind of a mess.
The running backs were finally all Narduzzi recruits last season, and the result was the least productive Pitt rushing attack in 14 years. The receivers really haven’t been exceptional since Tyler Boyd left early for the NFL after the 2015 season. And the tight ends - where do you start with the tight ends? How about this stat:
The tight end recruits Pitt signed in the classes of 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 have combined for three career catches.
Six classes. Three catches.
That’s amazing. And bad. Amazingly bad.
Not all of those six classes were Narduzzi classes, but the final four were, so that’s going to fall on him.
Whether the future is better at tight end remains to be seen (there’s not a ton in the pipeline), but there are some encouraging signs at running back and receiver. Vincent Davis showed some game-breaking potential as a freshman last season, and current freshman Israel Abanikanda has a nice mix of size and speed that could translate to strong first-year production.
And at receiver, there’s a good chance of talent emerging this season. Taysir Mack, Shocky Jacques-Louis, Jared Wayne and the freshmen have some high ceilings. They’ve got a chance to really change the narrative on their position group in 2020.
ONE PREDICTION
If Pitt wins 10 games, the 2022 class will be in the top 20
Put this one in the “Things no one will remember 18 months from now” file, if you don’t mind. But hear me out.
There’s a certain kind of synergy that can happen sometimes for programs like Pitt, a near-perfect occasion when all the key elements come together to produce a really, really good recruiting class.
Element No. 1: A successful season
Element No. 2: A good recruiting staff
If you have one of those, you can put together a pretty solid recruiting class. But you’ll be lucky to get inside the top 30 and you’re probably don’t have a chance of cracking the top 20.
If you have both of those things, though, if you can match a successful season with a really good staff of recruiters, then you can strike while the iron is hot and capitalize. And right now, the iron is heating up for Pitt.
I know that we’ve seen and discussed the over/under win totals for the 2020 season and how Pitt’s number keeps coming in around 6.5, but I’m not buying it. Or, put another way, I am buying into Pitt this season. I’m buying into a really good defense that returns almost everyone. And, more importantly, I’m buying into an offense that returns a ton of experienced personnel and the coordinator, which should lead to improvement.
I’m buying into this season as one that gets out of the seven and eight-win rut. I’m buying into this season as one that pushes the nine and 10-win envelope.
And I’m also buying this staff. I talked about Chris Beatty earlier and we all know what Charlie Partridge can do. Having two guys like that on the staff is a huge start, and I think there are some others emerging as legit recruiters in their own right - guys like Cory Sanders or Archie Collins. And I think Pitt’s recruiting staff - the non-coaches who spend all of their time on recruiting - are as good as you’ll find in the country.
You see where I’m going here.
Pitt has the recruiting staff in place to capitalize if the on-field product is what it should be. And if that happens, you’ll see the class of 2022 reap the results. It’s always the next class after a successful season that really benefits, so a good year on the field in 2020 should most greatly affect the 2022 class.
So I’ll make my prediction: if Pitt wins 10 games in 2020, then the 2022 class will be ranked in the top 20.
