The 3-2-1 Column: Approaching the final 3, something positive, hoops & more
In this week's 3-2-1 Column, we're thinking about how Pat Narduzzi should approach the final three games, something positive from this season, the hoops team and more.
Make a change now
I’m going to suggest something that I know Pat Narduzzi won’t actually do, but I’m going to suggest it anyway.
I’m going to suggest that he make coaching changes during the season.
Now, he has never done this before - even when he has known that he’s going to make changes, he didn’t make them until after the season. I’m sure he knew he was going to fire Shawn Watson. And I’m sure he knew he was going to fire Mark Whipple after the 2020 season (even if Whipple didn’t ultimately get fired, and it’s curious to think about how making a midseason change that year would have cost Pitt Kenny Pickett and, ultimately, the ACC championship, but that’s another topic for another day).
Narduzzi knew he was going to make those changes at offensive coordinator, just like he probably knew he was going to make changes at offensive line and defensive line and wide receiver in the past. And my guess is that, right now, Narduzzi knows he’s going to make changes after this season, too.
As an aside, I really do believe Narduzzi will make changes. I don’t see the staff returning in full next season. My contention is this, though:
If Narduzzi is going to make changes, particularly at offensive coordinator, then now might be the time to do it.
Look, I’m not necessarily advocating for Narduzzi to fire anyone; I don’t particularly care to advocate for people to lose their jobs. But the performance of the offense this season has been of the variety that tends to get offensive coordinators fired, and if that’s the decision Narduzzi wants to make, then there’s a case to be made that he should make that decision sooner rather than later.
I’m not saying he should do it to give the fans some sign of his frustration, or for any reason other than this: the transfer portal opens the Monday after the conference championship games. By that point, you need to have an actionable plan and a clear path forward of how you’re going to approach the transfer portal. If you wait until the portal opens to actually start formulating your plan, then you’re already behind. This is not to suggest that anyone is tampering or doing anything against the rules. But you need to know - and there are ways to know - what spots you need to fill in the portal and who’s going to be available to fill them.
When it comes to Pitt, one of the biggest questions is going to be whether or not they go to the transfer portal for a quarterback yet again. I think there’s a decent chance that they do, and if that’s the case and if Narduzzi intends to change offensive coordinators, then the offensive coordinator should probably have some input in who the next transfer target is.
Now, we saw Frank Cignetti have more success with the quarterbacks he didn’t choose than the two quarterbacks he did, but that’s another topic for another day. If Narduzzi‘s going to change coordinators, and if he believes he needs a new quarterback in the room from the transfer portal , then it makes the most sense to have the new offensive coordinator offer input on who that quarterback should be. And in that scenario, you need the new offensive coordinator sooner rather than later so you can have a plan ready to go when the season ends.
Will Narduzzi be able to hire someone before the end of the regular season? Probably not, but the longer you wait, the more of a delay you’ll create in being aggressive with the transfer portal (unless Narduzzi intends to handle the pursuit of a quarterback himself again).
Things will happen fast this off-season. They need to happen fast. And they probably need to start happening soon.
Time to find out
There are a few purposes that these last three games will serve.
For starters, they will be a chance to salvage something - anything - from this season. There’s no way to make a good season, by any definition; even in 2007 and 2017, the best possible end-of-year scenarios didn’t change the complexion of the 11 games that preceded them. Those were great finishes, not great seasons, and I don’t think it’s very likely that Syracuse, Boston College or Duke will be ranked No. 2 in the nation, so that particular happy ending is off the table.
So we’re left to ask, what can be accomplished in these final three games? I think there are a few things, and here’s the top one:
Find out what you have at quarterback.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily require a wholesale course change (I already mentioned one course change), because the first thing you have to find out is what you have in Christian Veilleux.
In his four games as a starter, Veilleux has been…okay? That’s probably too broad. He has had his bright spots, but when lightning strikes, there’s an immediate moment of darkness that follows the flash, and Veilleux has had those dark points, too.
For every beautiful pass and well-timed touchdown, there have been a few questionable decisions and missed throws. Not all of those are his fault, but his propensity for occasionally putting up stat lines that are a little too close to what we saw in the first five games of the season creates enough doubt about his long-time viability as the starting quarterback.
That’s a lot of words to say that he has not been consistent enough to fully cement his position at Pitt. He’s been better than Phil Jurkovec was - his high points have been much higher - and he should have started much sooner than he did, but I don’t think the last four games have really convinced anyone that he’s the guy going forward.
For Veilleux, then, the next three games are a chance to do just that.
And let’s not forget Nate Yarnell. For whatever reason, he can’t buy a snap from this coaching staff, but in his extremely limited playing time he has extremely efficient:
12-of-17 (70.6%), 270 yards, 2 touchdowns.
Sure, there’s a lot of context to add to those stats. After all, he has played a grand total of 74 snaps and dropped back 18 times in his career; that's not exactly a representative sample size.
Then again, maybe it is. Maybe Yarnell has shown us - and the coaches - who he is with his play against Western Michigan, mostly, as well as UCLA and Notre Dame. We don’t know, do we?
Seems like it would be nice to find out.
I don’t know if the answer is to go into a full rotation between Veilleux and Yarnell, but I’m not opposed to it. I think if the coaches take the approach of, “We’ll try to get Nate some snaps,” then they’re never going to do it, mostly because this offense probably isn’t good enough to build a cushion to allow for that kind of willing substitution, and Syracuse, Boston College and Duke aren’t good enough to build a Notre Dame-like lead that gets the backups on the field.
So maybe there needs to be a planned rotation, perhaps every other quarter. That would be wild and pretty unprecedented for this staff, but hey, why not make it a true quarterback competition? It would allow you to find out two things:
1. Which one of these guys is better
2. Whether either one of them can play at a winning level in the ACC
I’m not saying the coaches should take an unserious approach to these final three games. They shouldn’t de-prioritize winning in the interest of testing the quarterbacks.
Put another way, I’m not saying they should F around.
I’m just saying they should find out.
The more things change
Four years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a 3-2-1 Column that covered a variety of topics.
The decommitment of Tee Denson from the 2020 recruiting class was fresh, so I wrote about that. And Pitt hoops had just opened the 2019-20 season by beating Florida State - remember that one? - so I talked a little basketball, too. Oh, and I closed the column by predicting that Pitt would finally beat North Carolina in football. I actually got that one right, so shout out to 2019 me for nailing a prediction (probably the first one in the history of 3-2-1 Column’s and possibly the last time it has happened. Momentous occasion).
But one thing I spent considerable time discussing in that column was a particular phenomena I was drawn to that season.
It was Nov. 8, 2019 - so, like, four years and two days ago - and Pitt was nine games into the season, beleaguered by a lackluster offense that was held back by a whole litany of unforced, self-inflicted correctable mistakes.
Sound familiar?
That year’s team was 6-3 after nine games, so quite a bit better record-wise than this year’s group. But after my prescient UNC prediction that saw the Panthers improve to 7-3, they proceeded to lose at Virginia Tech and in the regular-season finale at home against Boston College by a combined total of 54-19.
After scoring 34 points, including a touchdown in overtime, to beat the Tar Heels, the Panthers managed just one touchdown over the final two games. It was a miserable finish to a season that had a few high points - the UCF win, the North Carolina game - but hit some real lows as well.
Now, this year’s team and that’s year team have a whole host of different problems, chiefly separated by the distinction between Kenny Pickett and Phil Jurkovec/Christian Veilleux. And like I said, that year’s team was 7-3 at one point before finishing 8-5 with a not-very-encouraging win over Eastern Michigan in the bowl game. This year’s team is 2-7 and not going bowling except under the most unlikely of circumstances.
But the two teams do have some things in common.
An offense that is often an abject disaster - that’s one. Pitt’s offense has been terrible this year, but that 2019 offense wasn’t much better. In fact, prior to this season, it held the title for being the worst Pitt offense of the Narduzzi era.
And inside that bad offense and this one is a terrible propensity for shooting oneself in one’s foot.
That 2019 team was really bad at this. In the 3-2-1 Column from Nov. 8, 2019, I had this breakdown of unforced, self-inflicted errors, which I defined as the following:
Interceptions, offensive fumbles (both lost and recovered), dropped passes and false start penalties
Through nine games, the 2019 team had nine interceptions, eight fumbles, 27 dropped passes and 17 false starts for a total of 61 self-inflicted errors, or 6.8 per game.
Now for the comparison.
Through nine games, the 2023 team has 10 interceptions, 11 fumbles, 17 dropped passes and 26 false starts for a grand total of…drum roll, please…64 self-inflicted errors.
That’s 7.1 per game.
7.1 times every game that Pitt is just shooting itself in the foot, either handing the ball to the other team with a turnover, stopping its own progress on an individual play with a fumble it recovers or a pass it drops, or stopping its own progress on a drive with a false start penalty.
That false start stat is particularly infuriating. It’s simply focus. Sure, three of those came at Notre Dame and four were at West Virginia and three were at Virginia Tech; that’s somewhat understandable in those environments. But Pitt had five false start penalties at Wake Forest, and I’m pretty sure it gets louder at my house when we’re trying to get ready for school than it did in Winston-Salem that day. And that’s to say nothing of the 11 false starts Pitt has committed in home games.
Home games.
No wonder this offense can’t move the ball - they can’t get out of their own way.
In 2019, Pitt at least had Pickett and a really, really good defense, and they were able to make up for some of the issues. This team doesn’t have those elements (among others), so they have no such cushion for these things.
You might not have a great offense. You might struggle to run or throw consistently. You might have personnel problems on the offensive line and personnel decision problems at just about every other position.
But at the very least, you don’t have to go out of your way to help the other team’s defense by giving them the ball or giving them yards.
You might not play great. But you can at least play clean.
TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE
Is this a positive sign?
There aren’t a lot of positive signs to take from Pitt this season, but I think one has kind of quietly - or maybe not so quietly - emerged in the last few games.
It’s the wide receivers.
This is a funny position group for me to tout since I spent most of the summer and spring talking about how the wide receivers were possibly the weakest position group on the team. I had very little faith in this group and did not expect them to do much this year.
But in recent weeks, I think we’ve seen that not only is this wide receiver group not the weakest position on the team, but it’s actually turning into one of the more productive and consistent position groups on the team.
The turnaround is led by Bub Means, who was the original Bub hype train over the summer only to put in a pretty miserable performance and stat line in the first four games. His 11 targets and no catches against Cincinnati stand out as the worst but overall he was not very good in the first four games: 22 targets, 6 catches, 71 yards, no touchdowns.
Since then he’s been really good with 24 catches for 416 yards and four touchdowns over the last five games. Take that five-game stat line and project it over 12 games and you end up with somewhere around 58 catches for 998 yards and 10 touchdowns.
I think anyone would sign up for 58/998/10 stat line from the wide receivers. In fact, that would be the best stat line by a Pitt receiver since Jordan Addison in 2021 (last year Jared Wayne topped 1,000 yards but he caught just five touchdowns, so I would take that Means’ line). And before Addison, the last Pitt receiver to put up 900 yards and 10 touchdowns in a season was Greg Lee in 2004.
So we’re talking about a pretty short list of guys who have played at the level Means has reached in the last five games.
Has he been the most consistent wide receiver? No. He still seems to have an odd habit of pulling up on routes or slowing down and causing a pass to look overthrown even though if he continued to run, it likely would’ve dropped right in his hands. But he’s made enough impressive catches and enough impressive plays - including multiple touchdown catches that were far better than anything he or anyone else did last year - that I’m willing to say he’s having a good season.
And beyond him, Konata Mumpfield continues to be perhaps the most underrated player on this team. I felt that coming into the season and feel it now, too, where he just continues to be a very, very solid pass-catcher, a good route-runner and generally a very good player.
The more Pitt throws him the ball, the more good things happen (the end of that long play against Florida State notwithstanding, but even on that one, you can tell your friends that you watched a player catch an 82-yard pass from the 18 that wasn’t a touchdown).
Beyond Means and Mumpfield, you’ve got Kenny Johnson, a star freshman who looks like he’s going to be a stud, and Daejon Reynolds, who is really solid as well. That’s a top four that’s pretty good.
And what’s best is, all of those guys can come back next year if they are so inclined. Of course, we’ll see what the transfer portal thinks about that, and certainly there will be some conversations about the future for some of those guys. But for now, Pitt has the makings of a really solid receiving core coming back in 2024 - plus the other freshmen who haven’t even really played much this year, like Lamar Seymore and Israel Polk and Zion Fowler-El, who all seem to have bright futures.
I can’t say there are many positions on offense that I feel better about now than I did before the season, but wide receiver is one of them.
How can we not overreact?
Let’s talk a little bit of hoops here, and let’s do it with the question I’ve been asking all week:
How can we not overreact to the season opener against North Carolina A&T on Monday night? I mean, I feel like we really don’t have an option here.
I’m just doing the math. You’ve got a team that broke through last year and returned its best player as well as three of its most exciting young players. That team added two veteran transfers and really only entered the season with question marks in the back court.
And that back court just produced the fifth triple-double in school history.
The biggest question facing the team may not have been fully answered on Monday night, but I think we started filling in the little circle, even if we’re not quite ready to put the paper in the Scantron just yet.
Bub Carrington just looked special in that game. I know we have to offer all the regular caveats about it only being North Carolina A&T and how the Aggies are potentially one of the worst teams in Division I and all of that - and yes, those caveats are relevant and worth considering - but the reality is, Pitt has played bad teams before, and nobody in the last 25 years was able to put up a triple-double against them. No Pitt team in the last seven years was able to score 100 points. Hell, we’ve even seen some Pitt teams lose to low-majors in the past few years. So I don’t think we should take anything for granted.
Like Carrington’s play. It was just so effortless, the way he seemingly cruised to 18 points, 12 rebounds and 10 assists. He was in control from the very start, with four assists on Pitt’s first four baskets, and then, like he did in the exhibition game, when he moved off the ball to give Jaland Lowe some minutes at point guard, Carrington showed his playmaking ability by draining baskets and finishing drives.
He’s really good; I think we’re all convinced of that now. And if his ceiling really is as high as it looks like it will be, adding him to the mix with Blake Hinson and Federiko Federiko and the twins and the transfers - whew, it’s tough not to overreact.
It’s tough not to shoot those expectations through the roof.
The thing is, I’m not exactly sure where those expectations should be. I think they should be pretty high. As high as what last year’s team achieved? Higher? I don’t know. This whole section of the column is an overreaction, so I probably shouldn’t go too deep on expectations and predictions.
But I think this year’s Pitt team is bigger, faster and more athletic than last year’s. They don’t have as much experience, and it remains to be seen if they have that extra something that Nelly Cummings and Jamarius Burton brought to the table.
But they have a lot, and after Monday night, it feels like they might have even more than we thought.
ONE PREDICTION
The success can be sustained
Here’s another thing I’m going to overreact to, but I really do believe in this.
Since last season ended, we’ve all been wondering if 2022-23 was a one-off or the start of something sustainable. I know I’ve been wondering, and along with that, I’ve been wondering what Jeff Capel and his staff can do and need to do to sustain it.
Inevitably, those thoughts drift back to Pitt’s last stretch of sustained success. What worked back then? How did Pitt elevate itself to the level of the blue bloods in terms of being one of the top teams in the country on a year in and year out basis?
A big part - maybe the biggest part - was linkage. From team to team and roster to roster, a culture was established and passed down. Each group of players learned how to win from the players that came before them, and every time there was roster turnover, the new group stepped into the roles vacated by the players who left, and it worked because the new leaders learned from the old leaders.
Linkage. That was Jim Calhoun’s word for it when he was asked how Pitt built sustained success, and I reference that often because I think it’s maybe the most succinct explanation of what the Panthers built way back when.
So when I started trying to figure out if this year’s team could pick up where last year’s team left off, I started thinking about linkage. Would Capel and his staff be able to create a culture where the things that worked last year could be passed down to this year’s team, even after losing some big leaders?
Well..
“It’s really just communication and trust. I’m telling you, it really goes a long way. Like, these guys - first of all, I trust these guys, because I’ve seen them do it. I watched them all last year and I’ve seen what they can do. I’ve seen the camaraderie they had as a team. And then I step in and they share that same momentum with me. They trust me to get them the ball or whatever the case may be, and I trust them to finish the play. It was kind of like we meshed together, just a team built off communication and trust.”
That was a quote from Bub Carrington after Monday’s game. The things he saw from Pitt last year made an impact on him - and they continue to make an impact on him.
And it wasn’t just watching the team from afar. There was direct interaction between last year’s leaders and this year’s group, according to Capel.
“You know, I thought it was great that, for the majority of the summer, Nelly, Greg and Jamarius were here. And there would be times when I would come in my office and I would see Greg working the freshmen out, like doing stuff with them. I would see Nelly grabbing them and talking to them. They’d play pickup and I’d see J.B. talking to them. So you have guys that have ownership. They have ownership. They didn’t want to just be good last year; they want us to continue to be good. The guys that were a part of that last year, they want us to continue to be good. The new guys that we have, they want to be good. They’re kind of smart, so they listen to the guys that were here and that accomplished - you heard Bub say that.”
I talked to Nelly Cummings himself on Thursday when I went to Lincoln Park to see Brandin Cummings, Nelly’s younger brother, sign his Letter of Intent with Pitt. I asked Nelly about how Brandin will fit in at Pitt. Check out this answer.
“I think he fits right into it. It’s a culture thing, you know? It’s a hard-working team, blue collar type of team. We’re all going to grind, we want it the hard way; that’s how we like to do things at Pitt, so I think my brother fits right into that because he’s going to come in and do whatever is needed to win games, and I think Coach Capel and his staff are going to be very, very happy with what he can bring.”
Great insight on Brandin, but you know what else stands out?
“We”
First-person plural pronoun. With some present-tense verbs. Geek out over the grammar, because it’s pretty loaded.
That’s the ownership Capel talked about. Nelly Cummings isn’t watching the team from afar. He doesn’t see himself as separate from the team.
He’s part of the team. He’s still part of the team.
I think that’s huge. The culture that Nelly Cummings and Jamarius Burton and the rest established last year didn’t end when those guys left the program - because they’re still a part of it. Carrington and Jaland Lowe and Zack Austin and Ishmael Leggett didn’t join a program looking to establish a culture; they joined a program that has a culture, and they learned about it from the players who built it in the first place.
“All of those guys,” Nelly went on to tell me, “we worked out with them pretty much the whole summer because we stayed here while we we”re training for our pro careers, so I think you saw a lot of the same things that I’m talking about with my brother: that grit and that determination to be great. I think when you have that and you have a culture that supports that, you see what can happen.”