In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about Justin Champagnie testing the waters, Abdoul Karim Coulibaly transferring, quarterback questions, one-year wonders and more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Hoops news, pt. 1
Some not-so-good news on the Pitt basketball front this week.

And that’s not the first time we’ve started one of these columns that way.

This week’s news wasn’t entirely unexpected, though. You’ve seen it by now: Justin Champagnie is entering the NBA Draft process, which is not to say that he’s entering the NBA Draft. He’s just entering the NBA Draft process, an important distinction that affords him the opportunity to return to college.

This is a luxury the NFL does not offer prospective professional football players, but it should, because this really is to the benefit of the players.

Champagnie will now have a chance to work out for NBA teams and participate in the NBA combine and get an evaluation from the NBA Undergraduate Advisory Committee and even sign with an agent to assist in the process, all with the door still open to come back to Pitt for another year.

So what will the next three months look like for Champagnie? At this point, there are a lot of unknowns. The NBA combine and the NBA Draft have not been scheduled; those will be two key dates, because if a player like Champagnie wants to pull out of the Draft and go back to college, he has to inform the NBA within 10 days of the conclusion of the combine.

Of course, as with all things over the last 12 months, the details of the combine are very much up in the air. Last year, with everything off the rails, the combine was held virtually from late September until mid-November.

I don’t know if that will be the case this year. My guess is the NBA would want to return to its previous format. In 2019, that meant holding the combine on May 16-17 and the Draft on June 20. Similar dates in 2021 would give Champagnie about two months to figure out if the NBA is his best bet or if he would benefit most from another year at Pitt.

I don’t know what Champagnie is going to choose. I don’t have any insight on his decision-making process, and while my gun-to-the-head guess is that he will go, I’m not leaning that way by a lot.

The most insight I have on Champagnie is this: he’s making the obvious move. When you average a double-double in a high-major conference - when you’re the only player to average a double-double in a high-major conference this season - you have to test the waters. I think there’s plenty for Champagnie to improve on; some of it he could accomplish at Pitt, some he could work on at the next level. But it makes all the sense in the world for him to take the no-risk option and see what kind of feedback he gets from the NBA.

In the meantime, you, me and Jeff Capel will be waiting to see what Champagnie decides.

Hoops news, pt. 2
The Champagnie news was expected.

The Coulibaly news was not.

Wednesday brought a bit of a surprise on the basketball front when Pitt announced that Abdoul Karim Coulibaly would be entering the transfer portal.

I did not see that coming, and I’m guessing you didn’t either. I can’t imagine many people outside of the Pitt basketball program expected it, and maybe even a few inside the program were caught off-guard.

This is a guy who started 20 of 22 games this season and averaged 22.5 minutes per game. He wasn’t terribly productive in those minutes - 5.2 points and 3.9 rebounds per game - but he was playing a lot and had the center position locked down on a roster without many options at that spot.

Which is to say, he was Pitt’s No. 1 center this past season and figured to be in the same role next year (pending incoming transfers, of course).

There’s been some suggestion that Coulibaly’s role could have been a source of his discontent, that perhaps he didn’t want to play the center position and saw himself as more of a power forward.

Okay. That’s fine. If that’s how Coulibaly sees himself, then go for it. Pursue a future elsewhere. Coulibaly’s certainly not alone in that pursuit. Every day, dozens of players go into the transfer portal. And that’s not an exaggeration either; the website VerbalCommits.com listed 42 new entries in the portal on Wednesday.

That’s one Wednesday in middle of March. The total number in the portal is now approaching 900 and will almost certainly clear 1,000 by the time the NCAA Tournament ends.

I imagine that you could look at a lot of the players in the portal and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got a significant role at your school; why are you leaving?’ And I don’t know if you would get many satisfactory answers. My guess is, like Coulibaly, a lot of these players simply feel like they could find a better situation.

So they’re going. Maybe it’s wilting in the face of adversity or cutting-and-running when things get tough. Maybe it’s a personality clash with the coaching staff or the roster. Maybe it’s a feeling of not being used the right way. And maybe they just don’t feel like being in the place you’ve been.

Whatever the reason, players are on the move in numbers we’ve never seen before. Imagine 1,000 players switching teams in a single offseason. Even if we’re including Division II, that’s an incredible number.

I won’t quite go so far as to say it’s ruining college basketball, but it’s certainly changing the game. And while I don’t think we’ll see numbers like this every year, the tide of player movement - some might call it player freedom - isn’t going to ebb anytime soon. Guys like Coulibaly, who seem to have a pretty solid situation, are going to keep leaving for pastures that at least present the possibility of being greener.

The middle ground
This is a pretty lame point to make, I admit, but I do think there's a middle ground here where most sides of the discussion on Pitt basketball can meet right now.

Abdoul Karim Coulibaly was not a key foundational piece of Pitt's future, but he was a hard worker who could have continued developing into a solid player at a position where Pitt doesn't have a lot right now.

Coulibaly's transfer, in and of itself, was not a death knell for Pitt basketball, but it doesn't look good to have a starter who was seeing significant minutes leave without any tangible indication that he felt those minutes were threatened.

It's not good for Pitt to have four players in the transfer portal (five, if we're counting Terrell Brown, and I think that's debatable; you can include him if you want to make the numbers sound more ominous) but this is also the way of the sport right now. New names are added to the transfer portal every day, well past the point of saturation, and it seems like every program in the country is feeling the effects right now.

Each of these transfers - Coulibaly, Gerald Drumgoole, Xavier Johnson and Au’Diese Toney - probably happened for their own reasons, mostly independent of each other, which would seem to point to a series of non-systemic issues. But taken as a whole, it doesn't necessarily reflect well on the state of the program.

I think all of these things are true. I think you can believe all of these things without contradicting yourself. Just like I believe you can consider this situation and think, "Boy, that doesn't look good" and also think, "I guess we'll see what the roster looks like six months from now." I'm pretty sure they will have more than six players on scholarship in September, because just as the transfer portal has taken away, so will it giveth.

Ideally, the players that come in from the transfer portal will be equal to or above the production of the players who went into it. Ideally, Pitt’s offseason additions will not just fill roster spots but actually improve the roster. Ideally, Pitt will come out on the better end of things six months from now.

But until we actually see what that result looks like, I feel like everyone would do well to just live in the middle ground for a bit. None of this is great news; nor is any of it the end of the world. If anything, Pitt’s contributions to and intended withdrawals from the transfer portal simply put the Panthers in line with the rest of college basketball.

The trend of transfers is turning things upside down this offseason for everybody. And for all the schools who have been impacted, there’s really only one course of action:

See how it turns out in the end.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Which one of these quarterbacks can play?
Let’s talk football for a bit, where things are at least a little more stable.

First things first: it’s an undeniable positive for Pitt to get Kenny Pickett back.

We said that when Pickett made his announcement and I don’t think anyone disagreed. I mean, I’m sure somebody disagreed - there are a lot of disagreeable people out there - but, on the whole, Pickett’s decision to come back to Pitt for the 2021 season was well-received. And it should be: Pickett solidifies the most important position on the field. That’s a good thing.

But there’s another side to it, one that doesn’t overshadow the positive of Pickett coming back, but it does offer a little bit of a dark cloud.

Because while 2021 was likely to be a real crapshoot without Pickett, it would have at least given us some sense of what Pitt has at quarterback. We’ve seen little bits and pieces of Nick Patti, Joey Yellen and Davis Beville at various points over the last two seasons. Despite some flashes - Patti’s relief appearance against UCF in 2019 or Yellen’s play at Miami last season - none of it has been overwhelmingly good. “Just okay” is probably the best praise we could offer, and really, that’s mostly an overstatement.

This season, though, we were going to find out. Patti, Yellen and Beville were going to show us what they can do, and we would have a clear idea of what Pitt actually has at quarterback.

Now, thanks to Pickett’s return, that proverbial can has been proverbially kicked down the proverbial road.

I’m not lamenting Pickett’s return, of course. This is a crucial season for Pat Narduzzi and he needs all hands on deck. But in terms of the future, Pickett’s return means we’re not going to know for awhile.

And so we’re asking a question today that we’ll still be asking a year from now (and maybe we’ll be asking in the fall if something happens to necessitate a quarterback change).

I think that Beville probably has the highest ceiling of the three. He’s big, can run a bit and has a good arm. That seems like a solid combination.

Yellen intrigued me in the Miami game. He didn’t show a ton of arm strength, but I thought he put some nice touch on his passes - maybe even better touch than Pickett shows. Then came the Notre Dame game, though, and that put a dent in the optimism about Yellen.

Patti is..I mean, Patti is Patti. I think he has looked good running the offense, even in the aforementioned Notre Dame loss. But I don’t know where his potential really is.

There’s also Nate Yarnell, the true freshman who enrolled in January and is participating in spring camp. He’s not likely to be a factor this season, but by next March, he’ll have a full year of college football under his belt, and there’s no reason to think he can’t compete with Beville, Yellen and Patti.

That will be interesting, if nothing else. But it will still be a question that we thought would get answered this year. Instead, we’ll have to wait.

What will become of the one-year wonders?
In the aftermath of Pro Day last week, as we’ve continued to process the testing results and interviews and whatnot, I’ve been thinking about a few of the guys in Pitt’s potential 2021 Draft class.

Two guys, in particular, are interesting to me: Paris Ford and Jaylen Twyman.

Those two guys are interesting for a lot of reasons. They both were really good at Pitt, as you know. But they were both also really good at Pitt for just one year. They played more than one season each, but they still only had one standout season.

In both cases, that standout season was 2019. Ford recorded 97 tackles, three interceptions and three forced fumbles in 2019; for the rest of his career - 2017-20 - he had 50 tackles and three picks. 97 of his 147 career tackles, half of his career interceptions and all three of his career forced fumbles were in 2019.

Twyman was the same way: 41 tackles, 12 tackles for loss and 10.5 sacks in 2019. That’s outstanding. But he redshirted in 2017 (as did Ford), had just 16 tackles, 1.5 TFL and 0.5 sacks in 2018 and opted out of 2020.

13.5 career tackles for loss, 12 of which came in 2019. 11 career sacks, 10.5 of which came in 2019.

I’m not sure what to make of that, to be honest. I don’t doubt the ability when it comes to Twyman or Ford. I think both guys can play at a high level. But I wonder how the relatively small sample sizes impact their pro prospects, or at least their perceived pro prospects.

In Ford’s case, there’s at least some indication that he would have had another productive season in 2020. He was well on his way with 45 tackles, 3.5 tackles for loss and three interceptions through seven games before he left the team at midseason.

Then again, the midseason “opt-out” could potentially have a negative impact. We’ll see.

I was trying to think of other guys whose splash at Pitt was big but isolated to one season. Quadree Henderson comes to mind. His breakout year was when he scored 10 touchdowns - four rushing, six returns - as a sophomore in 2016. He followed that performance with just two scores in 2017 and decided to go to the NFL after that.

I can’t really think of another good example. Greg Lee came to mind, but while his 2005 season (49 catches for 962 yards and 7 touchdowns) didn’t live to 2004 (69 catches, 1,297 yards, 10 touchdowns), it was still pretty good and he accomplished more than Ford or Twyman or Henderson did in their follow-up seasons.

Now, I’m not saying Ford or Twyman are in the same situation as Henderson. 2020 was the Unique Year of all unique years. Even the natures of their individual post-breakout drop-offs were all unique. But I do think all three of those players left behind the question of what-might-have-been.

What might have been for Henderson if Matt Canada hadn’t left? What might have been for Twyman if he decided to come back and play as a redshirt junior? What might have been for Ford if he had finished the 2020 season? And, of course, what might have been for Pitt if all of those things had happened?
We’ll never know the answers, but I’m sure we’ll keep asking.

ONE PREDICTION

We’re not out of the woods yet
This isn’t really a prediction, but sometimes there are topics we want to cover in the 3-2-1 Column, and they don’t all fit the observations-questions-prediction model. I’ll try to be creative and find some way to spin this into a prediction, but the relevant matter is this:

Just when you think you’re clear, just when you think you’ve found a way to get back to whatever counts as normalcy these days, the reality of life in 2020-and-now-2021 rears up and smacks you in the face.

Maybe that’s too harsh. Pitt’s announcement this week that it had paused football activities due to COVID-19 protocols wasn’t exactly a smack in a face. It was a light shove, a nudge that pushed us back toward the blackboard.

And written there, in less dire but no less important terms, was this message:

It’s not over yet.

We thought it was over. Or maybe not over, but at least past the point of things like this happening. Past the point of football activities being paused, which felt a little too reminiscent of last fall’s suspended game at Georgia Tech, which led directly to double-digit players missing the following week’s matchup with Virginia Tech.

That was the incident that came to mind for me this week. I remembered how things were really going smoothly in the fall. Pitt had some players miss the first two games of the season, but then it all ran pretty well.

Then came the planned trip to Atlanta, which was called off two days before the game and immediately reminded us of just how tenuous everything was.

Now, amidst talk of vaccines and dropping case rates (which sometimes don’t drop) and reopening and in-person school and the rest, it was easy to lose sight of that tenuousness, to forget how quickly things can be taken away.

It’s just spring football; I know that. But it’s more: it’s sports getting cancelled. Again. More than a year after the first conference tournaments were called off, we’re still having to cancel or postpone sporting events.

We’re close, but we’re not there yet. Pitt will get back on the field soon, I’m sure. Probably next week. And from there, we’ll see what happens.

Maybe that will be my prediction:

This week’s pause will be Pitt’s final COVID-related pause. The Panthers will get past this, and by the time they start training camp in August, the team will be vaccinated and they won’t have any more interruptions.