The 3-2-1 Column: Commits, decommits, camp optimism and more

In this week's 3-2-1 Column, we're talking about the joys of camp, two new commitments, a decommitment and much more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

The beauty of camp
Training camp is great.

It really is. At the beginning, at least. Later in camp, two weeks from now when the real doldrums of summer have set in and the real games still feel like they’re a long ways away - at that point, camp won’t be so great anymore.

But right now, camp is great.

Because you know what comes with training camp?

Training camp optimism.

It’s not hard to trace the roots of this particular phenomena. We haven’t had actual college football for eight months. All we’ve had is board room meetings and realignment threats and occasionally interesting hot mics. And when you go that long without any football, your brain starts to do weird things.

It starts thinking that great things are possible.

It starts breeding optimism.

It starts forgetting about some of the reasons the team lost games last season. Or, if those reasons aren’t forgotten, the brain starts thinking about the reasons why those issues will be corrected and improved on this season.

The quarterback was a problem last year, but the quarterback this year? It’s gonna be good, you see. He worked with the coordinator before. They have that connection, that rapport, where the coordinator knows what the quarterback likes to run and the quarterback knows what the coordinator likes to call.

The receivers were a letdown last year, but this year? You should see these guys. One of them looks like he was built in a lab and the other one is going to break out now that he’s got a year of Power Five football under his belt. And don’t get me started on the freshmen.

All of the experienced offensive linemen are back. The top tight end has adjusted to playing the role he moved into last year (plus he’s got some new talent around him).

The defense is replacing six starters, but almost all of the replacements have playing experience, and I think we can trust this staff when it comes to defensive evaluation, recruiting and development. There’s plenty of evidence to support that.

Finally getting football back can even take your brain to the point of celebrating special teams. Like how the kicker made 15 of his final 16 field goals last year and the punters are bound to be better because those dudes were punting into the ceiling this spring.

The ceiling!

See what I mean? It’s the start of training camp. Everybody looks great. Everybody’s in sync. Everybody’s locked in. Everybody had a great offseason and followed it with the best first day of camp in history. Everybody knows this team is capable of great things.

That was the word out of Media Day on Wednesday, and damned if I didn’t catch some of the fever as I sat there and interviewed like 18 players and coaches over the course of two hours.

They believe it, or at least they said they did, so I will, too.

For now.

Because it’s camp, when nobody has lost a game and everybody is a champion.

Training camp is great.

Some positive recruiting news
I don’t mean to put two commitments into one section of the column, especially when we’re going to spend the next two sections of the column talking about a decommitment. But this is just how the space worked out, so we’ll cover them both here.

Pitt’s first new commitment came last Saturday when four-star running back Yasin Willis announced for the Panthers. We believe Willis actually committed to Pitt during his official visit in June but waited until the very end of July before he announced.

No matter the timing, the end result was the same:

Willis committed to Pitt.

He’s a big-time running back prospect, a 6’1” 220-pound back who has a bit of explosiveness to go with his obvious power. Alabama was a top suitor in his recruitment, and it’s not hard to see why. He’s got the kind of build that seems to define so many of the Crimson Tide’s running backs in recent years.

Willis is a big get for Pitt and arguably one of the top commitments the Panthers landed in June (I still think Caleb Holmes is No. 1 in that regard, but Willis isn’t far behind).

Two days after Willis announced for Pitt, he was joined by the Panthers’ quarterback in the 2024 class:

Julian Dugger

We’ve talked a lot about Dugger over the last month. A lot. We’ve talked about him on Morning Pitt episodes and in recruiting articles and on the message boards and probably in a 3-2-1 Column at one point or another. So I don’t need to go through my whole spiel on why he makes sense for the Panthers.

I’ll try to be as succinct as possible:

Dugger is a 6’3” 205-pound quarterback with a big arm and enough athleticism to dunk a basketball.

How’s that?

No, he doesn’t have any other Power Five offers (he’s barely got any other FBS scholarships). No, he isn’t a top-ranked quarterback in his class. No, he wasn’t terribly productive as a junior at Penn Hills.

But he’s got the things you can’t teach and he’s been spending a whole lot of time lately working on the things you can (former NFL quarterback and WPIAL standout Mike McMahon has been training him for the last six months).

Would it be better for Pitt to land a more polished quarterback who is further along in his development? Somebody who is more likely to come in and be ready to play in 2024 or 2025?

Sure, of course it would.

But that’s not who Pitt landed, and I think that’s okay. The Panthers have Christian Veilleux for another two years after this one, and as long as he’s good, that gives the coaches some leeway. And the fact that there will pretty much always be another Veilleux available in the transfer portal means that high school quarterback recruiting can look different.

I’ve said a few times that I think there’s very little downside to taking Dugger, and there’s a chance for pretty considerable upside. It’s going to be really interesting to watch his senior season and see how the offseason of individualized quarterback training impacted him work on the field.

All in all, I think landing Willis and Dugger was a pretty good one-two punch for Pitt’s class and some much-needed good news.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

How did Pitt lose DayDay?
Lest there was too much good news early this week, the commitments of Willis on Saturday and Dugger on Monday were offset on Tuesday by a decommitment when four-star receiver Ric’Darious Farmer announced he was backing off of his Pitt pledge.

Actually he didn’t post that he was decommitting from Pitt. He posted that he was committing to Central Florida. The part about decommitting from Pitt was just assumed, I suppose.

But that’s neither here nor there. The end result is what’s here, and now Farmer is there - with “there” being Central Florida.

I can’t say this was a huge shock. Farmer’s commitment to Pitt was tenuous from the start. When he gave his verbal pledge on Christmas Day last December, he almost immediately started talking about how his recruitment was still open and that he would look at other schools.

And that’s exactly what he did, visiting schools in the spring before taking official visits to UCF and West Virginia ahead of his June trip to Pitt. The prospect of losing him always lurked out there, and by the end of June, it felt fairly likely that he would decommit.

Such is recruiting, it seems. Farmer is not the first recruit to decommit from Pitt in the 2024 class. Chasen Johnson also flipped from the Panthers to Central Florida, and there’s a fairly strong indication that Koy Beasley gave the Pitt coaches a verbal pledge before announcing his commitment to Purdue.

Chances are, Farmer won’t be the last decommit either. Pitt has 21 public commitments right now, and you’re not going to get good value if you bet on the class losing one or two more guys. It’s just the nature of things at this point in time.

I mean, there have always been decommitments, but the trend has really picked up since 2018, when the NCAA first started allowing spring/early summer official visits. That first year, Pitt landed nine commitments from June official visitors, and three of them decommitted.

The next year, the Panthers lost three of their 14 June official visit commitments. And the trend has continued: in four total recruiting classes (the classes of 2019, 2020, 2022 and 2023, since the 2021 class couldn’t take visits due to the Covid-19 pandemic), Pitt landed 48 commitments from June official visitors, and a quarter of them - 12 exactly - decommitted and signed with others schools.

So far this year, Pitt has gotten 12 June commitments (if we include Beasley) and lost two of them. That’s slightly off the pace of losing 25%, but not by much, and it’s not hard to imagine one or two of the other June commits ending up somewhere else.

I don’t want to be the meme of a dog drinking coffee in the middle of a fire saying “This is fine” so I won’t call it fine. I’ll just call it the way of things nowadays. We might as well accept that a few decommitments every year are part of the process.

At least Farmer was nice enough to soften the blow with months of obvious signs of his intentions.

How much does Farmer’s decommitment hurt?
Pitt will be fine without DayDay Farmer.

Okay, that may or may not be true. I just wanted to make a little reference to the message boards.

I don’t know what Farmer will be in his college career, which is now tentatively scheduled to take place at the University of Central Florida.

We’ll see what Farmer does in college. He might be good and he might not be. What I do know, though, is that Pitt needed a good receiver haul in the 2024 class, and Farmer’s decommitment hurts that cause.

The Panthers did well in 2023 with a four-man class of Kenny Johnson and Lamar Seymore and Israel Polk and Zion Fowler; I think there will be some really good players in that group. But the state of Pitt’s receiver room is such that one good class wasn’t going to be enough to rebuild it.

We’ve spent enough time this summer bemoaning Pitt’s receiver roster. There are a lot of reasons why things are the way they are, but when you list the top three receivers on the team and they’re all transfers, that doesn’t exactly speak well of the situation or the recruiting that got you to this point.

If Pitt’s recruiting had produced redshirt senior receivers for this year’s roster, they would have come from the 2019 class. The Panthers signed Jared Wayne and Will Gipson that year, and they’re both gone.

Fourth-year players this year would have come from the 2020 recruiting class. Pitt signed Jordan Addison, Jaylon Barden and Aydin Henningham that year; Addison’s in the NFL, Barden is at Georgia Southern and Henningham is playing linebacker.

The 2021 class brought Jaden Bradley and Myles Alston; they both left this offseason - Bradley to Charlotte and Alston to Old Dominion.

2022’s class of Addison Copeland and Che Nwabuko are still here, although neither saw the field as true freshmen last season.

That pretty much brings us up to the present day. Seven receivers signed over three classes that should provide the upperclassmen for the 2023 roster, and they’re all gone.

That’s why Pitt will have three transfers in the starting lineup this season. And why Pitt needed a big class in 2023. And why the staff needed to follow that class with another good one this year.

To me, that’s the biggest takeaway from Farmer’s decommitment: it’s a blow to the ongoing rebuilding efforts in the receiver room.

ONE PREDICTION

Pitt will outperform its preseason ranking
This prediction isn’t about Phil Jurkovec. It’s not about Pitt’s reloading defense. It’s not about Miami or North Carolina or N.C. State. It’s not about the schedule and overrated opponents.

It’s not about anything that specific.

It’s about history.

Pitt’s history.

Pitt’s history of being pretty consistently under-ranked in the preseason and, pretty much without fail, outperforming those preseason expectations.

This isn’t something that has happened once or twice. This is something that has happened in seven out of Narduzzi’s eight seasons at Pitt. In seven out of the last eight years, the Panthers have finished higher in the ACC than the preseason rankings gave them credit for.

Now, we’re just going by records there; if we bring head-to-head tiebreakers in, maybe Pitt finishes a spot or two lower. But if we go with the records, the Panthers have been better in just about every year under Narduzzi.

There are a few things at play when we talk about preseason rankings and where Pitt ends up. One is that other teams in the conference probably tend to get a bit more credit than they deserve and end up underperforming (ahem, Miami).

The other thing is that, for whatever reason, Pitt gets overlooked by media in the conference. Maybe they’re just constantly predicting that the Panthers will take a step back from prior success. Maybe they view that prior success as fraudulent or unsustainable. Maybe they just don’t think about Pitt at all.

But it seems to me that there’s a pattern.

Like winning percentage. That’s a pattern, particularly over an eight-year sample. And in this particular eight-year sample, Pitt has the ACC’s second-best winning percentage in conference games.

Clemson, of course, is the leader with a .923 win percentage since 2015 (that’s what happens when you only lose five games in eight years). But right after the Tigers come your Panthers, who are 41-25 in ACC games in the last eight seasons for a winning percentage of .621 that edges out Miami, who has gone 40-25 for a .615 clip.

Nobody else has a winning percentage better than .530.

If you split the ACC into “Clemson and everybody else,” Pitt has, by just about every measure, been the best of the “everybody else category.” The best winning percentage. Two division titles. The only team to win the whole damn conference. And responsible for two of Clemson’s five losses over that span.

And yet, there’s Pitt, tied with Duke for sixth in the 2023 preseason poll.

So my prediction here is pretty simple:

Pitt will outperform its preseason ranking.

Just like every other year since 2015.