The 3-2-1 Column: Early commits, recruiting tactics, Pickett and more

In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re talking about good NCAA rules, tactical decisions, valuable commits, the staying power of a commitment and a lot more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

The NCAA got it right
It’s not often that those words are uttered in sincerity, but here we are.

On Wednesday, the NCAA announced that players who appear in four games or less in a season can still take a redshirt for that year. The rule change was met with almost unanimous approval - I say “almost” because I’m sure there’s somebody out there who has an issue with it; there’s somebody somewhere who has an issue with everything - and it’s hard to find much in the way of faults.

Injuries are obviously one big area that gets affected by this rule change; players who get hurt in the fourth game of the year can use a redshirt (provided they haven’t already used one). That’s a nice save for guys who lose their season before it’s even a third of the way over.

But there were already mechanisms in place to account for early-season injuries, so that’s only a minor shift.

What’s really notable to me is that this rule will give coaches a little more flexibility in testing freshmen to see if they’re ready. We’ve seen plenty of instances where Pitt coaches have used freshmen early in a season only to find out that they’re not really ready for that stage yet, so the players sit and essentially waste a year.

It’s not necessarily anyone’s fault when that happens. Coaches watch the freshmen through training camp and see who is making progress, who is picking up the scheme, who is taking to coaching and - this is the important one - who seems like they will continue to progress to the point of being ready to contribute at some point during the season.

That’s the key: projection. Few freshmen come out of training camp ready to go right off the bat. In most cases, the coaches are looking at what the player did in August and how much they progressed and then trying to project if that player will be able to really help four games into the season or six games into the season or eight games into the season.

If they think that will happen, then they’ll use the player early and often, which is what they’ve done in recent years with guys like AJ Davis (a touchdown and a couple fourth-down conversions in his first game), Tyler Sear (a key third-down catch in his first game) and Amir Watts. They all played early in their freshman seasons because the Pitt coaches believed they were on the right track.

But when they didn’t progress as expected, the staff was stuck: keep playing a young player who’s not ready yet or let his redshirt burn away on the sidelines?

Every coach has those experiences, and they usually make coaches loathe to use freshmen they aren’t 100% sure about. Now, they can be a bit more liberal, experiment a bit more and give more players chances, knowing that if it doesn’t work out, if the player doesn’t progress, they can pull him in four games or less and have his redshirt preserved.

This rule will also give the coaches a nice carrot to dangle for freshmen who spend all fall on the scout team: “Keep working, and we might call you up for a game in November or the bowl game.” That would be an option now that playing in a late-season game wouldn’t burn the redshirt.

There’s a lot to like about the rule and not much downside.

Everybody has a different plan in recruiting
As we talk about Pitt’s lack of early commits - the number climbed from zero to one on Sunday when Florida linebacker Leslie Smith committed - there are the things Pitt can control and the things Pitt cannot control.

For instance, Pitt cannot control its 5-7 record from 2017 or the 36,294 average attendance at Heinz Field. Pitt could have controlled those factors last fall, but at the current point in time, the coaching staff cannot control them, and those factors have some effect on the state of recruiting.

What Pitt can control, however, is how it approaches recruiting, and there are two tactics that would likely produce more commitments if the coaching staff were to engage in them.

Those two elements are pressing and reaching, and to this point there’s no indication that Pat Narduzzi and his staff have done either.

“Pressing” is the high-pressure sale: recruit comes on campus, seems to be pretty interested and you lean on him to get a commitment before he leaves, either with a threat - “If you leave here without committing, we’re pulling your offer” - or simply being aggressive in trying to get that verbal pledge. Good recruiters - we would call them “closers” - know when to read a situation and apply a slight nudge to get a recruit who is on the verge of committing to pull the trigger; that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a hard sell, an aggressive offensive.

“Reaching” is offering recruits who might not be up to the level that you need to compete in your conference and beyond. The truth is, Pitt could have more commitments by now; Pitt could have a dozen or more commitments. There are probably quite a few recruits who are committed to MAC schools and even some who are committed to Power Five schools who would have committed to Pitt if they had an offer, but the coaching staff decided their evaluations didn’t show an ACC-level player.

So rather than chase a commitment for the sake of having commitments, they didn’t offer that player.

Now, I’m not going to go too far with this theory. I’m not going to say Pitt’s small commitment list is solely the product of the coaching staff being selective. It’s not my intent to put Pitt on a pedestal, and I don’t want to dismiss the fact that it’s somewhat troubling to get to almost mid-June before getting any commitments and hit the midpoint with only one verbal.

However, I think part of the consternation surrounding Pitt’s recruiting and lack of commitments resulted from the fact that seemingly every other school in the country had at least one commitment. Once Leslie Smith committed to Pitt, only UCLA and Utah among the Power Five conferences are sitting without a commit in the 2019 class. That looks bad. But I think some of the schools that have been filling their commitment lists in April and May have been engaging in some pressing and some reaching.

Again, Pitt's not on a pedestal here and I’m not saying that every school with commitments has pressed and/or reached. I’m also not saying Pitt is the only school in the country that hasn’t pressed and/or reached; there are plenty of schools that have built their commitment lists without doing those things.

But from the perspective of Pat Narduzzi and his staff, when you press for commitments, you increase the chance of a decommitment, and when you reach for commitments, you increase the chance of a player not panning out. So by avoiding those tactics while also coming off a down year (despite the Miami win), the staff finds itself in its current position: one commitment on June 15.

There’s value in early commits
It’s fine for Pitt to avoid the pressin’ and the reachin’. I understand the logic behind the decisions not to do those things, and as long as you don’t see too many of your top targets go off the board, there’s no harm and no foul at this point.

But still, it’s not a bad thing to have some early commitments (especially if you get them without pressing or reaching). Because, ultimately, recruiting is something of an offseason referendum on the momentum of your program.

You don’t play any games in May or June. Preseason rankings and over/under win total projections don’t matter in the spring. And unless, you have a player get injured or kicked off, there aren’t going to be many team-related developments to really create - or kill - momentum.

What accounts for offseason momentum is recruiting. Pitt had momentum in the summer of 2005, not because they were coming off a blowout loss in the Fiesta Bowl, but rather because Dave Wannstedt was barnstorming through the WPIAL. Pitt had momentum in the summer of 2010, partially because of the previous season’s 10-win record but largely because the recruiting was building off that record and really rolling.

As tangible or intangible as it may be, recruiting is the barometer in the offseason of where your program is. It won’t affect the on-field performance in the coming fall (those commits will still be in high school), but it serves as a stand-in for any actual football until the games start being played.

So even though Pitt is coming off a home upset of an undefeated No. 2 team in the country behind a breakout performance from a freshman quarterback and a developing defense with a lot of returning starters, it feels like the program is lacking momentum because there’s not much happening in the way of commitments.

Perception-wise, it looks like Pat Narduzzi’s program is stuck in the mud - not because of anything that has happened on the field, but because of what has happened while there have been no games to play.

Yes, there’s value in those early commitments for fan excitement and perception, and they can also snowball: if a school starts pulling in some high-end recruits, chances are other kids will want to join the party, too. Then the momentum grows, more recruits commit, fans get more excited and everybody’s living the high life drinking the champagne of beers.

Or you have one commitment from an as-yet-unrated undersized linebacker from Florida.

Pitt will get more than one commitment in the 2019 class and probably will get a few more before this month ends. We all know that. But until that happens, any conversation about recruiting is inevitably going to center on the lack of commits, because in June, what else is there to talk about?

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Are the odds against Leslie Smith?
Pitt got a nice one out of Florida for the first commitment in the 2019 class when Leslie Smith, an athlete from Miami who projects at linebacker. Smith was at Pitt’s prospect camp last Sunday and was a standout, showing his explosion and knack for getting to the ball; his highlight film shows he can play in pads, too, and he seems like a nice fit for Pitt’s defense.

Quite frankly, that’s the kind of recruit Pitt should look for in Florida: fast, explosive, athletic and maybe a bit undersized so he slips past the in-state big three. That was the case with Marquis Williams last year; it could be the case with Fort Myers running back/receiver Seneca Milledge, who Pitt offered this week; and it seems to be the case with Smith.

I like the pickup of Smith, but I have to ask:

Are the odds against him? Or, more relevantly, are the odds against Pitt signing him in the 2019 class? Because the truth is, the first commitment in each of Pat Narduzzi’s classes at Pitt hasn’t exactly been the model of consistency.

In the spring of 2015, Narduzzi landed his first commitment for the 2016 class in March 2015 when Cleveland safety Tony Butler said he wanted to be a Panther.

By the time summer started, his commitment had wavered and then completely fell apart, both from his interest in looking at other schools and the Pitt coaches’ distaste for his interest in looking at other schools. Butler ended up signing with Nebraska (he redshirted in 2016 and played on special teams in every game last season).

A few months after Butler decommitted, Pitt got another “first commit” that wouldn’t stick; no, it wasn’t for the 2016 class - it was for the next class: Johnstown safety Exree Loe committed to Pitt in August 2015 as an early verbal for the 2017 class.

Loe visited other schools in the following winter but maintained his commitment to Pitt until the summer of 2016, when his wandering eye and a lackluster performance at Pitt’s prospect camp led to Narduzzi and Loe parting ways. He signed with West Virginia in February 2017.

You can see the trend and you probably already know the next name on the list: Jay Symonds, a tight end/H-back from Massachusetts who broke the season on Pitt’s 2018 class with a commitment in March 2017. That lasted roughly seven months until Stanford offered and Symonds decided to go west.

Butler, Loe and Symonds: three recruits who were so excited about Pitt they couldn’t wait to get on board with a verbal commitment, putting their names on the list first - and then signing elsewhere, for a variety of reasons.

By my count, Pat Narduzzi has had five decommitments in the last three classes: Butler, Loe, Symonds, Juwan Winfree and Matt Alaimo. Not all of those - probably very few, actually - were instances of the kid changing his mind on Pitt; the coaching staff usually encouraged, if not flat-out demanded the move (the lone exception in Narduzzi’s tenure was probably Shawn Curtis, who committed late in the 2015 class shortly after Narduzzi was hired and then flipped to Ole Miss on Signing Day).

But it’s certainly odd that three of those five were “first commits.” I’m not sure what to make of that trend; we’ll see if Leslie Smith can break it.

Was the camp season productive?
Pitt’s prospect camps are in the books. There were five main camps of note: the “Rising Stars” camps on June 2 and June 9, the “Senior Elite” camps on June 3 and June 10 and the “Pittsburgh Elite” camp on June 12.

Each camp had a different purpose, but the biggest result was that probably close to 1,000 kids stepped onto the practice fields in the South Side to work with the Pitt coaches (that doesn’t include the Little Panther camps where young kids got to have some fun).

Of those 900 or so players who came to camp, less than 100 are legitimate prospects (probably closer to 50 or 60), so that’s probably an important distinction to make: these camps are mostly about high school football players coming in and getting coaches, ideally getting better for their high school teams.

For a select few, the camps were about getting evaluated by the Pitt staff and potentially getting a scholarship offer; along those lines, the coaches had extended 10 new offers as of Thursday afternoon. And that number will probably grow over the course of the summer, the fall and into next year, whether that means offers for 2019 recruits or underclassmen who camped.

By that measure, the camps were productive, since the primary goal for the staff, at least as it relates to those 60 or 70 legitimate targets, is finding new offer candidates. Coming out of the camps with 10 new offers is pretty solid.

Pitt did get one new commitment out of the camps, although it was a recruit who already held an offer. But I think there’s a good chance that one or two or more of those 10 new offers (or at least the nine who haven’t committed to other schools) could pick Pitt as soon as this month. That would make the number go up, too, and make the 2018 camp season look more productive as well.

Add a few more commits in June with one or two of them coming from some camp offers, and those three elements - lots of players participating, a nice group of new offers going out and a handful of commitments - are more or less what you’re looking for in a camp season.

ONE PREDICTION

Kenny Pickett is going to be a draw for Pitt
(And not just for the fans who want to watch him play)

There are a lot of things to sell in recruiting. You can sell academics or players in the NFL or championships or attendance or game day atmosphere or relationships or campus life - lots of things, and a coach can tailor each recruiting approach to what each recruit is looking for.

One thing Pitt has going for it, one thing the coaches should be able to sell for the next year or two, is Kenny Pickett.

The coaches know it, too: when Arkansas tight end Will Gragg started looking at Pitt as a potential graduate transfer destination, one of the first things offensive coordinator Shawn Watson did was tell him about the Panthers’ sophomore quarterback.

That’s the case with other recruits, too, whether it’s an offensive weapon like a running back or a receiver, or another player on offense like a tight end or an offensive lineman. Even defensive players hear about Pickett, since he - ideally - is a symbol of what Pitt’s future holds.

“We’re going to be good,” the coaches say, “because we’ve got this quarterback (in addition to a bunch of other things).”

Now, Pickett has to live up to the expectations created by his performance against Miami; that goes without saying, and if he doesn’t, well, Pitt’s going to have bigger problems than the recruits it can or cannot land.

But if he builds on what he did last November, he’s going to be an asset on and off the field. Pickett will be front and center for recruits who visit, hosting quarterbacks and generally spending time with other offensive players, and his play will be front and center when the coaches tell recruits about what Pitt is trying to build for the foreseeable future.