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In this week's 3-2-1 Column, we're thinking about conference expansion, changes in recruiting and a lot more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

The weirdest summer yet
June is over, and we’ve had a few content items recapping the month over the last week, so I won’t do that here. But there is one thing I do want to highlight from June 2022.

The weirdness.

Look, recruiting is weird. From the windmill-chasing concept of ranking thousands of high school football players (do you really know if an offensive lineman in Oregon is good enough to be four spots higher than a defensive back in New Jersey?) to the hyper-micro-scale of what counts for recruiting news on social media (do we need top 15’s or top 12’s?), recruiting has been weird for awhile.

After all, we’re hanging on the words and actions of teenagers here, and while some of us may have a longer trek down memory lane to recall that period in our lives, I’m sure that with a little work, we can all remember having unreliable judgment as we moved through high school.

But somehow, June 2022 has taken “weird” to another level.

I’m just thinking of Pitt here. We’ve seen at least four - I’ve lost count, honestly - recruits commit to Pat Narduzzi with enough certainty to compel the head coach to send one of his “PITT IS IT” tweets, only to wait days or weeks for the recruit to announce his commitment himself.

Jesse Anderson was one of the recruits to pull that move. He took his official visit June 24-26 and committed before leaving campus that Sunday morning, but he didn’t announce the commitment until Tuesday the 28th.

Anderson’s delay was only two days, which is short compared to some others we’ve seen. Pitt got two commitments on the second official visit weekend - June 16-18 - and those two are still unannounced (even if we have a pretty good idea of who they are and have discussed it on the message board). And one more recruit committed to Pitt last Monday, June 29; that one is still unannounced.

That’s three recruits who have been committed for more than a week but have not made their decisions public. I’m all for recruits handling their process however they see fit, but I don’t entirely understand the delay.

Then again, there are a lot of things I don’t understand.

Like this:

Set aside the fact that Penn State was the target of this troll job by four-star offensive lineman Zechariah Owens. Pretend that he dunked on a different school (since I know that PSU being involved is going to skew some opinions around here).

This just isn’t a good look. Maybe some will say I’m being too old, that Owens is just having a little fun and we shouldn’t take things so seriously. But it seems like this kind of thing goes beyond “having fun” and heads straight for “mean-spirited” territory. And I don’t know what’s gained by that.

I guess it’s just the evolution of recruiting. I’m all for recruits enjoying the process as much as they can, but it seems like things have veered into the weird this June. Even more than before.

Make no mistake about it
Since Jim and I split up these 3-2-1 Column’s each week, I sometimes forget which topics I have covered and which I have left on the table for a future column.

But I know for a fact that I have written about this one, and that’s okay, because I’m probably going to do it at least once a month before the season starts, so count this for July.

My repeated mantra here:

The quarterback will make all the difference in 2022.

Real shocker, there, I know. But I think it bears repeating a few times and for a few reasons.

For starters, I don’t think we should lose sight of why last season happened. We all know what happened and how important it was for the Pitt football program. But the why of the 2021 season is just as important when thinking about the future.

The 2021 season happened because Kenny Pickett had the best performance by a Pitt quarterback in school history.

Period.

We can talk about the offensive line and the defensive pressure and the coverage and the run-stopping. We can talk about Jordan Addison and the better-than-you-might-have-thought running backs. We can talk about finally getting production out of the tight ends.

All of those things are very interesting and certainly contributed to the overall success of the team.

But it all happened because Kenny Pickett played lights-out.

Without Kenny Pickett - or with Kenny Pickett at his 2019/2020 levels - Pitt goes 8-5 in 2021. There’s a direct and unmistakable correlation between Pickett’s play and Pitt’s success. This is grade-level stuff, and I think everyone knows it.

So we move to point No. 2: if Pitt wants to succeed like that again, the Panthers will need another high-end performance at quarterback.

Obvious stuff, right? Look at Clemson last year for a great example where things went the other way. Pitt and Clemson had more or less the same teams they had the previous few years. But the one big difference was at quarterback:

Pitt’s quarterback played great. Clemson’s didn’t. Pitt won the ACC. Clemson didn’t.

So it falls on Kedon Slovis (or Nick Patti; we’ll continue to include him in the discussion for the time being). If Slovis plays at a high level, then Pitt will have a great chance to compete for the conference title again. If he doesn’t, it’s going to be an eight-win season. I think balance in the offense will help take some of the pressure off of Slovis, but only in the sense that it gives him more opportunities to make plays - not that it allows him to play at a subpar level.

So that’s your July reminder: this team will go as far as the quarterback takes it. Last season showed what great quarterback play can do. The seasons before it showed what average quarterback play can do.

Plan for this season accordingly.

Nostalgia for the Big East
Okay. We put it off long enough. Let’s talk conference realignment and expansion.

We’ll certainly get into more of it in a minute, but to start, I want to say this.

I miss the Big East.

I’m not talking about nostalgia for the old hoops conference. That goes without saying. But the football conference…that wasn’t so shabby either.

I’m thinking back to the 2002 season. The Big East was an eight-team conference that stretched from Boston to Miami, but despite the length of the league, it was full of rivalries and genuine dislike. Everybody played everybody every year, so you built up some annual hard feelings, and by 2002, most of the league was playing pretty good football.

Miami was ranked No. 1 or No. 2 all season and barely lost to Ohio State (some would say the Hurricanes got robbed) in the national championship game. Virginia Tech climbed as high as No. 3 in the rankings (you might recall the event that caused the Hokies to fall to No. 8 the next week).

Miami, Pitt, West Virginia and Virginia Tech were all ranked in the top 25 by the end of the season after the Panthers and Mountaineers both went 9-4 and the Hokies were 10-4. Boston College won nine games that season, too, and while the Eagles only went 3-4 in Big East play, they did have a road upset at No. 4 Notre Dame on their resume.

Syracuse (4-8, 2-5), Temple (4-8, 2-5) and Rutgers (1-11, 0-7) weren’t great, but every conference has its bottom. Meanwhile, the top of the Big East in 2002 was as good as anything we’ve seen from the ACC since that league expanded.

I’m not kidding, either: the 2002 Big East had five teams with at least nine wins and four ranked teams at season’s end. Since the ACC expanded in 2013, it has hit similar numbers in 2014 (five nine-win teams, four ranked teams) and 2016 (six nine-win teams, five ranked teams). But those accomplishments came in a bigger conference; the expanded ACC has never had such a high percentage of its teams hit nine wins in a single season.

And those games back in the 2002 Big East season felt different, too. Despite the outcome, Pitt-West Virginia had an energy that can’t be found for Pitt in the ACC or for West Virginia in the Big 12. Pitt-Syracuse was always a battle. The Panthers had some epic showdowns with Virginia Tech, too.

And while few of those teams managed to beat Miami in the early years of the 2000’s, Pitt, West Virginia and Virginia Tech made sure the Hurricanes earned it. Miami-WVU in 2002 was a one-touchdown game after three quarters. Miami-Virginia Tech that same season was a wild one, with more than 100 points scored in a nine-point game. And Pitt gave Miami all it could handle in a late-November Thursday night game at the Orange Bowl.

A season like that, where one of the best teams in the nation has to survive against annual opponents, where a bunch of regional foes meet every year and craft great storylines, where everybody knows everybody and there’s some real history to the games - that’s what college football used to be like.

I know it probably won’t be like that again, and I absolutely point to the defections of Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College as one of those key moments when things broke off in the direction of where we are now.

I know we can’t go back. I know there’s no way things will ever reset to the way they were. But that Big East…it was good.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

What makes the most sense?
Let me start by saying I have no idea what the future will hold for Pitt, the ACC or the rest of college football.

I’ll probably repeat that, but I figured I’d get it out there right at the beginning.

Now then, with the clear understanding that I don’t know what’s next for Pitt or the ACC, let’s get to a question we can answer:

What makes the most sense for Pitt? In an ideal world, where would Pitt go? What would be the best conference for the Panthers - both the athletic programs and the University as a whole?

To me, there’s a clear and obvious answer:

It’s the Big Ten.

The best-case scenario for Pitt would be to get an invite to the Big Ten and join that conference, and I think that’s true for a number of reasons.

First and foremost and above anything and everything else, it’s the money, because, you know, everything here is about the money. Every move that’s made, every conversation that’s held, every negotiation that’s leaked, every TV contract that’s signed and every allegiance that’s broken - it’s all about the money.

I’ll probably repeat that one, too.

But beyond the money - as if there’s anything that even comes close - I just think the Big Ten is a better fit for Pitt than any other conference. I mean, the aforementioned Big East circa 2002 was a pretty great fit for the Panthers, but since that’s no longer an option, the Big Ten is about as good as it gets.

No, Pitt is not a land-grant university. But in terms of academics, athletics and culture, Pitt feels like a much better fit with the schools in the Big Ten than it does with its current mates in the ACC.

I noticed this the last time I traveled with Pitt for a game at Notre Dame. No, Notre Dame isn’t in the Big Ten, but culturally and geographically, it’s in the footprint, and as I was driving there and walking around the stadium and taking in the whole setting, it felt like a much better fit for Pitt than what I’ve seen and experienced on similar trips to Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh and Atlanta.

I came away thinking the same thing in 2017 and 2019 when Pitt played at Penn State. There truly was a time when college football conference mates had some kind of connective tissue that went beyond the paychecks, and I felt some essence of that connection on the trips to State College more than I ever did traveling to the Triangle.

It’s just a good fit for Pitt. The ideal fit for Pitt.

Oh, and the money’s right, too.

In an ideal world, that's where Pitt would be.

What’s the most realistic best-case scenario?
Of course, we all know that the world isn’t ideal and the Big Ten probably isn’t going to invite Pitt. The Panthers have a strong history and tradition, and they have certainly had some recent success. But I’m not sure how much Pitt adds in terms of potential revenue for the conference, and you know what I’m going to say:

It’s all about the money.

So if it can’t be the Big Ten, if Pitt’s chances of getting invited to that conference are, seemingly, slim to none, then what’s the most realistic best-case scenario?

The obvious answer is the ACC reaching some level of stability and health. But that’s only the first part of the answer, because we can say all we want that the ACC needs to be stable, but saying it and achieving it are two different things.

To achieve stability, the ACC has to keep its current group together. Of course, I’m talking about Clemson, Florida State, Miami and North Carolina (UNC seems to keep getting lumped in that group, so I’ll do it, too). Those are the marquee “brands” in the league, and they are the schools that are the most coveted by other conferences.

Keep those schools in the ACC, and the conference has a chance. Lose them, and things get grim pretty quick.

How do you keep them in the ACC? Well, the answer is the same as always: money. You have to find a way to get Clemson and FSU to a place financially where they feel like they’re on somewhat level footing with the SEC.

How do you do that? Well, that part is a bit trickier. You can try distributing the conference media revenue in uneven shares, giving bigger pieces of the pie to the schools that generate more of the revenue. That’s not a terrible idea, but it feels like a temporary fix, at best, and probably wouldn’t offset the disparity that exists between the ACC and the SEC/Big Ten.

The other option - or, put a different way, another option that could work in tandem with weighted revenue distribution - is some of what we’ve seen floated this week: a partnership or some other kind of collaboration with another conference. In theory, that could lead to a better media deal; merging - in some fashion - the ACC and Pac-12 would give the resulting conglomeration a whole bunch of prime media markets and schools of interest running from coast to coast. That should be worth something; or, at the very least, it should be worth more than what the ACC and Pac-12 are currently getting.

To be honest, a lot of that stuff happens in a space I don’t fully understand. The media landscape is shifting - has shifted - a ton in the last decade, with streaming services steadily chipping away at the traditional forms of consumption and physical/geographical media markets maybe meaning a little less than they did in the past.

All I really know is that money is the key. More money is what will keep the ACC together, and if it falls apart, there will be less money. I don’t know if the league can do what needs to be done to hold onto those key schools. I don’t know if current league leadership is capable of such action, nor do I know if such action is even possible.

Maybe we’re all just on a collision course with an inevitable end where 40 or so schools occupy the upper echelon of college football - in an even more formalized structure than we currently have - and the other 90 FBS schools operate on a separate level. I don’t know where that endgame puts Pitt; I can say with certainty that I would feel much better about Pitt’s prospects if the ACC can hold together.

But if the Big 12 couldn’t hold onto Texas and Oklahoma and the Pac-12 couldn’t hold onto USC and UCLA, I really don’t know how much hope there is or should be about the ACC. There’s a grant of rights that should hold everyone in place - again, because of money - but I don’t know what to count on at this point.

Whatever it takes, though, Pitt needs the ACC to hold together in its current form while working to find a way to increase the revenue. I don’t know if or how that will happen, but that’s what’s needed.

ONE PREDICTION

Pitt goes 9-2 in the non-conference
A hoops note to finish here.

Pitt released its non-conference schedule for the upcoming season this week. The Panthers will play 11 games before diving into the ACC schedule; seven of those 11 will be at the Petersen Events Center, two will be in Brooklyn for the Legends Classic and two will be true road games - at Northwestern for the ACC-Big Ten Challenge and at Vanderbilt.

So let’s predict the record.

My first bold prediction on this is that Pitt will get through the non-con schedule without any head-scratching (read: non-Power Five) losses. This has been a problem for Jeff Capel since he got to Pitt. There was Niagara in Capel’s first season; Nicholls in Year Two; St. Francis (Pa.) in the 2020-21 opener; and The Citadel, UMBC and Monmouth last year.

That’s six bad losses for Capel and certainly enough to say there’s a trend, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that the Panthers take care of business this season against Tennessee-Martin, Alabama State, Fairleigh Dickinson, William & Mary, Sacred Heart and North Florida.

If that happens, Pitt’s got six wins to start. But the Panthers will have to do better than 6-5 heading into ACC play, so what do we see from the other five games?

The second game of the season has West Virginia coming to the Petersen Events Center. The Mountaineers are coming off a losing season and will bring a roster that was rebuilt with transfers (sounds familiar).

That game will be followed by the Legends Classic, where Pitt will play two of Arizona State, Michigan and VCU. And then there are the road trips to Northwestern and Vanderbilt.

It’s tough to predict those games in Brooklyn, since we don’t know who the Panthers will face. And given the personnel turnover throughout college hoops, it’s kind of tough to predict any of these games. But I’ll take a shot and say that Pitt goes 3-2 in those five high-major games. I think the Panthers beat West Virginia, win one game at the Barclays Center and split the two road games.

Why make those picks? I guess I am buying into the leadership on this year’s team. I know we’ve heard that story before, but the combination of veteran guards and John Hugley as a junior - I don’t know, it seems like it just might work.

I think that core should be able to avoid missteps in the six “should-win” games, and I think they should be talented enough to pull out three wins in the high-major games.

That would put Pitt at 9-2 heading into the ACC, which isn’t terrible.