In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we are gearing up for the start of spring football. The Pitt football team will take to the practice field on Monday for the first of 14 practices ahead of the team’s spring game on April 9th. We dig into the storylines around Pitt football, position battles, and more. The Pitt basketball season is winding down, and we discuss what lies ahead for them.

Plenty to talk about in this week’s 3-2-1 column, time to dig in for over 2,000 words all about Pitt athletics on a Friday morning.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Spring ball starts Monday
It does not feel that long ago that Pat Narduzzi and Kenny Pickett were standing on the stage in the middle of Bank of America Stadium hoisting the ACC Championship trophy. The 2021 Pitt football season won’t long be forgotten by Panther faithful, as the team produced its best record in 40 years, won their first-ever ACC title, and had a record-breaking Heisman Trophy Candidate leading the charge. The 2021 season was the big breakout year Pitt fans had long been hoping for, and the team finally delivered.

As Pitt gets set to start spring ball on Monday, the chapter of the 2021 Pitt football team is finally closed, and it is full steam ahead towards 2022. The college football offseason really ramps up from this point forward from spring ball to a heavy dose of recruiting, up until fall camp in August.

The state of the program for the Pitt football team is as stable as it has been for a while as head coach Pat Narduzzi enters his eighth season at the helm. The team will enter spring camp with one of the most experienced rosters in college football. Pitt returns one of the premier players in the country in wide receiver Jordan Addison. He has a supporting cast that features seven offensive linemen with starting experience, the team’s top three leading rushers from a season ago, and other experienced offensive weapons like Gavin Bartholomew and Jared Wayne.

The Pitt defense will also feature tons of experience and talent returning as well. All-ACC picks like Haba Baldonado, Sir’Vocea Dennis, and Brandon Hill are all back to form a unit that should improve on a strong finish to the 2021 season.

All in all, this roster looks pretty good on paper and with the amount of experience it is returning. Spring ball can be a weird thing. It’s an opportunity for younger players to showcase themselves, while the key for veterans is to stay healthy and be ready for fall training camp.

Given Pitt’s experienced roster, I would imagine Pat Narduzzi’s main objective is to get through these upcoming 15 sessions without a major injury.

There are some storylines, though. The biggest, of course, is what will happen at the quarterback position and who replaces Kenny Pickett. USC transfer Kedon Slovis is a former Pac-12 Freshman of the Year and entered last season as a Heisman candidate. He brings over 7,500 yards and 58 touchdowns to Pittsburgh and he will have to fend off Nick Patti who has been Pickett’s primary backup for the past three years. Patti is well respected by his teammates and is ready for his opportunity to be a full-time starter. He is of course coming off an injury he sustained in the Peach Bowl, but should be ready to participate on Monday.

The other big thing to watch is sort of directly tied to the quarterbacks. Pitt had a pair of coaching changes this offseason with Frank Cignetti and Tiquan Underwood replacing Mark Whipple and Brennan Marion at offensive coordinator and wide receivers coach. All eyes will be on Cignetti, as he has to figure out who the starting quarterback will be, while also installing the offense. The Panthers finished as a top five scoring offense in college football in 2021, and he will be tasked with keeping that rolling into next season and trying to figure out how all of his weapons will fit into his scheme.

Pitt’s primary goal this spring will be to stay healthy, but the offensive install and the quarterback battle are two things worth monitoring throughout the offseason.

Pitt will have a quarterback battle
I hit on it above, but for the first time since perhaps the 2015 season, Pat Narduzzi’s first year, the Pitt football team will have a full on quarterback competition. In 2015 Chad Voytik and Nate Peterman battled it out, with Voytik earning the nod early only for Peterman to take full control of the job just two weeks into the season. The 2016 season belonged to Peterman. Max Browne was the presumed starter in 2017, and Pickett had been the unquestioned starter ever since.

It is a new world in 2022. Pickett is gone and leaves as the school’s all-time leader in just about every passing category. He had a historic 2021 season and was Pitt’s first Heisman finalist since Larry Fitzgerald in 2003. His departure creates quite a void, but at the same time the work Pickett did in 2021 coupled with the returning talent made Pitt an attractive destination for a graduate transfer.

Pitt was quick to pounce on USC transfer Kedon Slovis once he entered the portal. The former Trojan had a successful career a Southern Cal, but an injury in 2021, an emerging freshman in Jaxon Dart, and a coaching change all led to him looking for a new home this offseason. Narduzzi recruited Slovis directly, as he was without an offensive coordinator at the time, but he was able to secure the commitment to give Pitt one of the most coveted quarterbacks in the portal.

Slovis had a disappointing season, but he has pedigree. He was a former All-Pac 12 quarterback and entered last season as a Heisman candidate. In many respects, the season Pickett had in 2021 was what was expected of Slovis. It did not work out, and Pitt is hoping a change of scenery and a loaded supporting cast can get him back on track, and keep the Panthers near the top of the ACC standings.

Admittedly, Slovis will be expected to win this job. There are even some sports books giving him Heisman odds already. The expectation is there for him to come in and have a big season, but I don’t expect Nick Patti to lay down and give him the job.

Patti has two career starts under his belt, but his most recent one was cut short with a shoulder injury in the Peach Bowl against Michigan State. That game was going to be a big opportunity for him to prove he is capable, but unfortunately for him it was not meant to be.

Patti came to Pitt in 2018 as a three-star recruit out of New Jersey. He won a start in 2019 over Delaware and has 479 career passing yards and three touchdowns, in addition to four rushing scores. Patti has mostly worked in mop-up duty, while spelling Pickett for a play here and there over the past three seasons.

What Patti lacks in game experience, he does make up for in leadership and trust. Once Pickett opted out of the bowl game, there was no question he would take the reigns of the starting job, and his teammates and coaches spoke of him very highly leading up to the game.

In fairness, Slovis is the likely leading candidate as spring ball is set to begin, but with a new offensive coordinator and a long offseason ahead anything can happen.

Pitt basketball is running in circles
The Pitt basketball team has been one of the harder teams to figure out throughout the season, especially in recent weeks. After looking down and out and likely heading towards another disaster of a February, the team bounced back and won three straight games. The final of which was an outstanding road victory over North Carolina, where the team played with poise and displayed its best offensive performance in ACC play all season.

It all came to a screeching halt after that. Pitt followed up that three game winning streak with two uninspiring home losses to Georgia Tech and Miami. After some optimism returned to the program, it is all but gone just a week later. This team was not really heading anywhere in particular either way, but a strong finish to the season would have been a positive after a trying season.

It is hard to make of where things go from here. Pitt head coach Jeff Capel will finish with a fourth straight losing season guiding this program. The Panthers will miss the NCAA Tournament for a sixth consecutive season. The core of the team is set to return, but this group has struggled mightily throughout the year in what is considered a down ACC. Of course, the team does not have any recruits lined up for next season either.

I feel I have typed these words multiple times throughout the 2021-22 season, but in essence it’s the reality of the program. They have been dealt bad blows throughout the year, but any time it looks like they are ready to overcome them, they take two steps backwards, like this current two-game losing streak.

By all accounts this program is going to run it back for a fifth season under Capel. Mike Vukovcan of Pittsburgh Sports Now reported earlier this week that Capel’s buyout is 15 million dollars after this season, and will drop to a much more manageable 5 million following next season. While I can’t confirm the specifics, I have heard similar details regarding the contract situation.

If those numbers are indeed accurate, then Jeff Capel will get one more chance to turn things around next season, though with each passing day a frustrated fan base becomes more apathetic to the situation the program finds itself in currently.

I believe things are coming to a head, but again any decision about the future is starting to feel like it will not come after this current season.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Is this the most anticipated Pitt season in a decade?
As we get set for Spring ball, I am starting to think about where this offseason and upcoming season ranks in terms of excitement level among the Pitt fan base. I keep coming back to 2010 and drawing parallels to that team, and that offseason.

In 2009, Pitt reached the 10-win plateau for the first time in decades under head coach Dave Wannstedt. The Panthers were roughly two plays away for a Big East title and a berth in the Orange Bowl, but still managed to finish with their best season in years and ended up in the final AP rankings for the first time since 2004.

Following that season, there was plenty of optimism around Wannstedt’s program. The team was preseason ranked and had a core returning that included the likes of Dion Lewis, Jonathan Baldwin, and a new quarterback Tino Sunseri.

In addition to the preseason expectations, there was also an exciting season-opener against Utah on a Thursday night, and another marquee showdown with Miami a few weeks later.

This all kind of sounds similar, right? Pitt is likely to be preseason ranked, with tons of returning talent, ushering in a new quarterback, and an early season schedule that has the fan base excited.

Of course the 2010 season was a failure. It led to the end of the Wannstedt era with an uninspiring 8-5 finish to the season. Of course, I’m not projecting the 2022 season to play out the same way, but in the preseason it feels similar.

Of course there was excitement ahead of the 2013 season as well, as Pitt was making the jump to the ACC and got a season opener against eventual national champion Florida State to commemorate the switching of conferences. The Panthers had a legitimate star in Aaron Donald, and an exciting group of freshmen led by local standout Tyler Boyd. It was also Paul Chryst’s first season as head coach, and fans were eager to turn the page on the Todd Graham era. Again, there was some hype that offseason but probably not to the level we’ll see this year.

There was also excitement leading up to Pat Narduzzi’s inaugural year as head coach in 2015. The newly hired head coach created some buzz after his staff sort of embraced the Penn State rivalry head on with some light trash talking by the coaching staffs of the two schools over social media. The Panthers also had two marquee players in Boyd and James Conner.

You could go way back to the 2003 preseason as well, as Pitt entered the year with a bonafide Heisman candidate in Larry Fitzgerald, and a roster filled with returning starters and another hyped up home schedule coming to Heinz Field, and they were also preseason ranked .

Again, there have been some years with varying levels of hype, expectations, and aspirations, but as we begin the road to the 2022 season opener, there is more excitement around Pitt football for the first time in at least a decade and we’ll have to see how the team handles those expectations.

What are five position battles to watch this offseason?
Pitt is a team that is returning a ton of experience on both sides of the ball. With a group that returns so much starting experience, it’s easy to gloss over what the position battles actually are this offseason. Having said that, there are going to be some competitions, and not in the general coach speak you will here from Narduzzi and his staff. I have probably touched on quarterback plenty so far, so here are five other positions I’ll be watching starting on Monday.

Running Back
Israel Abanikanda vs. Rodney Hammond vs. Vincent Davis

Running back is one of the deepest positions on the team, as three players return who all rushed for at least 500 yards in 2021. The Panthers utilized those backs in different ways last season, and with injuries and a long 14-game season all three players were needed throughout the year.

Israel Abanikanda was the talk of camp in 2021, as the freshman who played very little in 2020 seemingly took a step forward and he proved it on the field. Abananikanda has every physical trait you would want in a running back with speed, size, and power. He led the team in rushing with 651 yards and finished with 9 total touchdowns on the year. Durability issues sprung up at times, as he missed time with injuries, but by in large part he has every tool to take an even greater leap in 2022.

Can he be Pitt’s workhorse back, or will the others still push for time? It’s hard to discount Rodney Hammond especially. The true freshman was not a highly rated recruit, but came up big multiple times last season in some wins, as he carved out a role as the team’s ‘finisher’ and took over the game in multiple fourth quarter wins. Vincent Davis gets his fair share of criticism from fans, but he’s been a productive member of this offense for three seasons now and is highly trusted by the coaches.

So what I am watching for this spring: Can one player, likely Abanikanda, beat out the other two and decidedly be the team’s top back in 2022, or will it yet again be a by-committee approach.

Tight End
Kyi Wright vs. Cole Mitchell vs. Jake Renda

Pitt tight ends had their most productive season in a long time in 2021. After years of futility from the position and some shaky recruiting classes, Lucas Krull and Gavin Bartholomew combined for 66 catches in 2021 and 10 touchdowns. Krull is moving on after a successful season, but the Panthers bring back Bartholomew.

The positions future looks bright under Bartholomew, but the interesting thing for next season will be who emerges beyond him. Bartholomew was not a big-time recruit, but outplayed his ranking and quickly proved he was going to be a major contributor in the ACC.

Pitt employed a lot of two tight end sets in 2021 and under Cignetti there should be a lot of the same heading into next season. Pitt has explored the idea of adding a transfer and that could happen before the season begins, but for now this spring will be a big opportunity for someone else to emerge.

Cole Mitchell and Jake Renda are two redshirt freshman that signed in the class of 2021 and should be looking at getting on the field this upcoming season. Kyi Wright has been around for some time, but he has yet to really play a prominent role for Pitt after dealing with some injuries through the years. Wright was a big-time athlete at the high school level here in Western Pennsylvania, so there should be some untapped potential still to be unlocked in his game.

Can one of these tight ends make a name for themselves in spring, or will Pitt look to bring in a transfer to play alongside Bartholomew?

Offensive Line
The returning starters vs. Matt Goncalves, Branson Taylor, and Blake Zubovic.

The Pitt starting offensive line announced in unison that they would all be returning for the 2022 season. For an offense that was one of the most potent in the country, that was a welcomed announcement. Still, that group has been banged up over the past two seasons, and has allowed for guys like Matt Goncalves and Blake Zubovic to play significant snaps. Not to mention there is always room for improvement from this group. Can one of those two guys, and even perhaps Branson Taylor unseat one of the five regular starters? That should be a good battle to watch unfold throughout the offseason.

Linebacker

Basically Pitt has Sir’Vocea Dennis returning at linebacker, and a lot of question marks beyond that. The Panthers rotated the linebacker spot quite a bit in 2021, using as many as seven players in a given game. Dennis was probably the best of the bunch, and his return is key for this team, as he will be one of the best linebackers in the ACC in 2022.

Brandon George got some run as a reserve middle linebacker and on special teams over the past three seasons, and looks poised to perhaps move into the starting lineup. Pitt also brought in a transfer from Notre Dame. Shayne Simon is a graduate transfer and a former four-star recruit out of New Jersey, and it’s clear the staff wanted to bring in a veteran to help out at this spot.

Bangally Kamara and Solomon DeShields are a pair of promising players here, but are mostly unproven. Kamara flashed his potential on several occasions in 2021, and the coaches appear to be high on him. Guys like Preston Lavant and Aydin Henningham will have opportunities to push for time, and Pitt is bringing in a pair of freshman in the class of 2022. Marquan Pope from Texas is on campus and will be one of the newcomers to watch there.

Pitt has some talent and a few players with experienced, but this is a group that is largely unproven. There is also likely room for them to add a transfer following the spring if they need it.

There is a lot to unpack with the linebackers, and this will likely be the most watched position in spring ball outside of the quarterbacks.

Cornerback
MJ Devonshire vs. AJ Woods

Pitt regularly played four cornerbacks in 2021, and three of them are set to return for next season. Damarri Mathis is off to the NFL and should have a good chance to be drafted come April. He was the team’s top corner last year, so it will be a battle to see who replaces him there.

Marquis Williams was Pitt’s other starting cornerback in 2021, and it will be tough to see him unseated for one of the starting jobs, so I think this battle ultimately comes down to AJ Woods and MJ Devonshire. Both players showed potential in 2021 and in essence the coaching staff will likely consider them co-starters, but still one will likely play over the other and that’s what we will be watching for in spring.

There’s also some young promising corners in the program like Khalil Anderson, Noah Biglow, Tamarion Crumpley, and Jahvante Royal. Can one of those younger players make a push towards the two-deep?

ONE PREDICTION

Dayon Hayes will be the talk of the offseason
From spring ball of 2021 up until fall camp, one player seemed to garner the most praise and attention from both his teammates and coaches, and that was Izzy Abanikanda. In nearly interview session last year, everyone gushed about what Abanikanda could bring to the table. He showed off what he could do in 2021 and finished as Pitt’s leading rusher.

The hype and attention was warranted and ultimately came to fruition. So that begs the question…who will be that guy this year?

I have my pick as we gear up for spring ball, and that is third-year defensive end Dayon Hayes. I think he is ready for a breakout performance.

Hayes was Pitt’s prized recruit in the 2020 class out of Westinghouse High School in the Pittsburgh City League. Hayes played sparingly in 2020, but worked his way into the rotation last year and really shined late in the season. He totaled 7.5 tackles for loss and two sacks, with 5.5 tackles for loss coming in Pitt’s final three games.

The defensive end spot at Pitt is generally competitive, and it is not easy to break into the lineup. In 2020, Pitt had a pair of All-Americans in Patrick Jones and Rashad Weaver. The 2021 group was also talented with Haba Baldonado, Deslin Alexandre, and John Morgan, and that entire trio is set to return next year as well.

Again, there will be competition, but I just think Hayes really started to figure things out towards the end of the season and I believe he can carry it into the offseason.

I’m expecting to hear his name quite a bit, as he is poised to be the breakout player in spring ball and fall camp.