MORE HEADLINES - Reaction: How Pitt's two new transfers will fit | PODCAST: Hoops additions and a spring game preview | Oladapo talks about picking Pitt | Burton finds the right fit at Pitt | In the film room: What Dan Oladapo is bringing to Pitt | In the film room: What Jamarius Burton is bringing to Pitt | Blue vs. Gold: Breaking down the spring game rosters | Recruiting: Who are the best western Pa. prospects In the class of 2023?

In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about new hoops additions, what to look for in the spring game, a college football super league and more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

A new addition, pt. 1
This is in two parts since, you know, Pitt got two commitments this week.

No. 1 came on Monday in the person of Dan Oladapo, a transfer forward making the move from Oakland to Oakland.

That first Oakland would be the university outside of Detroit; the second Oakland would be the one we all know and love. A 6’7” 220-pound forward originally from Maryland, Oladapo started 54 games over the last two seasons at Oakland, including all 30 this past season when he averaged 12.9 points, 8.8 rebounds, 1.7 assists and 1.1 steals per game. He was a second-team all-conference player in the Horizon League who pushed his season numbers to 15.1 points and 10.3 rebounds per game in conference matchups, and he led the Horizon League in field goal percentage (61.5%) against conference opponents.

Oladapo’s best game came right here in western Pa. when he put up 25 and 20 in a loss to Robert Morris in February, but we all know that those numbers, like his career stat line, are interesting but ultimately not too relevant to what he’ll do at Pitt and in the ACC.

What is relevant is what his role will be, and I think there are a few possibilities in that regard. Much of it - like so many things you can say about Pitt in the upcoming season - hinges on Justin Champagnie’s decision to either enter the NBA Draft or return to the Panthers for another year. If Champagnie does come back, Oladapo can fill one of several roles: he can be Champagnie’s backup at power forward; he can play the four and give Champagnie a chance to work on the perimeter and improve his game there; and he can get minutes as an undersized center if the matchup or situation calls for it.

If Champagnie doesn’t return to Pitt, then Oladapo probably becomes Pitt’s top power forward. I am not smart enough to say whether he’s ready for ACC competition or not - ideally, you’d have a guy who can make the Horizon League all-conference first team rather than the second team - and I don’t know how he would function in that job. But he seems to be a sound rebounder, so while his presence as a mainstay in the rotation could shift more of the emphasis on scoring to the back court, he should be able to help keep Pitt competitive on the glass.

A new addition, pt. 2
Oladapo committed on Monday. That was number one. Number two came about 24 hours later.

Right around 9 pm on Tuesday, Pitt landed a second transfer commitment. This one was Texas Tech guard Jamarius Burton. We’ve talked quite a bit in the last few days about what Burton means for Pitt, but let’s look at it again.

He started his college career at Wichita State, where he played for two seasons as the starting point guard before bailing last spring. That doesn’t make Burton unique: while the world didn’t know it at that point, Gregg Marshall was apparently fostering a pretty toxic culture, and that seems to be the reason that Burton and five of his teammates jumped ship after the 2019-20 season.

The Charlotte native landed at Texas Tech after he left Wichita State, and his stat line wasn’t too impressive: 4.3 points, 1.8 rebounds, 1.2 assists and 1.1 turnovers per game while averaging 19 minutes in the 23 games he played with the Red Raiders.

Contrast that with his sophomore season at Wichita State - 10.3 points, 3.4 rebounds, 3.4 assists, less than 2 turnovers per game while playing 27 minutes, on average - and you kind of get to pick which stat line you want to believe. Was he the player he was at Wichita State, when he was one of the Shockers’ leaders as the team’s starting point guard? Or was he the player he was at Texas Tech, when he was a bench player in 19 out of 23 games and not a significant contributor?

I’m not sure about the answer to that, but I do have a sense of where I think he can fit in at Pitt. With experience playing a variety of backcourt positions, I think Burton can fill some needs for the Panthers. The first one is, well, the one: Pitt needs a backup point guard to play behind Femi Odukale and spell the sophomore-to-be when he gets into foul trouble or needs a rest. That’s where I think Burton can help: he’s not a great or prolific shooter, but he drives to the basket and finishes, gets fouled or dishes the ball, and he can run a transition offense well - to me, those are good traits for a backup point guard. I don’t know if you would necessarily want Burton playing 25 minutes at the point every game, but if you only need him for 8 or 10 minutes per game, which seems like a reasonable number for a backup point guard, he should be capable of that.

Did Jamarius Burton transfer to Pitt to play just 8 or 10 minutes per game, though? Probably not, and that’s where I think a secondary role can come in for him. The Panthers have Odukale, Nike Sibande and Ithiel Horton as their three returning scholarship guards this season; guard depth has been a problem the last few years, and if those are the only three guards on the roster this year, it will be a problem once again.

Now, with Burton, those aren’t the only three guards on the roster. He can backup Odukale at the point for a few minutes per game and then log some more time playing off the ball, either as a two or a three, giving Jeff Capel more options in how he aligns the backcourt.

Like Oladapo, I think Burton is a good addition. Neither guy should be a star for Pitt this season; ideally, neither guy will be needed to be a star this season. But they both look like good roster pieces and, you know, Pitt will need a few of those this season.

Speaking of which…

Doing it all at once
I’ve talked a lot about the Oladapo and Burton additions this week, both on the message boards and on a couple podcasts, and one thing I keep coming back to is the idea that filling a basketball roster in the offseason is not like a fantasy draft.

In a fantasy baseball draft or a fantasy football draft, there’s a certain priority placed on filling your starting spots before you add depth. I know there are some exceptions, but as a general rule, you don’t take your backup third baseman when you still need a third outfielder; you don’t draft a second tight end when you still have an empty spot at receiver.

But building a basketball roster in an offseason isn’t like that - especially when you have as many openings as Pitt has.

Especially when you have as many needs as Pitt has.

Pitt came into the offseason needing a center. More than one, probably. But Pitt also came into the offseason needing a backup point guard and at least one power forward and probably some more help on the wings.

There are obviously priority rankings among those various needs, but they’re all needs that have to be filled this offseason, and Pitt’s coaching staff has had to approach all of those needs at the same time.

Yes, they need to get a center. That’s the top priority. But while they’ve been working on Efton Reid and any transfer candidates they’re targeting, they have also needed to get a power forward. And while they’ve been trying to get a power forward, they have also needed to get a backup point guard. And while they’ve been working to get a backup point guard, they have also needed to find some high school prospects, particularly on the wing.

All of the needs are on the table, and the staff is working to address all of them at the same time.

I think part of the reason the fan reaction to Oladapo and Burton has been tepid, at best, is that fans aren’t interested in seeing a backup point guard and power forward. They want to get a center. And any addition that isn’t a center is seen as less interesting, less relevant and, in some cases, disappointing.

But those other players are needed. Pitt needed another guard. Pitt needed another forward. Pitt needed more wings.

So the staff got Burton and the staff got Oladapo and the staff got Nate Santos. Now they’ve got nine scholarship players set for the 2021-22 roster, eight of which count against the 13-man scholarship limit (Nike Sibande doesn’t), so there’s room for a max of five more players. Certainly, the staff would like Justin Champagnie and John Hugley to be among those five; time will tell on each of those. And Reid is a major priority as well.

If by some chance all three of those situations work out in Pitt’s favor, then the roster looks pretty good - on the strength of not just the starters, but also the reserves.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Would a super league be a good thing for college football?
You might have seen the topic this week: a few top-tier (I guess) European soccer teams or clubs or whatever briefly considered the idea of breaking away from the rest of the teams or clubs or whatever and forming their own super league.

The idea would have made a bajillion dollars, but the rest of the world - the entire world, it seems - yelled pretty loud about it, and the proverbial kibosh was applied.

But, since we’re Americans and the Internet has endless space for endless content and hypotheticals are always popular, more than a few sportswriters took the super league concept and applied it to college football.

Just about everybody who went through the exercise named the same schools for a hypothetical super league, so we’ll go with Andy Staples from The Athletic and his proposed 15-school super league. It’s about what you would expect.

Alabama. Auburn. Clemson. Florida. Georgia. LSU. Michigan. Nebraska. Notre Dame. Ohio State. Oklahoma. Oregon. Penn State. Texas. USC.

After seeing more than a few of those hypotheticals, I started thinking about the idea and what it would mean for a school like Pitt. Setting aside your personal opinions on whether some of those schools belong, I had to wonder:

Would it really be a bad thing to have a super league in college football? Could it actually be good for the sport?

Okay, an admission: I’m not all that convinced of what I’m about to say. But hear me out; maybe by the end of it, I’ll have convinced myself (and possibly even you).

A big talking point this winter was how we seem to keep seeing the same 4-6 teams every year in the College Football Playoffs. Alabama is always there. Clemson is always there. Ohio State is always there. Georgia and Notre Dame and Oklahoma and Oregon and LSU have been there and seem to always be almost there when they don’t make it. And it’s not a stretch of the imagination to think that somebody like Florida or Texas or USC could get there in the near future.

Basically, the teams that Andy Staples named: we see them there every year, and we’re kind of tired of it.

But right along with the complaints about always seeing the same teams is the reality that it’s probably not going to change in the near future. I think a couple schools like Texas A&M (who didn’t make the cut for the super league) could join the group, but does anybody really see Alabama or Clemson or Ohio State falling off anytime soon?

So what if we dropped the charade that everybody has a fair shot at the CFP and just formalized it: have those teams that already seem to be playing a different sport from everybody else go off and actually play a different sport from everybody else. What would be the fallout if that happened?

Okay, the first thing is the money, and this is pretty important. If a super league formed with those 15 teams, they would get a huge chunk of cash - and the other 50 Power Five teams would get a whole lot less. I’m sure there could be some wheeling and dealing where maybe the conferences that lost teams to the super league could get an annual kickback, pro-rated by the number of teams they lost. But that’s not going to make the ACC or the SEC or the Big 12 or Big Ten or Pac-12 whole; their income after the super league is formed will be less than it is now.

So that’s a big problem. But we’ll come back to that. Let’s talk about the fans for a second.

Would your interest wane if a change like this took place?

For starters, how many people rooting for schools that aren’t in that group of perennial contenders go into each season thinking about how their team has a shot at the College Football Playoffs? Most fans of Georgia Tech and Minnesota and Oregon State and Colorado and, let’s face it, Pitt, probably aren’t considering the CFP implications of every game they play. The goals for each season aren’t set at that level. The goals are set at the division level. The goals are set at the 10-win level. The goals are set at the win-a-good-bowl-game level. The goals are set at finish-in-the-top-15 level.

This isn’t to disparage those programs; it’s the reality of the situation, and programs in that tier can make a lot of hay with seasons like that. Fanbases get energized by seasons like that. Those are the kinds of successful seasons that help a program recruit better and win more games.

So would your interest wane if those goals became a little more formalized? Would you lose interest in Pitt if the powers that be said, “These teams over here are competing for their own championship and the rest of you will reorganize into new conferences and play for your own thing”?

I honestly don’t know how it would go, but to tell you the truth, there’s part of me that thinks it could work. Maybe fans would look at the new system and say, “My school is in the minor leagues now, and I don’t really care anymore.” Maybe. Or maybe fans would say, “This is my school and we’re competing against a bunch of other schools that are on the same level as us.” You would still have Virginia Tech, North Carolina and Miami - some of those premier matchups from the ACC - not to mention West Virginia, who would be an obvious choice to get back into a conference with Pitt. So there would be plenty of compelling games and matchups. And there would be a real, tangible sense that you could reach the highest level. If this new, reorganized group of schools had a championship - and why wouldn’t they? - a lot more teams would enter each season with a legit chance at a title than is currently the case.

It wouldn’t be the big championship, but it would be a championship of your peers, and I have to think fans just might buy into it.

Of course, there’s still the money issue, and no athletic director or university president is interested in decreasing the annual payout. But here’s a crazy idea:

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea to dial back the spending on college athletics.

I’m very interested to see if the fallout from 2020, with all of its cancellations and empty stadiums and lost revenues, leads to any kind of course correction in college sports spending. I don’t know if it will or not, and I’m guessing it won’t for those schools at the very top of the sport, but I’m curious to watch the situation with the majority fo schools over the next year.

What if a major reorganization in the sport leads to less money for the vast majority of schools - especially when a whole bunch of those schools operate in the red anyway? Maybe this is the way you dial things back for that huge swath of athletic departments that really don’t have any business spending at the levels they do. They wouldn’t choose to cut their spending on their own because they have to give the appearance of going all out, even if it means going into debt. So what if they had to cut their spending because they had less coming in?

I don’t know. It seems like it could make sense. Or it’s completely ridiculous. I haven’t decided.

What did we learn this spring?
Getting back to Pitt football specifically, you actually get to see a little bit of that on Saturday at the annual Blue-Gold Game, which will actually be the first time just about any of us get to see Pitt football in action this spring. Media wasn’t permitted to attend any of the 14 previous practices - we saw more practices in person last year when spring camp was cancelled after the first week - so we’re going into the spring game pretty much just as blind as you are.

But there are little things we’ve picked up here and, either from on-the-record press conferences on Zoom or other conversations we’ve had over the last two months.

So what did we learn this spring? Here are a few bullet points:

The backup QB situation is unsettled: We asked Pat Narduzzi about this several times, and he never really had a concrete answer. Maybe he wanted to keep things vague because he doesn’t want to say anything that could possibly lead one of the backup quarterbacks to transfer. Or maybe he never really said anybody was stepping up behind Kenny Pickett because, well, nobody stepped up behind Kenny Pickett.

Whether it’s Joey Yellen, Davis Beville, Nick Patti or Nate Yarnell, somebody is going to take snaps at some point this season; right now, it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of confidence in any of them.

A running back emerges: This was based partially on some things we’ve heard and partially on one comment Narduzzi made during his press briefing this week.

“Who’d I’d say was the starting tailback at the beginning of spring? Vince Davis, right? Eh, not so fast, I shouldn’t say stuff like that. You sit there and declare something, and all the sudden Izzy is really come on. Again, Vince is still a good back, but Izzy Abanikanda is getting after it. We’re happy with where he is, so there's a battle going on there. I sit there and declare a winner in pre-spring ball, maybe that lit a fire under Izzy, but he’s played well.”

I’ve said since last season when he was a freshman that I thought Israel Abanikanda had a chance to be the most complete back on Pitt’s roster. It didn’t amount to a whole lot in 2020, but now he’s a year older and a year wiser, and he could be in line for a big sophomore season.

More expectations for Krull: Lucas Krull was another guy with high expectations entering last season, but his were dashed when he got hurt in the second game (after missing the first game with an injury). Now he’s healthy and, by all accounts, ready to contribute to the offense. We all know how much Pitt needs some contributions from the tight ends and Krull has all the tools: he’s big, he can run and - we’re told - he can catch.

DB depth: Pitt lost a lot from the secondary this offseason, what with Jason Pinnock, Damar Hamlin and Paris Ford all heading out to the NFL. That’s a lot to replace, but it seems like some quality players have emerged. At corner, Pitt’s got Damarri Mathis, Marquis Williams, A.J. Woods, Rashad Battle and Jahvante Royal; they all seem to have had their moments this spring. And at safety, Erick Hallett missed the spring due to injury but Brandon Hill, Judson Tallandier and transfer M.J. Devonshire have been stepping in. Time will tell if all of those guys are good enough to keep up the strong play of Pitt’s defense in recent years, but there seems to be a lot of talent and depth in the secondary.

I know that’s not exactly a long list of “Things we learned,” but there are a few realities at play here: one is that you rarely learn all that much from spring camp. More importantly, I don’t think there’s a lot that’s unknown about this team. The needs are simple and well-understood - they need the offense to take a big step forward while the defense gets a few guys to step up and keep things going on that side of the ball - and the key players, from the quarterback to the tight end to the new starters at defensive end and defensive back, have been talked about a lot.

Now it’s just a matter of waiting to find out if those guys will actually get this team to success.

ONE PREDICTION

There won’t be a lot to take from Saturday
When it comes to the spring game itself, I think we have a pretty good idea of what to expect.

After all, we’ve watched Pat Narduzzi Spring Games for the last six years - five spring games, in total - and we know the format by now: a team-vs-team matchup with the roster split in two, scored like a regular game.

More importantly, we know the format for how the roster will be split up. It happens via draft, which took place on Wednesday, and while the order of selection says a lot about what the players on the team think of their peers and the depth and talent and value at each position, it doesn’t necessarily make for a great football game.

You know the problem with the format: the players get drafted individually, which means first and second and third-team units get mixed up. In a lot of cases, that’s not a big deal, but it is on the offensive line, where continuity and cohesiveness are so important. Certainly the coaches have mixed and matched personnel on the line throughout spring camp, but in this format, you’re likely to have guys lining up next to each other with little experience working together.

The results, as you might expect or perhaps as you recall from previous years, are not great. The defensive line is far more adept at rotating players, and more often than not, they have taken advantage of the offensive line’s personnel groupings and made it difficult for the offense to move the ball and score, which ends up leaving the fans who attend the spring game a little unfulfilled.

I know this is Pittsburgh and we love defense and all of that, but the truth is, people want to see touchdowns. They want offensive fireworks. And a defensive struggle in the spring game, born largely of the offense being a mess…that’s not very fun to watch, especially when the team needs a big boost of offense in the coming season.

But we all know this, right? We’ve all seen enough spring games to know what’s coming. The offensive line will be mixed up, Kenny Pickett won’t play more than one series and we will probably be lucky to see more than two touchdowns. At least, two offensive touchdowns.

That’s just how it goes in these things. And because of that, there won’t really be that much to take from the spring game, at least in terms of learning something about the upcoming season. At best, I would like to see the receivers and especially the tight ends make some nice catches, and I would like to see some sound tackling from the back seven on defense.

Really, the best matchups will probably be the defensive backs against the receivers. There’s some talent on both sides of the ball, and they should get an opportunity to make some plays against each other. I’m looking forward to that.