2/18/2022 basketball Edit

The 3-2-1 Column: Hoops coming together, Donald the GOAT and more

Chris Peak • Panther-lair

Publisher

In this week's 3-2-1 Column, we're talking about Pitt's three-game winning streak, how the Panthers are starting to look like what was expected, Aaron Donald's place among Pitt greats and more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

It’s hard not to like what we’ve seen
I’m not going to overreact to Pitt’s win at North Carolina. I’m not going to overreact to Pitt’s win at North Carolina. I’m not going to overreact to Pitt’s win at North Carolina.

Okay, I’m probably going to overreact to Pitt’s win at North Carolina.

Look, we react strongly to every game. Every loss is a clear indication that the program is doomed and every win shows that things are on the right track (although that one has been a slightly tougher sell this season).

We live in the moment. Or, put another way, the moment dictates how we live. So I try to be cognizant of that and keep some broader perspective on things. That’s always the goal, and sometimes it even works.

But when Pitt pulls together to win three in a row, with two of those coming on the road (did you know that Pitt won a total of two February road games over the course of six seasons from 2015-21?), well, you’ll forgive me if I overreact a bit.

Look, it’s not that Florida State or N.C. State or North Carolina are great teams; I can keep my overreaction measured enough to not go that far. Rather, this is about Pitt.

Prior to the trip to Florida State, the Panthers were mired in arguably their worst stretch of the season. A disgusting 13-point loss at Boston College, a blowout defeat at Wake Forest and a pair of games against Virginia Tech that basically contained all the worst things that can happen - it was brutal. Pitt was 8-16 overall and 3-10 in the ACC with no hope on the horizon and little reason to even pay modest attention to the final seven games of the season.

But then Pitt went to Tallahassee and escaped against an undermanned FSU team for the Panthers’ first February road win since 2017. Then they came home to face N.C. State and took a solid lead before holding on at the end to beat the Wolfpack.

Those were wins. Maybe not good wins, but they were wins. Surely, Pitt wouldn’t be able to get a third win in a row against a North Carolina team that had won six of its last seven and was the top-scoring team in ACC games this season, right?

Except that’s exactly what the Panthers did.

UNC certainly played poorly on Wednesday night. The Tar Heels were sloppy early, giving up 10 turnovers in the first half that Pitt turned into 20 points and doing their best Panther impression by failing to guard the three-point line. That turned into a 17-point lead at halftime, and the advantage eventually grew as great as 21 in the second half.

There was something for everyone on Wednesday night, though. The fans who like big leads could enjoy Pitt’s 59-38 advantage in the second half; for fans who prefer resilient efforts to hold on and win a game late, there was plenty of that, too, when UNC cut the lead all the way down to six with 1:50 to play.

Build a big lead and then make plays down the stretch to clinch the win. There’s a lot to like about that combination. If you can excel in both of those situations, it’s a good way to win games.

And there’s a lot to like about how Pitt is playing right now. The Panthers’ current three-game winning streak - their first of the season - has been fueled by strong defensive play and some of the team’s best offensive work all year. Pitt is averaging 67.7 points per game over the last three while shooting 41% from the field and 39.3% from three. And it doesn’t hurt to have made 41-of-45 free throws in the last two games either.

So again, we’re not going to overreact. But I don’t think it’s an overreaction to say this team has played well over the last three games and, dare I say, they have improved?

I think it’s tough to argue with the positivity of that development.

Something new
I have tried to resist the “February collapse” narrative the last few years.

Sure, Pitt’s record in February was bad in Capel’s first three seasons. Like, “3-19” bad.

But my contention has always been that the struggles are not unique to February; rather, they are tied to the overall mediocrity of the teams and the increased challenge of facing ACC opponents when the calendar year changes. To wit, Pitt’s record in January during Capel’s first three seasons was 8-14; that’s better than 3-19, but still not what anyone would call “good.” So while the records dipped in February, it’s not like the team was all that great to begin with.

Also, for further context, the last time Pitt had a winning record in February was 2015 - Jamie Dixon’s penultimate season with the Panthers. So it’s also not like February struggles are anything new or exclusive to Capel.

However, Pitt is now on the precipice of possibly breaking that particularly gnarly streak. The Panthers are 3-3 so far in February 2022, having lost the first three games of the month before winning the last three. And with two potentially winnable games left before March begins, there’s a real chance that Pitt could go 5-3 in February.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed, and I’m certainly not putting this in the “ONE PREDICTION” section of this week’s column. But Georgia Tech is objectively the worst team in the ACC, and the Yellow Jackets are coming to the Petersen Events Center on Saturday. Pitt is capable of decent highs and considerable lows, so no game can be taken for granted, but that is really one the Panthers should win.

And then they are scheduled to host Miami next Tuesday. The Hurricanes are quite a bit better than Georgia Tech at 19-7 overall and 11-4 in the conference, which puts them at No. 3 behind Duke and Notre Dame. But Miami - like UNC - has had its clunkers this season, from an early loss to UCF to a 30-point thumping by Alabama to a pair of losses to Florida State. And Pitt has actually won two regular-season games in a row against Miami (on the road last year and home two years ago).

So there’s a chance for Pitt to pull it off. Imagine if the Panthers could manage a five-game winning streak to end the month and head into the final two games - Duke at home and Notre Dame on the road - with some momentum and the first February winning record in seven years.

That would be wild.

The best part
I’m going to come back to something I said at the end of the first section of the column.

In fact, I’m going to quote myself, which is weird but that’s what I’m going to do.

So again, we’re not going to overreact. But I don’t think it’s an overreaction to say this team has played well over the last three games and, dare I say, they have improved?

That last word - improved - is the one I want to look at, because that has certainly been missing from recent Pitt teams, and there were points this season when it felt like improvement of any kind was out of reach.

Like when they lost four in a row, a losing streak that stretched into this month and seemed to doom the team to yet another miserable February.

Instead, as we already laid out, things went in a different direction. After losing those four games, they pulled themselves together and beat Florida State on the road and N.C. State at home leading into Wednesday’s win at North Carolina.

What stands out to me, though, is not just the wins but how the team improved in that stretch. There are a lot of reasons they seem to have gotten better, but what it looks like to me is a team that is developing. Guys are finding their roles, settling into them and excelling (to varying degrees).
And what’s really interesting is, the team is just-maybe-quite-possibly starting to look more and more like what the coaches expected to have all along.

The coaches never counted on Jamarius Burton getting hurt in the preseason. They never anticipated Ithiel Horton getting arrested or Nike Sibande tearing his ACL. They team they envisioned, the team they expected, featured all three of those guards playing at full strength throughout the season.

Instead, they didn’t get Burton into the starting lineup until the end of November, didn’t get Horton into the starting lineup until Feb. 9 and won’t get Sibande in at all.

Those are significant shakeups to the construction of this roster, as we all know and have discussed at length over the last three months.

But now, things seem to be coming together. Burton has long since found his groove, scoring in double figures in 19 of the last 20 games while providing leadership, toughness and a knack for making the key play. Horton took some time to get back into the rhythm of things, but in his three games as a starter, he has scored 61 points and shot 56.5% from three despite posting a 1-of-5 line from deep against N.C. State.

Elsewhere, John Hugley bounced back from his brief scoring slump with 48 points and 23 rebounds in the the last three games, including a head-to-head win against UNC standout center Armando Bacot on Wednesday night.

Femi Odukale scored 10 points against UNC but dished nine assists and has recorded 18 dimes in the last three while averaging better than six rebounds per game.

And Mo Gueye…well, he’s Mo Gueye: 25 points, 15 rebounds, 11 blocks and 13 fouls against Florida State, N.C. State and UNC.

Meanwhile, bench players like Noah Collier and Will Jeffress and Onyebuchi Ezeakudo are contributing quality minutes; they’re impacting the games in positive ways when they get on the court.

All told, things seem to be going pretty well.

Now, I’ll admit that I am writing this in the midst of a three-game winning streak, and as the man says, it’s easy to grin when your ship comes in. They’re probably not going to play like this consistently over the next two weeks. There will be dips and ebbs and challenging moments.

But somehow, nearly three months into the season, they seem to finally be morphing into the team they were expected to be. Not great, but good enough to compete with most of the teams on their schedule.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Is Aaron Donald the GOAT?
I don’t think we needed any further confirmation to know that Aaron Donald is great, but if there was anything missing from a near-perfect career, it was a championship.

He didn’t win one at Penn Hills. He didn’t win one at Pitt. And his Rams lost when they made it to the Super Bowl three years ago.

As you most certainly know, Donald got his Super Bowl win on Sunday night, and he did a whole heck of a lot to make it happen, especially at the end. So if you felt like he needed a championship to cement his legacy, there you go.

But you know he didn’t need that. Donald had already done more than enough to establish himself as the best in the NFL and one of the best defensive tackles to ever play the game.

One of the best defensive players ever.

Maybe one of the best players ever.

I’ll let the TV pundits and talking heads debate that. Our focus is here is Pitt, so let’s narrow to that perspective a bit.

Where does Donald rank among all-time Pitt greats?

I am fighting the urge to make this a Mount Rushmore debate, since that’s just about the lowest common denominator among sports discussions. But you know the names that are at the top of the list.

Tony Dorsett. Dan Marino. Hugh Green. Bill Fralic. Mike Ditka. Mark May. Jimbo Covert. Larry Fitzgerald. Joe Schmidt. Marshall Goldberg.

Those are the 10 players whose jersey numbers have been retired by Pitt. Aaron Donald isn’t in that group (yet), but his name rightfully belongs among them, and while we toss around the term Greatest of All Time for a whole lot of things that probably don’t deserve it, Aaron Donald just might be the GOAT.

He nearly achieved that status during his Pitt career. He was a unanimous first-team All-American in 2013; only 11 other Pitt players have achieved that. He won four major national awards - more than any other player in Pitt history. He was the 13th overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft; only 13 Pitt players have ever been drafted earlier.

And since he got to the NFL, he has been among the best in the game. Seven All-Pro first teams in eight seasons. Eight Pro Bowls. Defensive Rookie of the Year. Three Defensive Player of the Year awards (and he has been in the top five in DPOY voting each of the last seven seasons). Top-10 in the league in tackles for loss every year of his career. Top-10 in sacks in five of his eight seasons. Top-10 all-time in career tackles for loss. Top-50 in career sacks since 1982 (when the NFL started officially counting the stat).

Those would be impressive numbers for any defensive player. But a defensive tackle?

That’s GOAT status.

So is Donald the guy? Where does he rank among those top players in Pitt history? His career has checked almost every box possible for a football player (short of team success in college football; his Pitt teams went 8-5, 6-7, 6-7 and 7-6). He produced in college. He produced in the NFL. And his status as one of the best in the game - maybe the best in the game - has been cemented.

Can we put him above Dorsett? Green? Fralic? Fitzgerald? To me, those four are the cream of the crop, the guys who achieved at the highest possible level during their Pitt careers. Taking the whole picture into consideration, are you dropping one of those guys for Aaron Donald?

I don’t have an answer to this one yet. But he is right there on the doorstep.

What’s the pro outlook for Pickett?
NFL Draft season is a goofy time. There are benchmark events and moments, like the Senior Bowl and the combine and the pro days and the Draft itself. But in and among those are a whole bunch of empty days.

And to fill those, the NFL Draft coverage industry creates content but releasing mock drafts, moving players up and down, releasing new mock drafts, moving players up and down and on and on.

What’s funny to me, of course, that oftentimes these movements up and down the board aren’t really tied to any specific event or change. NFL executives aren’t really tipping their hands about who they like or what they think, and yet new mock drafts come out, ostensibly on the basis of new information - even if there really isn’t any.

So when it comes to Kenny Pickett and trying to figure out his pro prospects, I tend to look at little less at the Mock Draft Industry and a little more at what we all know and have seen from his college career.

Look. I’ll admit to having had my doubts about Pickett prior to this past season. It was hard not to after watching his first four seasons as a starter. He was a decent college player 2017-20, but nothing screamed “First Round Draft Pick.”

2019 was especially rough, when the offense cost the team two key wins (Miami and Boston College) that could have turned a mediocre 7-5 into a strong 9-3, and while that’s not all on Pickett, some of it is. When the starting quarterback manages 13 touchdown passes in 12 games, it’s not exactly encouraging.

And things really didn’t improve in 2020 when he had another 13 touchdown/9 interception stat line (probably the only time Pitt fans have ever disliked that particular combination of numbers). Granted, Pickett got hurt, missed two games and played the final four with considerable limitations, but even before his injury, it wasn’t exactly a dominant performance:

5 games played, 60% completion, 1,389 yards, 8 touchdowns, 3 interceptions.

Those are okay numbers, but not great. He didn’t throw more than two touchdowns in any of those five games, topped 300 yards just once - 411 in a loss to N.C. State - and threw an interception in three of the four games against ACC competition.

He was just okay. Not good, not particularly bad, but just okay. And that’s who he was entering 2021:

Just okay.

But as we all know, he was far more than okay in 2021. He was one of the best in the nation, by just about any standard, and the question that has to be answered by NFL decision-makers is where that improvement came from and if it’s sustainable.

I think it is.

The reason I say that is because the biggest improvement I saw from Pickett last season wasn’t necessarily anything physical. He wasn’t magically able to make throws he couldn’t make before. His arm didn’t get drastically stronger or anything like that.

The biggest improvement came in things like pocket presence. One criticism I had of Pickett after the 2019 and 2020 seasons was that he didn’t seem to handle himself well in the pocket. He reacted to pressure that wasn’t quite there yet, escaping the pocket when he didn’t need to. The protection from Pitt’s offensive line wasn’t great, but it was often good enough that Pickett could have hung in a little longer or trusted it a little more.

Instead, he often bailed from the pocket or rushed his throws, which had more than a small impact on how catchable his passes were - and led to more than a few of those drops we’ve all talked about for a few years.

I would contend that Pitt’s improvement in catching passes this past season was partly due to the receivers themselves, but also a whole lot of it was on Pickett throwing a more catchable ball. And he did so because he was more comfortable in the pocket than he had been at any previous point in his career.

That’s not a result of improved pass protection, to my eye; instead, it was a result of Pickett’s improved awareness on the field.

To me, that was the biggest change in Pickett’s play from 2020 to 2021, and I think the giant steps he took in that regard are also among the biggest reasons he should be able to have success in the NFL (and they’ll have a hell of a lot more impact on his play at the next level than his hand size will).

I also think Pickett really excelled in his preparation this season. He and Mark Whipple were on the same page on game day due to the work they put in during the week, and the result was the most productive offense in Pitt history and an ACC Championship.

So when you hear talk about hand size and double-jointed thumbs and this or that, remember what really matters: the physical tools that you can see without a tape measure, the preparation that makes it look easy and the mental approach on the field to process information and make good decisions.

Those are the things that separate Kenny Pickett, in my opinion.

ONE PREDICTION

Pitt will retire No. 97
Okay, on this one, I can claim that it’s not entirely a product of recency bias. I can claim it doesn’t even have anything to do with Aaron Donald winning the Super Bowl. I’ve been talking about Pitt retiring his number for awhile now.

In fact, I said it should happen way back in December 2013, shortly after Donald claimed his fourth major national award. So yes, I’ve been on this train since it left the station.

Now, with Donald firmly establishing his place among the NFL greats - even if that shouldn’t be a qualifier for Pitt jersey retirement - I think the time has come. And I think the time will come in the near future.

This isn’t sourced reporting. Nobody told me Pitt is going to retire his jersey. But 2022 sure seems like a good time to do it.

Why now?

Well, we can’t ignore the fact that Donald is fresh off a Super Bowl win. That’s a good thing. But just as much, if not more, is the fact that 2022 has some “event games” that would serve as fine settings for such a ceremony.

That’s how Pitt likes to do it. They like to take the event games and make them even bigger.

In 1997, the jersey numbers of Mike Ditka, Joe Schmidt and Marshall Goldberg were retired when Pitt hosted Miami. In 2001, Mark May’s jersey was retired during a home game against Miami. Larry Fitzgerald’s No. 1 went in the rafters, so to speak, during Pitt’s first game as a member of the ACC (Florida State in 2013). And the most recent jersey retirement - Jimbo Covert’s No. 75 - happened during a game against Notre Dame in 2015.

Pitt likes those Event Games, and we all know that 2022 starts with a pretty big one.

September 1. West Virginia. Heinz Field.

It doesn’t get any bigger than that, so you might as well blow the roof off - figuratively - by retiring No. 97. The place will already be rocking for the Return of the Brawl, and the crowd will be extra pumped by whatever Pitt has planned to commemorate the ACC Championship. So take a big night and make it even bigger.

Make it a big old Pitt Party.

What’s funny here is, I have only really talked about when Pitt will retire No. 97 - not if they should, since that seems relatively obvious. But in case you were on the fence, consider that Pitt has had 14 unanimous All-America honors spread across 12 players (because Bill Fralic and Hugh Green were so good that they did it twice).

Nine of those 12 players were named unanimous All-Americans since 1938, and seven of those nine have had their jerseys retired. The only two who haven’t been retired? Joe Walton (unanimous AA in 1956) and Aaron Donald.

And then there’s this: only four players in Pitt history have won multiple major national awards. Tony Dorsett won three (Heisman, Maxwell, Walter Camp), Hugh Green won three (Maxwell, Walter Camp, Lombardi), Larry Fitzgerald won two (Walter Camp and Biletnikoff) and Aaron Donald won four (Nagurski, Bednarik, Outland, Lombardi).

Put all of that together - the unanimous All-America honors and the major national awards - and you have a player who is truly in the upper echelon of Pitt Panthers. In fact, I think you could make a case that he is more deserving of jersey retirement than some of the guys whose numbers are already off the board.

I don’t think Pitt is going to wait long to fix that and add him to the list. And once that happens, I think it will be a long time before the Panthers retire another one.

But this one has to happen. And I say do it on Sept. 1.