The 3-2-1 Column: Johnny Majors, modern Pitt history and 2020 leaders

In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about Johnny Majors, what might have been and who will lead Pitt in sacks and tackles this season.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

The passing of a legend
You have no doubt seen the news that former Pitt coach Johnny Majors passed away on Wednesday.

Somehow, just calling him a “former Pitt coach” doesn’t seem to do justice to the man who, by all accounts and rightfully so, saved Pitt football.

We often talk about the state of Pitt football and what it has been for the last 30 years. We reflect on some low points in that stretch, whether it was the ultra-lows of the mid-1990’s (of which Majors was a part) or the general mediocrity and average-ness that has been all too present in the 2000’s.

But nothing that we have seen in recent decades comes close to where the Panthers were prior to Majors’ arrival in 1973.

From 1964 to 1972, Pitt was awful. The Panthers won just 22 games and lost 68 in those nine seasons. They won just one game in four of those nine years, including each of David Hart’s three seasons (1966, 1967 and 1968) and Carl DePasqua’s final season in 1972.

A once-proud program that was among the best in the nation had sunk to the depths of college football.

Then came Majors.

He roared into Pittsburgh in 1973 after a successful five-year tenure at Iowa State and made an immediate impact, starting his first season with a tie at Georgia (the Bulldogs went on to upset a top-20 Maryland team in the Peach Bowl that year), and while he lost to Penn State and Notre Dame, he did get the Panthers their first win over West Virginia in three years.

What’s more, Majors’ first team went to the Fiesta Bowl, where a loss to Arizona State didn’t overshadow the fact that Pitt hadn’t been to a bowl game in nearly 20 years. And things just grew from there. The Panthers didn’t get invited to a bowl game after a 7-4 season in 1974, but they beat Kansas in the Sun Bowl the next year and then capped Majors’ time in Pittsburgh with a perfect season and a national championship in 1976.

You know the story. And with Majors’ passing this week, we’ve all been reminded of what the world was like when Pitt was a dominant program.

That’s what Majors represents. He is the central figure in the story that is Pitt’s supremacy in college football. He’s not the only one, of course; Tony Dorsett and some of the great players who suited up as Panthers in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s represent it as well. But Majors is the one who started it. He’s the one who took over a one-win team and a moribund program and turned it into a national power.

Majors set the bar for what Pitt can be.

What might have been
Of course, it’s impossible to talk about Johnny Majors without considering the period at Pitt after he left.

Things started off well enough. Majors went home to Tennessee after the national championship in 1976 and was replaced by his former assistant, Jackie Sherrill. The Panthers experienced little drop-off in the transition.

They went 9-2-1 in 1977 and 8-4 in 1978 before rattling off the best three-year run in modern Pitt history:

11-1, 11-1, 11-1.

That’s the stuff dreams are made of. Nightmares, too, when you consider the 1981 regular-season finale against Penn State that ended in a loss and kept Pitt out of the national championship. But overall, it’s hard to argue with the success of those three seasons.

Sherrill left for Texas A&M after the 1981 season, and the reasons for his departure have been well-documented. But Pitt’s failures in retaining Sherrill in 1981 or Majors in 1976 open up some obvious questions that many have wrestled with:

What heights might Pitt have reached if either of those coaches had stayed in Pittsburgh?

It’s not hard to imagine the success continuing. Pitt was a machine back then, first under Majors and then under Sherrill. The program was one of the strongest in the nation, and keeping one of those coaches beyond 1976 in the case of Majors or 1981 in the case of Sherrill wouldn’t have guaranteed continued success, but it sure seems likely.

They both won at their subsequent jobs, and it’s completely plausible to think that they would have kept things going at Pitt.

As we all know, Pitt wasn’t necessarily committed to that sustained success and that part of the story has to be included. But the Panthers very well could have become one of the blue bloods in college football; instead, they slumped through the 1980’s to a miserable decade in the 1990’s, and it’s hard to say they’ll ever reach the level they were at in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

That downward trajectory only makes the Majors years (and Sherrill) stand out even more.

A coach’s role
When I spoke to Jackie Sherrill this week to reminisce about Johnny Majors, he said something that got me thinking.

He said that a coach’s job is to make players do things they don’t want to do and get them to accomplish things they didn’t think they could do.

I thought that was interesting and it really drives at the heart of what coaches do: they motivate. That’s what making players do things they don’t want to do is - it’s motivation. Coaches motivate.

They motivate players to work hard and focus and give everything they have to the team. That goes for any coach at any level, but college coaches are particularly interesting because they’re working with young people in a formative period of their lives; they’re not just trying to get them to be good teammates.

They’re trying to develop them as people. I mean, most coaches are trying to do that, and the successful ones are definitely trying to do that, since personal development often correlates with development as a teammate and an athlete.

It’s different working with players who are 18-21 years old. They’re not kids but they’re also not adults. They’re young but they have life experience. And the life that they experience in their college years will go a long way in laying the course for the rest of their lives.

That’s the case for everyone that age, but student-athletes are unique because they have the direct influence of someone else - a coach - in a way that non-athletes don’t experience.

I found myself thinking a lot about college coaches and their relationships to their players this week. Specifically, I was wrestling with the question of whether a college coach has obligation to speak publicly on a non-sports topic that impacts the players on his team.

You know where I’m going with this.

Pat Narduzzi made minor waves earlier this week when he didn’t say anything on social media as protests about the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota swept the nation over the weekend. He finally addressed the situation on Tuesday and, for my money, effectively put the matter to bed.

But I still wrestled with that question. Do college coaches have an obligation to speak up? Do they have to say something? I think I came to the conclusion that, yes, they do have some obligation, and here's why:

College coaches have a certain obligation to their players, an obligation to support their players and stand up for them. Sometimes that means arguing with a referee. Sometimes it means meeting with an academic advisor. And sometimes it means taking a stand publicly on a social issue that is important to the players.

I don’t think there’s any question that the current situation is very relevant for student-athletes. And because of that, I do believe that Narduzzi had some level of obligation to represent them and, more acutely, to show them his support. When he did say something, I think he represented himself and his team well - which is what he needed to do.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Will Pitt top the country in sacks again?
Getting back to the football talk - people still want that, right? - I’ve been thinking a lot about sacks this week.

Specifically, I've been thinking about how many sacks Pitt recorded last season and the likelihood of the Panthers getting that many again this year.

Make no mistake about it: Pitt got a lot of sacks in 2019. They had 51 total, which was three fewer than Ohio State, but since the Buckeyes played one more game than the Panthers did, Pitt ended up tied for first in the nation with an average of 3.92 sacks per game (SMU also had 51 in 13 games).

As an aside, SMU went 10-3 last season, and of the 15 teams who recorded at least 40 sacks in 2019, 11 won nine or more games. Pitt (8-5), Miami (6-7), Buffalo (8-5) and Michigan State (7-6) were the lone exceptions. Which kind of comes back to the notion that if you’re that good at getting to the quarterback, you should probably do better than eight wins, but that’s a topic for another discussion.

Back to the original point:

Pitt was one of the best teams in the nation at sacking the quarterback last season. So can the Panthers do it again?

Since 2006, only six teams have recorded at least 50 sacks in 13 games. In 2011, Texas A&M recorded 51 sacks. In 2012, Arizona State had 52 under first-year head coach Todd Graham (because the guy can actually coach defense pretty well). In 2014, Utah put up 55 sacks in 13 games. And Florida State got to 51 in 2016; that was the last time a team hit 50 sacks in 13 games prior to Pitt and SMU this past season.

So it’s not a very common occurrence for a defense to get to 50 in 13. But it’s even rarer for a team to repeat that feat. In fact, not one of those other four teams matched their performances the season after producing 50 sacks.

After getting 51 sacks in 2016, FSU had just 29 in 2017. Utah dropped from 55 in 2014 to 37 in 2015 (which still worked out to be No. 16 nationally in sacks per game). Arizona State went from 52 in 2012 to 40 in 2013. And Texas A&M had 31 sacks in 2012 - a full 20 less than the Aggies put up in 2011.

Three of those four 50-sacks-in-13-games teams dropped by at least 18 the next season, so we’re back to Pitt and the expectations for 2020: Are the Panthers in line for a similar drop?

I say no. You’ve certainly heard me rant and rave about this Pitt defensive line throughout the offseason, and that’s not going to stop anytime soon. The Panthers return almost all of last season’s sack producers (linebacker Kylan Johnson, who had 6.5 sacks in 2019, is the only significant departure). Plus they will add Rashad Weaver and Keyshon Camp, two very good defensive linemen who missed last season due to injury.

Pitt has the talent to average nearly four sacks per game again; the Panthers may or may not hit 50 sacks, but I think they’ll get close. Last year, they boosted their numbers quite a bit with nine sacks at Syracuse and six sacks each against Ohio, UCF and Delaware, but those offset some quieter games from the pass rush (two sacks against Miami, two at Georgia Tech, one against Boston College and two against Eastern Michigan).

I don’t know if Pitt will get to 50 sacks; that's obviously a big number to shoot for. But I don’t see them dropping off much. And I don’t see any reason the Panthers shouldn’t be right near the tops nationally when the 2020 season is over.

Will Twyman go back-to-back?
The other question is a bit more specific to individuals, and I addressed it earlier this week when I posed the question:

Who will be Pitt’s leader in sacks in 2020?

Jaylen Twyman is the incumbent leader, and at a lot of schools, the natural inclination would be to say that it’s rather unique and rare to have a defensive tackle lead the team in sacks. But those other schools aren’t Pitt, where a defensive tackle has led the team in sacks in four out of the last nine seasons.

Of course, three of those four were from Aaron Donald, who led the Panthers in sacks three years in a row from 2011-13. Then, after five seasons where Pitt was led by three different defensive ends and one linebacker, a defensive tackle ascended to the top spot again in 2019.

And this wasn’t like 2012, when Donald led Pitt in sacks but only had 5.5 (which is still a pretty good number for a defensive tackle but not a great total for the team high). Rather, Twyman legitimately earned it in 2019. He had 10.5 sacks, the most since Ejuan Price had 13 in 2016 and a total that outpaces Pitt’s season highs from nine out of the last 14 seasons.

Twyman was legit, but will he do it again? I’m not so sure. When I wrote about the potential sack leaders earlier this week, I named defensive end Patrick Jones the favorite and I’m sticking with him as the top candidate.

For all the attention that was rightfully paid to Twyman and Paris Ford and Damar Hamlin and Dane Jackson, Jones might have been Pitt’s best overall player on defense last season, which would make him the frontrunner for the title of best overall player on the team.

He didn’t match Twyman’s sack total, but he had 8.5, which is no small number. And he also had 18 quarterback hurries, per Pitt’s stat-keepers, Pro Football Focus credited him with a whopping 44 pressures - tied for the third-most in the nation.

My point is this: Jones had 8.5 sacks but created enough pressure to get even more. I think he will finish more of those plays in 2020 and take the sack title.

ONE PREDICTION

Something will happen for the first time in seven years
I don’t know if Jaylen Twyman will go back-to-back as sack leader, but if he does, it will be the fourth time since 2009 that a Pitt player has led the team in sacks in consecutive seasons.

It’s far more rare for one player to lead the team in tackles in back-to-back seasons, though. The last time that happened was in 2012 and 2013. Anybody know the trivia on the player who led Pitt in tackles in 2012 and 2013?

Anybody?

Jason Hendricks.

That’s a forgotten name, which is too bad because he was a good player at Pitt. He started 37 games over the course of four seasons, including five starts as a redshirt freshman in 2010 before becoming a full-time starter for his final three years.

In 2012, he made the All-Big East second team after making 90 tackles and recording six interceptions. He followed that up with a team-leading 85 tackles in 2013, but no player has been Pitt’s leading tacklers in consecutive seasons since then.

I thought Jordan Whitehead would do it. He burst onto the scene as a true freshman in 2015 and led Pitt with 109 tackles - the only time since 2011 that a Pitt defender has broken the 100-tackle mark. He was well on his way in 2016, averaging better than seven tackles per game through the first nine contests, but an elbow injury at Clemson ended his season and kept him out of the top spot.

Also among the leading tacklers in each season since Hendricks in 2013: Anthony Gonzalez (2014), Matt Galambos (2016), Seun Idowu (2017), Damar Hamlin (2018) and Paris Ford (2019).

You know where I’m going with this.

I’m going to predict that Ford hits the repeat button. He plays the boundary safety position in Pitt’s defense; when that spot is played well, it can be very productive. So productive, in fact, that I think Ford will not only repeat as Pitt’s leading tackler, but he’ll put up some big numbers in the process.

He had 97 tackles last season despite missing multiple halves due to suspension after targeting penalties. Give him a full 13 games last year and he would have easily broken the 100-tackle mark. I think he’ll get there this year and maybe even pass Whitehead, who had 109 tackles as a freshman in 2015. He might even push Max Gruder, who was the last player before Whitehead to cross the century mark when he had 116 tackles in 2011.

Ford is an active playmaker with a nose for the ball and he’s also one of the best tacklers on the team. That’s a perfect combination for the boundary safety spot, which naturally puts the player in position to make tackles, and I think he’ll go back-to-back on top of the Panthers’ stat sheet.