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In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re counting down to kickoff on Pitt’s season opener and talking offense, defense and everything in between.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Is it game time yet?
Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock…

Is it 7:30 on Saturday night yet? It really can’t get here soon enough.

I know there’s always anticipation for the season opener. Every team in the country is looking forward to their first game (well, I don’t know if Georgia Tech was looking forward to what happened last night, but still…). It’s always exciting when your team is about to take the field for the first time, and that final countdown to kickoff is pretty much the peak of the anticipation and excitement.

But this year seems to be even more of that for Pitt. It’s not just that the Panthers are opening with a real game against a key opponent; that’s part of it, but that’s not the whole thing.

Rather, it’s all the uncertainty. While Pitt fans are split on what to make of 2018, I think a lot of them would agree that the Panthers were close. They won the Coastal and went 7-7 despite miserable offensive performances in at least three of the team’s losses. So it’s not a stretch to say that if they could just get some offense, the team could really be successful.

Well, now we can find out if they “got some offense” this offseason. Mark Whipple was hired, of course, and he has been tasked with fixing the passing game in the macro and Kenny Pickett in the micro; those two things are naturally connected, and Whipple certainly has an encouraging resume from that perspective.

But it’s bigger than just seeing if Whipple’s game plan works or if Pickett is a good quarterback. With how close the team got last year - again, a few bad offensive performances away from 10 wins - there’s at least some reason to feel like Pat Narduzzi’s building of this program is coming to fruition. The team is potentially on the cusp of turning a corner from six or seven wins into consistently seeing eight or nine as the floor, but it has to score points.

Figure the offense out, and this team has a huge amount of potential. Get something effective out of the passing game, the ceiling raises considerably for Pitt in 2019. Become a dangerous and explosive team on that side of the ball, and you assert yourself as perhaps the top team in the Coastal - not just for one season, but in a bit more of a permanent role.

Fail to do those things and continue to flounder on offense, and the direction of the program turns dramatically.

There’s a lot riding on the offense this season. It’s not crazy to say everything is riding on the offense this season. It’s been the focal point since the end of last year and it’s all leading up to the 12 games Pitt is about to play.

Starting with Saturday night.

Enough talking about the offense. Enough asking questions about the offense. Enough getting non-answers about the offense. Enough speculating and hypothesizing and guessing and assuming and hoping.

It’s time to kick off and get the first real picture of this offense in action.

Starting with a big game is fun
The schedule definitely plays into the anticipation for the season, too. There’s no way to ignore that.

Getting a real opponent in Week 1 is such a rarity. Sure, it’s exciting to see your team no matter who the opponent is. But let’s be real: there’s not a lot of juice, as I think the kids say, in Albany and Youngstown State.

Those games are the norm, though. In the last 20 years, Pitt has opened with a Power Five (or power conference, prior to the last realignments) opponent just three times. The Panthers had Notre Dame in 2005 to celebrate the debuts of Dave Wannstedt and Charlie Weis. The next year, they opened with Virginia as a nonconference opponent. And in 2013, Pitt hosted Florida State in what was supposed to be a welcome-to-the-ACC game for the Panthers but turned into a welcome-to-the-Heisman party for Jameis Winston.

Each of those three games had something on the line (to varying degrees; there wasn’t a lot of hype for the Virginia game in ’06 and it drew 46,000), but this one in 2019 is arguably the biggest of all. And maybe it’s not too arguable at all.

Notre Dame in 2005 wasn’t a conference game; it was more about a new head coach making a statement. Virginia in 2006 was just a game. Florida State in 2013 was a conference game, which adds something to it, but there really wasn’t much competition in it.

This game against Virginia on Saturday night, though - this is a huge game. We all know the Cavaliers are the preseason favorites for the Coastal, but that didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t that long ago - maybe 10 months or so - that they were the in-season favorites for the division. After opening the season 3-2 overall and 1-1 in the ACC, Virginia knocked off then-No. 16 Miami and then beat Duke and UNC to take the lead in the division at 4-1.

That spot had the Cavaliers ranked in the top 25 for the first time in seven years, and all the hype was behind them heading into a Friday night home game against Pitt.

You know what happened that night.

They added two more losses after the Pitt game, falling in overtime in consecutive road games at Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech to end the regular season. But they rebounded to shut out South Carolina 28-0 in the Belk Bowl.

Entering 2019, Virginia returns its quarterback, its head coach and both of its coordinators; Virginia Tech is the only other team in the Coastal that can make that claim, but the Hokies have experienced plenty of offseason turmoil. So when you combine the flirtations with success from last season and the stability entering this season, it’s not hard to see why so many are high on Bronco Mendenhall’s squad.

If Pitt wants to repeat as Coastal champs, the Panthers are probably going to have to compete with Virginia. There are plenty of spots in this division for a team to falter, so losing to the Cavaliers on Saturday doesn’t completely doom Pitt’s chances.

But it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that winning the opener puts the Panthers in a position of strength, at least at the start of the season.

Perkins is key
Here’s a shocking bit of In-Depth Football Analysis:

Pitt has to keep Virginia quarterback Bryce Perkins under wraps.

Really analytical stuff, isn’t it?

Okay, I know it’s obvious that, in any game, containing the opponent’s quarterback is key to the game. Keep the quarterback from having a big game, and you’ll probably win. That’s especially true with a team like Virginia and a quarterback like Perkins.

For starters, Perkins is really good. He can run and throw really well, and he was a big part - maybe the biggest part - of Virginia’s success last season.

Likewise, when Pitt beat the Cavaliers in Charlottesville, keeping him contained was a big part of the Panthers’ success. Perkins finished with a net of minus-7 rushing yards in the game, due largely to Pitt’s five sacks. That’s a big number to reproduce, but it’s one the Panthers have to shoot for in Saturday night’s game.

I asked Pat Narduzzi this week which position should get the credit for that performance in Charlottesville last fall. Was it the defensive ends? Dewayne Hendrix did have 2.5 sacks. Or was it the outside linebackers? They did a good job containing the perimeter and not letting Perkins get out and run.

Narduzzi’s answer was a perfect coaching answer but also one that makes a lot of sense: he said it takes all 11. He said that some of Pitt’s sacks in that game were coverage sacks, and that’s probably an important element we should consider.

If Perkins doesn’t have any open options, he’s going to linger in the pocket. If he lingers in the pocket, Patrick Jones and Deslin Alexandre and the defensive tackles are going to have a better chance of getting to him. They still have to be responsible and not give him big seams to run through, because plays can break in Virginia’s favor when that happens.

But if Dane Jackson and Jason Pinnock and Damarri Mathis and Damar Hamlin and Paris Ford and Jazzee Stocker - or some combination thereof - can do their job on the back end, I feel a lot better about the chances for the guys up front.

Ultimately, the main point is the same: Pitt has to prevent Perkins from taking over this game.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Where will Pitt’s scoring come from?
In addition to the rushing yards Qadree Ollison and Darrin Hall took with them to the NFL - 2,357 combined, or 74% of Pitt’s total from a year ago - the two former Panthers also carried away a significant portion of the team’s scoring in 2018.

Pitt produced 42 offensive touchdowns last season; we’ll set aside how paltry it is to average three offensive touchdowns per game in today’s college football and simply look at what percentage of those 42 came from Ollison and Hall.

It was an even 50%. Ollison rushed for 11 scores and Hall had 10. We could bump the number of departed touchdowns to 28 if we want to, since Rafael Araujo-Lopes scored four touchdowns, George Aston added two more scores and Stefano Millin had one, but the numbers for Ollison and Hall seem to make the point well enough.

Obviously, the biggest hole to fill will be with the running backs. Pitt has Taysir Mack and Maurice Ffrench returning, and they accounted for seven of the Panthers’ 12 receiving touchdowns last season. But Ollison and Hall had 21 of the team’s 30 rushing scores, and that’s where this year’s offense has to make up ground.

So who carries the load? That’s pretty much the same question as asking who will make up the difference in the rushing yards, and the answers to both questions are the same:

It will probably be a committee.

I could end up being wrong about this - probably even odds on that one - but I really think this is going to be a year where Pitt’s offense has a handful of players in the range of 400-700 rushing yards but no 1,000-yard rusher. Similarly, I could see a number of guys rush for 4-7 touchdowns but nobody get to double digits.

I just don’t know if there’s a bona fide lead back on the roster, or at least one who will establish himself as such this season. But I do think there are a bunch of solid players with a variety of skill sets who can do enough different things to keep a defense off-balance and get some productive yards.

So I think Pitt’s offensive production this season is going to rely heavily on personnel usage. When do you go with Todd Sibley? When is it time for AJ Davis? Is Vincent Davis able to make something happen on limited touches? Where is V’Lique Carter’s role? How does Maurice Ffrench figure into it?

There are some explosive playmakers on this team, but getting them on the field at the right time and then getting them the ball with an opportunity to make plays will be the difference between averaging three touchdowns per game and getting a closer to a competent college football offense.

What’s the impact of Salahuddin’s departure?
Speaking of running backs, Pitt lost one this week when redshirt freshman Mychale Salahuddin decided to transfer.

According to Pat Narduzzi, “Mutually Pitt football and Mychale Salahuddin have decided to part ways.” By all accounts, this was one that probably should have been visible on the horizon. Salahuddin fell behind on the depth chart in training camp, not necessarily due to performance but more to opportunity: his snaps, particularly in contact drills, were limited as he continues to recover from a knee injury he suffered last season.

While he was watching from the sidelines, Salahuddin dropped behind not just upperclassmen AJ Davis and Todd Sibley, but seemingly also behind freshman Vincent Davis, who was one of the breakout players in training camp.

Throw in sophomore V’Lique Carter, whose role will include snaps at running back, and Salahuddin found himself fourth and potentially fifth on the depth chart.

Given that all three or four of the players ahead of him have years of eligibility remaining, it’s not hard to see why Salahuddin made the decision he made.

Really, it was probably inevitable that somebody was going to transfer out of the running back room. The Panthers had five running backs on scholarship in camp (or six if you count Carter), and that’s a crowded group competing for snaps at a position where one or two players usually gets the bulk of the work. Even if Pitt will take a committee approach this season - and I think they will - there’s still a realistic “max size” for that committee, and it’s probably something less than five.

Still, it’s too bad to see Salahuddin go. I think he’s a talented player who could have helped Pitt, either later this season or next year. But he’s also probably talented enough to go to a junior college this year and then find an FBS home for his final three years of eligibility. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see him have success.

If you’re keeping score at home, Salahuddin is the third scholarship player to transfer from Pitt this offseason: receiver Devin Street transferred to Towson and tight end Tyler Sear transferred to Temple (technically, Sear left the team at midseason, but his transfer was in the offseason). That’s not too bad for one offseason in 2019. And while tight end continues to be a big question mark for Pitt, the Panthers do have a fair amount of depth at both receiver and running back to absorb the departures of Street and Salahuddin.

At running back, in particular, Pitt has one more year of AJ Davis and Todd Sibley, at least three and possibly four more of Vincent Davis and Daniel Carter, two more of V’Lique Carter and two backs currently committed in the class of 2020.

ONE PREDICTION

Here comes the run
Okay, we’re bringing it back.

When this column started two years ago - the first 3-2-1 Column was published a few days before the 2017 season opener - it was set up with this format: three things we know, two questions we have and a prediction.

In that first column, I predicted that Max Browne would throw for at least 250 yards in the opener against Youngstown State. Browne ended up with 140 passing yards that day, and my predictions only got worse from there. Like the next week, when I said I didn’t think Pitt would beat Penn State that year but they would get the Lions in 2018 (they didn’t). Or Week Three, when I said the passing game would get on track and Browne would throw multiple touchdown passes (he didn’t thrown any scores and got benched for Ben DiNucci).

You see the pattern. For the Georgia Tech game in Week Four, I predicted DiNucci would account for two touchdowns; he connected for one. Later that year, I predicted that Pitt would finally sign a recruit from Michigan; that still hasn’t happened. And the list goes on and on.

So I stopped making predictions. Why keep up the gimmick if it only goes wrong? Granted, I was mostly using the prediction as a way to discuss an additional topic rather than staking my life on something, but if you keep calling tails and heads comes up every time, eventually you throw the coin away. Or something.

But now that the season is about to start, I’m feeling predict-y again, so here goes:

In Saturday night’s opener against Virginia, Pitt will have at least 175 rushing yards as a team. Why 175? Well, last year’s Panthers, with a pretty effective ground attack, topped 175 in nine out of 14 games, and the team’s defense allowed at least that many rushing yards eight times (plus the UNC game when the Tar Heels had 173). So it’s an attainable number sitting right between a dominant rushing performance (say, 200 yards) and one that’s just okay (like 150).

In 2018, 92 college football teams averaged at least 150 rushing yards per game. 56 averaged 175+. While Pitt is replacing four starters on the offensive line and both running backs, I think the Panthers should still be able to field a top-50 rushing attack. Even if Mark Whipple really does turn up the volume on Pitt’s passing attack, there’s still going to be an emphasis on the run.

It won’t be easy to get 175 against Virginia. The Cavaliers were a top-50 run defense last season, allowing an average of 147.5 yards per game on the ground. Pitt went off in Charlottesville with 254 rushing yards, but that relied heavily on Darrin Hall picking up 229 and three touchdowns on just 19 carries.

The key, then, is to hit some big plays. So I’m looking at guys like Todd Sibley, V’Lique Carter and maybe Vincent Davis plus some handoffs to Maurice Ffrench; there’s some breakout potential in that group, and if they can hit on a few long runs, 175 is doable.

I’m saying they do it. My track record isn’t great here, but I think it can happen.