The 3-2-1 Column: LB's, playmakers, recruiting and more

Another grad transfer
I was gone on vacation last week, but the news we had been waiting on was finally confirmed when Pitt announced that Kylan Johnson would be joining the program as a graduate transfer.

Johnson, a native of Dallas, originally signed with Florida as a three-star safety prospect in the class of 2015. He redshirted in his first year in Gainesville and then played in 33 games over the next three seasons prior to graduating this offseason. He made eight starts over the course of those 33 games - five starts as a redshirt freshman, one as a redshirt sophomore while battling injury and two this past season despite playing in 13 games - so he’s not exactly an All-SEC player joining Pitt’s linebacker corps.

Still, there’s not much downside in this addition (or the addition of Michigan offensive lineman Nolan Ulizio). It’s a one-year scholarship commitment, so there’s not a lot at risk there. We currently list Pitt as being at the full allotment of 85 scholarships for 2019, assuming all players return and all freshmen qualify, so that means Johnson’s spot will have to come from somewhere (or, more accurately, someone).

Generally speaking, I think grad transfer additions are a win-win. While there are occasionally two-year guys like Nate Peterman (who was obviously pretty good) and Will Gragg (the jury’s still out on that one), it’s mostly a one-year investment that either adds a contributing player with experience or a veteran presence to practice and the sidelines. That’s pretty solid.

Beyond that, I’m not sure what to expect from Johnson. He seems like a good athlete and should fit the “Star” linebacker position in Pitt’s defense (that’s the hybrid safety/outside linebacker role). He has experience in the SEC but, like I said, he didn’t exactly dominate. That doesn’t mean he can’t contribute at Pitt, but for the time being, I’m hedging my bets on how he’ll fit in.

If you look at Pitt’s history with grad transfers under Narduzzi, Peterman is obviously the gold standard. But he’s also the exception as a player who came in with limited experience and actually played really well. Stefano Millin was a very solid score for the staff last year, and he was probably the type of player the coaches should target in the grad transfer market:

An experienced and successful contributor at a non-Power Five program. I mean, it would be great if you could grab a left tackle who started 30 games at a Big 12 school, but that’s probably not going to happen. If you’re Pitt, you need to find those guys who have outplayed their recruitment, so to speak - the guys who ended up in the MAC for whatever reason but have developed into very good players.

That’s what Pitt should be targeting.

I don’t mean to say that Pitt shouldn’t go after guys like Ulizio or Johnson; they’re one-year fliers, like I said, so there’s not much downside. But my expectations drop a bit for what they will contribute if they weren’t doing much at their previous Power Five homes. Ideally, everybody works out like Nate Peterman did, but he was probably the exception.

The course of the linebackers
A couple months ago, I was asked in one of our mailbag columns or maybe on the message board whether or not I thought Pitt would add another grad transfer, and if I did think there would be another one, which position I thought the coaches would look to fill with such an addition.

Interestingly enough, I said that linebacker would be a position where the coaches probably wouldn’t mind bringing in a grad transfer for, at worst, some veteran depth.

Now that it is actually happening, though, I started wondering about exactly why the roster needs an experienced linebacker. I mean, every coach would probably prefer to add veteran depth whenever they can, but why does linebacker seem like a spot where Pitt could use a grad transfer in 2019?

With that question in mind, I did what I often do: I went to the roster and looked at the recruiting. By our count, Pitt is currently projected to have 13 scholarship linebackers this season.

Saleem Brightwell - RS Sr.
Kylan Johnson - RS Sr.
Phil Campbell - RS Jr.
Chase Pine - RS Jr.
Elias Reynolds - RS Jr.
Cam Bright - RS Soph.
Kyle Nunn - RS Soph.
Albert Tucker - RS Soph.
Wendell Davis - RS Fr.
SirVocea Dennis - Fr.
Brandon George - Fr.
Leslie Smith - Fr.
Kyi Wright - Fr.

Now, a couple of those freshmen might end up switching positions, but we probably shouldn’t include any of those four when we’re talking about the depth situation for this season, since I doubt they’ll be factors. So let’s look at the nine upperclassmen, from Brightwell and Johnson down to Davis.

Pitt hasn’t had a ton of attrition at linebacker under Pat Narduzzi. Anthony McKee decided to hang up the cleats before expiring his eligibility and Kaezon Pugh and Henry Miller transferred. But that’s it; pretty much everybody else has stuck around. And they’ve also added linebackers through position moves, like Elijah Zeise coming from receiver a couple years ago and Phil Campbell switching from safety this offseason.

And yet, it seems like this group could use some experienced depth. I think a big part of that Pitt’s linebackers are in one of those transition years with three senior starters graduating from the roster. Anytime that happens, you’re going to feel like you’re lacking in experienced depth.

To be honest, Pitt got a whole lot out of Zeise and Seun Idowu - probably more than anyone expected them to get out of a converted receiver and a former walk-on safety. If those guys hadn’t taken to their roles as well as they did - save your jokes about poor play at linebacker; those two were pretty solid most of the time - then some of the younger players might have some more experience.

There’s also the matter of the 2015 class, which should be the redshirt seniors on the roster. With McKee gone, Brightwell is the only member of that class to still be here. Drill down from there and you have three redshirt juniors: Campbell (who moved from safety), Pine (who can’t seem to work his way up the depth chart) and Reynolds (who has actually played a decent amount).

So there’s a confluence of a small redshirt senior class and a big hole left by three departing seniors. With the way rosters are constructed in college football, that will happen from time to time.

That’s no moon, it’s an official visit weekend
While I was on vacation last week, we ran a series of articles looking back at five of Pat Narduzzi’s biggest official visit weekends since he became head coach at Pitt. There was the January 2015 weekend when Narduzzi and his newly-hired staff put the finishing touches on that year’s recruiting class. There was the December 2015 weekend when Narduzzi and company first really flexed their official-visit muscle.

A year later, Narduzzi pulled a clean sweep on the first visit weekend of the offseason. Then the staff changed course by spreading out the visits in December 2017 and January 2018, as opposed to stacking one big weekend.

And, of course, there was last June when Pitt hosted 18 recruits and got commitments from nine of them over the course of a weekend. That one was a spectacle to behold, a Father’s Day extravaganza that was truly unlike any other. It was the biggest official visit weekend I have seen in nearly 15 years of doing this job, and I wasn’t sure I would ever see anything like it again.

Until now.

June 2019 - the weekend of June 14-16, to be exact - is going to be even bigger. Like, maybe twice as big. Which is insane. We’ve already confirmed 20+ official visitors for that weekend, and I’m going to leave that as an unspecific number because I’m typing this on Thursday afternoon and I have no doubt that we’ll keep confirming new names by the time you read this.

The visitors are piling up and Pitt’s campus is going to be crawling with recruits that weekend. There’s probably something to the question of whether or not that many recruits is too many recruits - we’ll get to that in a minute - but I have to say that I admire the ambition of the staff.

It can’t be easy to plan for that many visitors. When you’re looking at potentially more than 30 recruits visiting at one time, there’s a whole lot of organization and planning that goes into it. Because these aren’t just visits; these are official visits, which means the coaches get the kids on campus for 48 hours and, for those most part, those 48 hours are pretty meticulously accounted for.

There are tours of campus and the city and the stadium. There are meetings with academic advisors and presentations from the Life Skills people. There are meetings with the position coaches. There are meetings with the head coach. And in almost all of these instances, the goal is to have as much one-on-one direct interaction as possible, which means allotting specific times for each activity and making sure everything that needs to get done actually gets done.

Oh, and food. Food is a big part of official visits. The school can feed the kids and pay for them to eat on official visits, so coaches tend to make sure that’s a memorable experience.

Pardon the phrase, but we’ll see if the coaches have bitten off more than they can chew with this mega-visit weekend. I think they’ve got smart guys planning these things out; I don’t know how much sleep they’ll be getting between now and then, but I do believe they’re smart, so we’ll see how they handle it.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

How big is too big?
Or, did the coaches bite off more than they can chew?

Like I said, I don’t think they did. I think if they thought the June 14th weekend was getting too big, if they believed it was getting out of hand and would be unmanageable or ineffective due to the size, I think they would try to break it up a little. The staff has already started planning for an official visit the following weekend (June 21-23) so they’re not entirely opposed to expanding beyond one weekend. And thus far, they’ve opted to stack the recruits into this one weekend.

But is it too big? Is 30 kids - or more - on campus at one time too many?

The biggest potential issue is something I addressed earlier: the individual attention. You want to make each kid on an official visit feel like a king. With this many at one time, it’s going to be hard to do that. I mean, Pat Narduzzi has greatly increased the size of Pitt’s support staff, so there is definitely enough people to go one-on-one throughout the weekend with every recruit if that’s the desire.

But for the priority recruits, you want them to spend as much time as possible with their future position coach to help build what could be a crucial bond, and that’s tough to do with this many kids. I’m sure the coaches and recruiting staff will develop a plan to address this and make sure each recruit gets the attention he needs, but there will be some logistics involved.

The other thing is the head coach. On an ideal official visit weekend, you’d have the recruits arrive on Friday and hang out around the facility getting to know each other and the coaches/staffers they’ll be with throughout the weekend. On Saturday, there would be a lot of meetings like those I mentioned: academics, Life Skills, position coaches, coordinators, etc., and then a trip to Heinz Field for dinner and to check out the stadium.

On Sunday morning, there might be another meeting with a position coach and then the visit would conclude with a sit-down with the head coach. That’s the ideal way it works, and the whole plan is to build up to that meeting with the head coach where, in the storybook version of things, the head coach closes the deal and the recruit commits before leaving his office.

That’s how most coaches try to plan it out. But if you have 30 kids visiting, then that plan gets a bit tougher to execute. How many recruits can Narduzzi meet with on a single Sunday morning? Those meetings are supposed to be more than 15 minutes long, but even if they were that short and you really stuck to that schedule and shipped them in and out exactly on time, it would still take close to eight hours to meet with all of them.

And again, that’s if everything works perfectly in 15-minute blocks (without bathroom breaks or meals or anybody going long in their meeting). So yeah, that’s not going to work.

Last June, with 18 kids on campus, some of the recruits met with Narduzzi on Saturday night. That’s what you have to do, I suppose, when things get big like that, and Pitt will probably have to do that again on this visit weekend.

Now, it’s not all downside. I think a visit weekend of this size, if it’s executed properly, can have some unique effectiveness. You’re bound to get commitments out of the weekend, and with this many kids on campus at the same time, the chances are high that we’ll see another Sunday with a half-dozen or more commitments.

That’s good for momentum and creates quite a boost heading into the summer, which is what happened last year. Some of that momentum can also grow among the recruits on the visit; one commits, then another, then another and before you know it, the momentum is spreading and pulls in another couple commitments just on its own sheer force.

So there’s value in the size of the visit weekend, too. We’ll see where the final balance falls. But there’s no question that it will be a spectacle.

How much should we read into Whipple’s history?
A question in this week’s Mailbag got me to thinking about Mark Whipple and his offense and the impact the change in scheme can/will have.

See, I can’t figure out what to expect from the offense this season. I know all about the personnel - the good and the bad - and while I’m not fully the type to say “Anything will be an improvement over Shawn Watson”…well, I do think there can and will be some improvements in that department.

But what can we really expect, at least based on what Whipple has done in the past? Put another way, can we look at his history and base any expectations on what we find. I’m not thinking as much about points scored and yards gained; those are helpful and informative measures, but they also depend a lot on the players and personnel.

I think what interests me more is the dispersal of the football. Pitt didn’t do a great job last season of getting the ball to its playmakers, in my opinion, particularly when it comes to the passing game. Sure, some of that is on Kenny Pickett and his decision-making, but some falls on the offensive coordinator, and that’s what I’m interested in.

In looking at the numbers, I think they reflect positively on Whipple largely because he seemed to have an innate ability for making sure that the playmakers got the ball. Tight ends coach Tim Salem said something this spring to the effect of, “If you’re running a route, you better be ready because in Mark Whipple’s offense, the ball could go to anyone at any time.” That might be true, but the reality is, Whipple made sure the ball went to certain guys most of the time.

Like last season at UMass. Andy Isabella was clearly the priority in the passing attack and he saw 146 targets over the course of 12 games, according to Pro Football Focus. That was more than triple the amount that No. 2 receiver Sadiq Palmer saw (he was targeted 45 times).

The previous year, Isabella was again the No. 1 target, but this time Whipple spread the ball around a bit more. Isabella had 65 receptions on 105 targets, but tight end Adam Breneman caught 64 of his 92 targets - and he did it in 11 games, as opposed to the 12 that Isabella played.

The numbers were similar in 2016: 105 targets and 70 catches for Breneman, 100 targets and 62 catches for Isabella. In 2015, future fifth-round pick Tajae Sharpe caught 112 passes on 177 targets - 100 targets more than anybody else on the team. The year before that, Sharpe saw 136 targets.

Moral of the story: When Whipple had Breneman and Isabella, he made sure they got the ball a lot. Then, when he only had Isabella, he made sure he got the ball an extra lot. And before he had Breneman and Isabella, he got the ball to Sharpe a ton.

Of course, Whipple may not have the complete freedom to throw it quite that much, but the underlying principle should be the same, even if the numbers are scaled back:

Identify the playmakers and get them the ball.

JUST ONE MORE THING

About Pitt’s playmakers…
Continuing from that last part, I don’t think there is any question about who Pitt’s top playmakers are, particularly in the passing game, and one of the things I’m looking forward to most this season is seeing if Whipple follows his historical trend and how emphasizes those playmakers.

I think it’s pretty clear that the top two options in the passing game are Maurice Ffrench and Taysir Mack. It’s not a stretch to say that they were woefully underutilized in the offense last season: Ffrench led the team with 60 targets and Mack was third with 50.

Think about those numbers for just one second: Ffrench and Mack combined to have fewer targets in 14 games than Isabella saw in 12 games last season. Again, one offense was pass-based (485 attempts for UMass in 2018) and one was run-based (more than 500 rushing attempts for Pitt) but still, that contrast is ridiculous.

And good things happened when Ffrench and Mack got the ball. Ffrench scored a team-high six receiving touchdowns (he had 10 total scores) and Mack averaged more than 20 yards per reception and 10 yards per target. So while I fully expect Pitt to keep trying to establish the run, Ffrench and Mack have to get some emphasis, too.

I won’t leave out Shocky Jacques-Louis and even V’Lique Carter here, either; both of those guys have home-run potential (even if Carter has only shown it in the run game) and Whipple needs to look for them, too. But Ffrench and Mack are the 1 and 1A. Both have downfield ability, with Ffrench as a dual-threat deep option and catch-and-run playmaker.

So if there’s one directive for Whipple, one thing he absolutely has to do in his first year as Pitt’s offensive coordinator, it’s simple:

Get the ball to the playmakers. Pitt has guys who can make plays, but there’s not much they can do if they’re standing there without the ball in their hands.

Get them the ball.