The 3-2-1 Column: Morrissey, Miami and more

Will Pitt be focused on Miami? How big is the loss of Jimmy Morrissey? Can Kenny Pickett build on the Wake game? That's what we're thinking about in this week's 3-2-1 Column.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

The same old song
(But with a different meaning…)

You may have heard me mention this before. I certainly talked about it last week, and if I didn’t write about it the week before, I’m sure I brought it up on the message board or the podcast - I say things in a lot of places these days - prior to the Virginia Tech game.

But just because we’re repeating ourselves, doesn’t mean it’s not worth repeating.

Focus, focus, focus.

That kept Pitt locked into each game after the early-season blowout losses. It kept the players locked in on Virginia Tech after a big road win. And it made sure that nobody overlooked Wake Forest last Saturday. The coaching cliché of being “1-0 every week” took hold with this team; the players bought into it and it ensured that they neither dwelled on the past nor looked forward to the future.

And they’ll need that focus again this week. It’s very easy for all of us to look ahead to the ACC Championship Game against Clemson. I’ve been checking out the Tigers’ stats this week (spoiler alert: they’re scary good). I’ve been reaching out to people who cover Clemson to get a head start on some preview content.

I’ve been looking ahead. Not overlooking Miami, per se, but looking ahead nonetheless.

That’s okay. I can do that. I’m media. Just like you can do it, too; you’re a fan.

But the players can’t overlook any game, and certainly not this week’s game at Miami. Sure, the Coastal Division is clinched and the spot in Charlotte is assured, so this game is more or less meaningless in the tangible sense. But it does present some opportunities.

For starters, winning this game would send Pitt to Charlotte on a five-game winning streak - the program’s longest since 2009 - and give Pat Narduzzi his third eight-win regular season in four years with the Panthers.

Plus, it’s still, you know, Miami. Granted, a “down” Miami team, but Miami is Miami, and in the ACC and beyond, it’s still a program that carries some cache. Whether they’re up or down, it’s still kind of a big deal to beat Miami. It was a big deal in 2014, when Pitt logged its first road win against the Hurricanes since 1963. It didn’t matter all that much that the 2014 Miami team was swirling the drain and entered that regular-season finale on a two-game losing streak - it was still a road win over Miami, and that means something.

Just like nobody is apologizing for celebrating wins over teams like Florida State and USC this season, no one is going to shy away from bragging about beating Miami in Miami. If Pitt can pull it off - the Panthers opened the week as 5-point underdogs - it will be a good win, a significant win.

To do it, Pitt is going to have to do what it has done all season: stay focused on the task at hand, think about nothing from last week or next week and make Saturday’s game the top priority. Doing that has built a four-game winning streak and a division championship; doing it again can build that winning streak to five and maintain the momentum heading into Charlotte.

That’s a bad loss
You never like to see season-ending injury news. You especially don’t like to see it in the final week of the regular season, when so much time and effort and work has been put in, only to have the real payoff taken away at the last minute.

And you really, really don’t like to see a season-ending injury to one of your key players. But that’s the news Pitt got this week when it was announced that redshirt sophomore Jimmy Morrissey is done after having surgery on his ankle Monday.

Morrissey is a big loss, and there’s no way to really rationalize it. He has played a whopping 709 of Pitt’s 711 offensive snaps this season, according to Pro Football Focus; the only two snaps he didn’t play were the final two of the Virginia Tech game - a handoff and a kneel-down. In fact, no player on the team - offense or defense - has played more snaps this season than Morrissey has.

He’s been a consistent foundation in the middle of the line, but more than his physical abilities (or, at least, in addition to his physical tools), he has been key to all of the other things centers do - setting the blocking schemes, making checks at the line, identifying fronts, etc. Morrissey is tied in with Kenny Pickett; he’s the only center Pickett has ever known in a game.

Now that has to change.

The most likely course of action will involve moving Connor Dintino from left guard, where he has started every game this season, to center, where he played roughly 60 snaps in games last season. That’s not a lot of experience, but it’s more than Pitt’s listed backup at center, redshirt freshman Owen Drexel, who has two career snaps (those two plays at the end of the Virginia Tech game when Morrissey was on the sidelines).

To replace Dintino at guard, the coaches will probably go with redshirt sophomore Bryce Hargrove. He has been Pitt’s sixth lineman this season, spreading 134 snaps over time at left guard, right guard and as a tight end in the Wildcat package. Plus, Hargrove is probably going to be a starter next season when every lineman other than Morrissey graduates. So he’s next in line, and I’m guessing he’s about to get his first big chance.

How Dintino and Hargrove will do against Miami and Clemson and a bowl opponent is unknown to me. The line as it was constructed for 11 games was oftentimes a paradox, looking exceptional in blocking for the run but struggling against a good pass rush. What we’ll all be looking for is whether these changes weaken either of those areas. But there’s no question that losing Morrissey now hurts quite a bit.

If it’s a pass/fail…
There are different ways to evaluate a season and declare it a Success or Not a Success (I guess Failure would be the other term for that second option).

You can go heavy on context; a wise man once said that you need a lot of context to seriously examine anything, and I tend to think that’s true. One man’s 9-3 could be judged more harshly than another’s 8-4 or 7-5, depending on the particulars of how those records were accumulated.

But you can also go another way. “Pass/fail” is what I would call it, and here you basically say “Which goals did you achieve?” And if the level of achieved goals fits a certain definition of success, then you have succeeded.

The best answer on judging a season is probably a combination of both avenues, but I think sometimes one is preferable to the other. And in the case of this season, I do think that pass/fail has some practical application.

Of course, I’m talking about winning the Coastal Division. At worst, Pitt is going to finish 6-2 in the conference; at best, that mark could be 7-1. Either way, the Panthers did what they have very seldom done in knocking off Syracuse and then, in consecutive weeks, Duke, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest. Pitt came out of the drubbing at Central Florida with six of its eight ACC games still to play; even though the Panthers looked bad in Orlando, they had reason to believe they could compete in the division.

And when they beat Syracuse, it seemed a little more plausible. Same with Duke. When they went to Virginia and knocked off a ranked Cavaliers team on Friday night, the idea became not just plausible but realistic, and the expectations started to change. Virginia Tech couldn’t trip them up; on the contrary, Pitt responded to the Game They Always Lose with a 30-point blowout win over a conference foe. Then the Panthers sealed the deal by dominating the second half at Wake Forest.

Five straight conference victories to realistically assert themselves as the best team in the division. There were some close games and they weren’t always dominant, but the point differential through seven ACC games paints a picture of something close to it: 266 points for, 187 points against, a difference of +79 in Pitt’s favor - or 11.3 points per game.

Pitt won the Coastal convincingly, and no matter what happens over the final three games, that won’t change. You may end up with a sour taste in your mouth if the Panthers drop one or two or three of the upcoming games, but it won’t change the fact that they ran through the division and clinched the title before the season was even over.

I understand that goals change over the course of a season. The current winning streak and overall strong play has moved the goalposts; I get that and I often say that I don’t care for arguments that start with “If I had told you before the season that…” I think that line of reasoning dismisses the fact that goals can change as a season develops.

But I think that the goalpost of winning the Coastal Division is pretty firmly in place. That one doesn’t move, especially not with the way the team looked in the first five games. Granted, those weren’t ACC games - other than UNC - but Pitt didn’t exactly look like it had what you need to rattle off wins like it has.

So, we’ll see how things play out over the next month, but I think it’s going to take extreme circumstances to change from a passing grade.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Is Clemson really the boogeyman?
In a word, yes.

Okay, Pat Narduzzi doesn’t want to talk about Clemson. I understand that. He and his team should steer clear of anything that doesn’t have to do with Saturday’s game at Miami. Like I said above, focus on the immediate, on the current week, on the Here and Now - that’s what has gotten Pitt to this point, so it’s important for the team to keep all eyes on Miami.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about the Tigers. That doesn’t mean we can’t look ahead to Charlotte, while also talking about this week’s game. Multi-tasking is fine if you’re on the outside; fans and media can talk about Clemson and think about that matchup without jeopardizing Pitt’s chances against Miami.

And that matchup in Charlotte…yes, it’s scary.

Clemson is good on both sides of the ball. Really good. But the defense is frighteningly talented and extremely productive. The No. 1 scoring defense in the nation, the No. 2 total defense and the No. 3 rushing defense - they don’t give up much yardage and they’re even better at keeping teams out of the end zone. They don’t bend or break.

And what’s really scary about Clemson is the pass rush. The Tigers lead the nation with 40 sacks through 11 games; a whopping - or crushing - 28 of those 40 have come from the defensive line alone. That’s an incredible amount of pressure out of the front four, and in a season where Pitt faced some stout defensive fronts - Notre Dame and Syracuse had some really talented players there - the Panthers quite simple haven’t seen anything like this.

Well, they haven’t seen anything like this in 2018. Two years ago, Pitt went to Death Valley and saw something similar. In fact, three of the four starters from that Clemson defensive line are still on the team this year - Christian Wilkins, Clelin Ferrell and Dexter Lawrence - while the other lineman, Carlos Watkins, was a fourth-round pick of the Houston Texans in last year’s Draft.

Of course, Wilkins, Ferrell and Lawrence are all two years older and more experienced, which does make them more dangerous. But Pitt has gotten over on these individuals before, averaging 4.7 yards per rushing attempt and topping 300 passing yards. So it can be done - provided you have the right amount of plays that can take advantage of a talented front like that. You need to beat them with scheme, because it’s going to be difficult to beat them with talent alone.

Pitt’s offensive coaches have done some different things this year to take advantage of what defenses are doing and, perhaps just as importantly, what defenses are seeing; they’ll need to dig into that bag of tricks against the Tigers, manipulating the line’s effectiveness and catching them over-pursuing. That seemed to work a couple years ago, but these are different teams than the two that met for that 43-42 game.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s better to just focus on Miami after all.

Did Pickett turn a corner?
Okay, that’s a dumb question.

Yes, Kenny Pickett had the best game of his young career on Saturday at Wake Forest. But when Pitt faces Miami this Saturday, I think he’s just as likely to match his Virginia stat line (7-of-11, 61 yards, 0 touchdowns) as he is to match the one he posted last week (23-of-30, 316 yards, 3 touchdowns).

That’s not to say I think less of Pickett; on the contrary, I think he showed the truest flashes of who he can be at the high end of his career. He might not put up 300 every week as a junior in 2019, but I think he can do something close to what Nate Peterman did, being reliable for 220 or so and a couple touchdowns on a consistent basis, with the potential to go big when the situation calls for it.

But he’s not there yet. He was really good at Wake Forest, but not great and certainly not perfect; he would even tell you that. More importantly, though, is something we’ve talked about before: progress and growth and improvement are not always linear. They don’t always move forward at a steady rate. Sometimes there are steps back after a step forward.

Peterman went through that. Lost in the glamour of the Clemson game in 2016 is all those other games he played, especially in 2015 when his inexperience was a factor and adversely impacted the play of the offense.

Obviously Peterman got better, but there were bumps along the way. Even in 2016, he wasn’t great - the Clemson game really changed the narrative on him. But he was efficient and took care of the ball, an area where Pickett has also done well this season.

I do think there are reasons to get excited from what Pickett showed on Saturday and in the Virginia Tech game, when he made the most of his 11 pass attempts. I think there has been clear growth over the course of the season, maybe not on a game-by-game basis but rather on a start-to-finish basis - he’s playing better now than he was at the beginning of the season.

Of course, that’s easy to say when he’s coming off a 300-yard game, but he has put together a pair of strong showings, and that’s really encouraging for the future. Maybe the present, too; we’ll see how Pickett finishes the 2018 season. He’s got a pair of tough defenses to face plus whoever Pitt draws in a bowl game.

Ideally, Pickett has one or two more big steps forward left in him this season.

ONE PREDICTION

This will be a tight one
I’m not predicting a winner in Saturday’s game at Miami. After the Wake Forest game, I’m 4-1 when calling a winner in this column, so maybe I should shoot my shot again, but the truth is, I think this is going to be a tough one.

Miami has slumped this season; there’s no question about that. The Hurricanes are 6-5 overall and 3-4 in the ACC. They’ve got personnel issues and unrest among the fan base. They are a mess at quarterback, too, which has had a lot to do with the rough season.

But Miami has a really good defense. The No. 2 defense in the ACC behind Clemson, giving up less than 20 points per game. And the Hurricanes are coming off a blowout win over Virginia Tech on the road. We all know the Hokies aren’t great this season, but a road blowout win in conference play is worth noting, and it’s especially notable when it’s done by a team that is struggling.

Miami’s got something to play for, too. The Hurricanes will be looking to string together a couple wins to end the season and they might, just might, have some revenge on their minds for the way last year’s regular-season finale went down. Miami can’t push Pitt out of the playoff conversation, but the Hurricanes can seriously cramp the Panthers’ style with a convincing win on Saturday.

Pitt is playing to get an eighth win and carry momentum into the ACC Championship Game. Miami has other motivations, and if that whole thing I said about focus doesn’t have any reality behind it, the Hurricanes can get on top of this game. And while Pitt has made something of a habit of coming back from halftime deficits this season, Miami’s defense isn’t exactly built to yield such comebacks.

These Hurricanes are built to be stifling, to stop the run and get to the quarterback. And turnovers. They like turnovers. And they have 15 interceptions so far this season.

So this isn’t going to be an easy one. It’s one Pitt can win; I think you can say that. But just like Syracuse and Virginia, winnable games against sort-of-kind-of-mostly-good-but-also-flawed opponents require focus, resiliency and an ability to believe in what you’re doing and keep doing it until it works.

Maybe this is where we come back to the thing about the early schedule preparing Pitt for the late schedule. No, I’m not talking about Penn State and Central Florida; I’m talking about Syracuse and Duke and Virginia and Wake Forest, the games where Pitt was trailing in the second half but stayed strong in the face of adversity and ultimately prevailed.

Miami might be a tougher opponent to pull that off against (although the Hurricanes lost to Virginia and Duke and Georgia Tech, who all lost to Pitt) but it can be done. The Panthers would do well to finish the regular season in stride, closing out an impressive turnaround with an impressive final note.

But I don’t think it will be easy. I’m thinking this will be one of those games that gets decided in the fourth quarter - kind of like, you know, almost every other game Pitt has played since October began.