The 3-2-1 Column: No-name Panthers in a big-time game
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The no-name Panthers, how to beat Clemson and whether Pitt overachieved; that’s what we’re thinking about in the run-up to the ACC Championship Game.
THREE THINGS WE KNOW
The All-ACC team was probably right
The ACC released its all-conference team this week, and while the rosters featured plenty of the usual suspects - 21 Clemson players made the cut for the first, second and third teams and honorable mention - one team was notably absent, at least from the first team:
The Coastal Division champs.
For the first time since Pitt joined the conference, the Panthers didn’t have a first-team All-ACC selection. In those five seasons, Pitt has had 13 players make the first team. Some, like James Conner and Ejuan Price, did it multiple times. And Tyler Boyd did it twice in one year.
From Aaron Donald being the lone Pitt rep on the first team in 2013 to getting four spots on the 2016 team, the Panthers have managed to get at least a few names on the conference’s top honor roll each year.
Until this season, when Pitt won the Coastal Division. Is that odd? At first glance, yes; shouldn’t one of the two (presumably) best teams in the conference have at least a couple all-conference first-teamers?
But it’s not altogether unique. Miami won the Coastal last year with one first-team selection (and that was the Hurricanes’ kicker). The same goes for the Virginia Tech in 2016, and North Carolina only had two in 2015. Pitt had eight first-team selections from 2015-17; the Coastal champions in those years had four.
As it relates to Pitt this season, I guess the question to answer would be, which player got slighted the most?
Qadree Ollison is probably the answer. He was Pitt’s leading rusher this season, had some really exceptional games and was probably the Panthers’ best overall player. And what’s more, he finished second in the ACC in rushing yards, behind only Clemson’s Travis Etienne, who had 1,307 yards and 19 touchdowns, averaging a strong 8.0 yards per carry.
Two running backs make the All-ACC first team, and Etienne was deservedly one of them. But the other nod didn’t go to Ollison; it went to AJ Dillon from Boston College. Dillon missed two games due to injury this season and had 1,108 yards in 10 games, giving him a better per-game average than Ollison (110.8 to 94.5).
That difference and the fact that Dillon scored 10 touchdowns plus a receiving score in 10 games while Ollison had 10 touchdowns in 12 games probably made the difference in the voting (Dillon garnered 162 points; Ollison got 128).
Beyond Ollison, I can’t really make a case for any other individual Pitt player. But maybe that says something about this team: they are a whole more than a sum of their parts, a collection of players who, taken as individuals, might not blow anyone’s doors off but, as a group, have been able to win their way into the ACC Championship Game.
They really are the no-name Panthers
No, wait; they’re not the no-name Panthers. They’re the “no-name Pittsburgh football team.”
That’s what Pat Narduzzi called his squad on Wednesday. The “no-name Pittsburgh football team.” And there’s probably something to that. As a matter of fact, the whole matter of no Pitt players making the All-ACC first team got me thinking about it, and Narduzzi’s words are pretty accurate.
There’s no big-name star player are on this group. There’s no James Conner (he was on the All-ACC first team in 2016 despite having fewer rushing yards and fewer rushing touchdowns than Clemson’s Wayne Gallman, who finished on the second team).
There’s no Tyler Boyd. There’s no offensive lineman like Dorian Johnson or Brian O’Neill, who had some cache heading into the seasons when they got first-team honors.
There’s no Ejuan Price with gaudy stats. There’s no Aaron Donald with tons of hardware.
It’s just a bunch of guys who found a way to work together, keep each other up, rebound from some tough losses and take care of business.
There’s something to be said for a team with a lack of star power, something about their accomplishments that rings differently from teams that are loaded. That’s not to say it’s better or worse; you would always like to have the talented superstars, for sure. But this team got to where it is by not relying on superstars, by not needing any individual player to be The Guy. It got here through a collective effort, a group mindset where everyone relies one everyone else to do his job.
Does any of that make a team more or less likely to win games? I don’t know. It probably lends itself to the “us against the world” mentality that this team, led by its coach, seems to have. George Aston, in the most George Aston way possible, said on Wednesday that the team doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.
That’s probably true of most teams, but it rings a little more true with this one. And why would they care? Since the summer, they’ve been told that they’re a six-win team at best, that they have no chance of winning the Coastal Division and that they aren’t the favorites to win something like 75% of their games.
From the beginning, this team has been insulated by choice, a closed-ranks organization with a singular focus and a small circle entrusted with pursuing that goal. They were just as uninterested in hearing what people had to say after the Virginia win as they were in hearing what was said after the UCF loss.
They had their own thing going inside the locker room. And that thing brought a division trophy to Pitt.
Maybe the ACC media and head coaches got it right. And maybe that’s just fine by the members of this team.
There is something to learn from 2016
Inevitably, this week has brought up discussions about - or at least references to - the Pitt-Clemson game from two years ago. The 43-42 win in Death Valley is a fond memory for most fans, one of the greatest wins in Pitt history and a signature win for Pat Narduzzi in the biggest, most challenging game of his then-young tenure with the Panthers.
But it’s not just fond memories that brings people to think of that game. It’s more about the possibility of hope: Pitt did it before, after all, so maybe the Panthers can do it again. They were three-touchdown underdogs back then, and they were going into a building where the Tigers had won 21 games in a row. The outcome of the game seemed to be predetermined: it wasn’t a matter of whether Pitt would lose, but rather how much the Panthers would lose by.
Most of that sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Pitt didn’t have a chance against Clemson, especially not after the beat-down the Panthers suffered the previous week in a game at…let me check the schedule…Miami.
That’s weird.
But never mind the coincidences, because this isn’t about coincidences. Coincidences don’t win games. And if Pitt finds a way to win on Saturday, it won’t be a result of coincidences.
So if we look back to the 2016 game and we look past coincidences and pep talks, can we find anything that could help this year’s team? Most of the personnel has changed for Pitt and a lot of it has changed for Clemson, too, so there aren’t too many connections there. But there are a few things the Panthers could focus on from the last time they met the Tigers.
Like turnovers. Pitt did nothing to stop DeShaun Watson (52-of-70, 580 yards, 3 touchdowns), Mike Williams (15 receptions, 202 yards, 1 touchdown) or Artavis Scott (13 receptions, 125 yards, 1 touchdown). But what the Panthers did was grab three of Watson’s 70 passes for themselves.
Ryan Lewis picked off Watson in the end zone on Clemson’s first drive. Avonte Maddox grabbed one in Pitt territory in the second quarter. And Saleem Brightwell made the biggest play of his career when he pulled in an interception in the end zone and returned it 70 yards.
Now, Clemson went up and down the field outside of those three picks. But those three interceptions, especially the two in the end zone, were huge plays - the kind of plays a team like Pitt needs to make against a team like Clemson.
That’s the lesson from the 2016 game, just as it’s the lesson from any big upset: the favored team has to make mistakes, ideally when they are forced by the opponent. When Pitt beat West Virginia in 2007, the Mountaineers lost five fumbles. And in the next game the Panthers played, they turned it over five times themselves to lose to Bowling Green.
It’s difficult to outplay a top team like Clemson for 60 minutes, and Pitt didn’t do that in 2016. What the Panthers did back then - and what they need to do on Saturday - is find a way to force a few of those mistakes and capitalize on them. The 2016 Pitt team scored two touchdowns from the three interceptions, so if Trevor Lawrence is about to put up historic numbers like DeShaun Watson did, the Panthers are going to need to make sure a few of those passes go to blue jerseys.
That won’t be easy, since Lawrence has thrown four picks in 302 pass attempts this season, but it might be Pitt’s best (or only) chance.
TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE
Did this team overachieve?
This is one of those questions that really doesn’t matter in the wake of the Miami game and really, really won’t matter if the current point spread holds for Saturday’s ACC Championship Game, but I’m wondering:
Did Pitt overachieve this season?
I don’t just mean winning the Coastal Division; this thing was up for grabs from the first kickoff of the season, because there are no great teams in the division and, really, no consistently good teams either. Every team among these seven has its warts, and those flaws led to 6-2 being the best conference record in the division and no Coastal team winning more than seven games overall this season.
That’s not great. There’s something to be said for Pitt being the team that came out on top, the team that knocked off Syracuse, Duke, Virginia, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest in consecutive conference games to win the division. Even if the division isn’t great, the team that wins it deserves some credit.
But that’s not what I’m interested in here. What interests me is the idea of overachieving and whether this Pitt team did it. One way to measure is against preseason expectations. We all had our own guesses - I think I put the Panthers at seven or eight wins, depending on whether they could steal one of the “big three” non-conference games - but the popular Vegas betting line saw Pitt falling well short of the division.
5.5 was generally the over/under on wins for Pitt this season. By that measure, they overachieved.
On a per-game basis, we can also look at the spreads. Pitt was favored in four games this season: Albany, North Carolina, Virginia Tech and Wake Forest. The Panthers went 3-1 in those four, so they more or less met expectations (that damn North Carolina game).
In the other eight games, Pitt was the underdog, and the Panthers went 4-4. I don’t know how we want to define overachieving or underachieving, but going 4-4 in games as a dog seems pretty solid. And when you narrow down to ACC games, Pitt was 4-1 as an underdog against the conference. That seems really solid.
Solid enough to be overachieving? That depends on your personal perspective. I suspect a lot of people would set the bar for overachieving at one of the “big” games, believing that Pitt would only have truly overachieved by beating Penn State, UCF or Notre Dame.
I see that line of thinking, but I think you have to look at where the expectations were preseason or even midseason when, after the UCF game, many wondered if Pitt would get to three wins in 2018. The Panthers may have only beaten the average teams on their schedule, but given that they themselves were predicted by many to be below average, rising as far as they did seems like an accomplishment.
I really don’t know what the answer is here. That’s partially because the idea of overachievement seems temporary, like it can’t be sustained going forward, and I actually think this team can build on 2018 and have a better 2019 with the pieces that are coming back, but that’s another topic for another column.
For now, we’ll see what happens on Saturday. If we’re talking about overachieving, that game could go a long way…
What is the defining game from this season?
I started thinking about this during the week, for some reason that I couldn’t explain.
It’s a pretty simple question: what game - at least of those that have happened so far - defines Pitt’s 2018 season?
I suppose if you’re cynical, you might say the North Carolina game, since that defined the team as one that underachieved against a team it should beat. No matter how cynical you are, I don’t think anyone would say the Penn State or UCF games; yes, those were blowout losses in big situations, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to say those games were emblematic of the team, since it did play better in subsequent games.
The Notre Dame game wouldn’t qualify; it was a close loss in a season that didn’t really have many of those (UNC was the only other one). Virginia Tech and Wake Forest and even Georgia Tech were pretty convincing wins, but don’t seem to define the team, at least for me.
Virginia was a gutsy, resilient win; Duke kind of was, too. Do either of those games define the season for you? I don’t think they do for me.
Rather, I point to the Syracuse game. It was probably Pitt’s signature win so far, since the Orange were favored by nearly a touchdown and currently rank No. 20 in the College Football Playoffs. Plus, it was a hard-fought victory, as Pitt overcame multiple fourth-quarter deficits and then made some huge plays in overtime to seal the win.
Pitt wasn’t perfect that day against Syracuse, but the Panthers did what they did in most of their wins this season: they found a way to make enough plays to win it.
Naturally, there’s a chance for a serious signature win on Saturday night, but for now, the 44-37 defeat of Syracuse will have to do.
ONE PREDICTION
The offense will be better
Okay, I’m channeling my inner Paul McCartney on this one, but I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that Pitt’s offense will be better this weekend, simply because it can’t get any worse.
I actually believe that. While things can always get worse, I’m not sure an offense can be less productive than Pitt’s was at Miami on Saturday. 200 yards of offense - you could run 50 plays on offense, take a snap and run quarterback sneaks every play and probably get 100 yards alone. And while Clemson’s defense is big and scary, Pitt will probably have at least a few plays that get four or five yards, and hey, if you can get five yards on a play, you only need 196 more to top last week’s output.
Seven three-and-outs in 15 possessions? 1-of-15 on third down? 12 negative or zero-gain plays on third down? 3.2 yards per play? 6 sacks allowed? 14 tackles for loss?
Yes, you can do worse than those numbers - you could get shut out on third down or have a negative play on every third down or average 2.0 yards per play - but I just don’t see it happening. Those are the numbers of a truly bad offense, and while I don’t think Pitt has a great offense, I don’t believe it’s truly bad.
There are flaws in this offense, of course. Pass-blocking has been one of them all season, and the passing game has suffered as a result (although the protection hasn’t been the only issue). They’ve also had an issue with penalties, taking four on offense in the Miami game.
But I don’t think they’ll be quite as bad against Clemson as they were against Miami.
I know Clemson has a defense that is probably better than Miami’s. Or maybe “probably” isn’t necessary; the Tigers are better in almost every statistical category, and where they don’t have superior numbers, they’re close enough to the Hurricanes to call it a draw.
Clemson is really, really good on defense. They’re going to probably have multiple players taken in each of the next few drafts. To beat the Tigers, or at least to move the ball and score points on them, Pitt’s going to have to do more than just line up and run. Creating confusion and manipulating what Clemson’s defense sees - those are the keys to finding success against this Clemson defense.
That’s what South Carolina did last week to put up 600 yards on the Tigers. That’s what Pitt did two years ago in the 43-42 upset. This Clemson defense is fast and big and strong and scary in all the ways you would expect; that means you have to get them moving one way and then run the other way. You have to motion and use formations to get their eyes thrown off. You have to trick them a little, make them unsure of what they’re seeing and where the ball is going.
That means RPO’s and jet sweeps and Wildcat variations and things of that nature are going to have to be in play, and I think Shawn Watson will throw some of that stuff at Clemson. I think last week’s game was an eye-opener for Pitt, or at least it should have been, as the Panthers were positively dominated by a Miami defense that was bigger, stronger and faster.
The only way to beat a talent disparity like that is to be smarter, to make the opponent make mistakes. It doesn’t happen often, but if you can force Clemson to make mistakes, you’ve got a chance.
I don’t know if Pitt will force enough mistakes to score 40 points again, and if they force the mistakes, I don’t know if they’ll capitalize on enough of them to score 40, but I think they’ll find some things that work and get some production out of it - more production than last week, at least.