The 3-2-1 Column: Normalcy, Coastal favorites, WPIAL misses and more

In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re talking about sports as normalcy, the ACC’s early favorites, WPIAL players who would help the most and a lot more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Another week without
I don’t know how you’re looking at things, but in my mind, we’re at the end of Week Two.

Two weeks ago today, in the time between retrieving my kindergartener at 11:15 am and my first-grader at 3:30 pm, the superintendent of Mt. Lebanon School District announced that school was going to be closed for a little bit.

That announcement wasn’t a total shock; it happened on Friday afternoon and in the 48 hours that preceded it, the NBA suspended games, talk of sporting events without fans became prevalent and the world generally turned upside down.

By the time schools announced that students wouldn’t be coming back for awhile, it was kind of expected. But still, things were new then. We weren’t really prepared for a pandemic. We didn’t realize it was a pandemic.

Fast forward to this week: the Mt. Lebanon superintendent announced on Wednesday that school is going to be closed for a little bit longer and that announcement came to the surprise of no one. We’ve all changed in the last two weeks. We’ve all grown accustomed to a new way of living. And, slowly but surely, we’re all coming to realize that the end might not really be in sight, no matter what we may hear from various heads of state.

This isn’t political. It’s really not. I mean, it’s a pandemic we’re talking about; it shouldn’t be political. But this column isn’t a politics column. It’s a sports column. And in terms of sports...well, I have a few thoughts.

On one hand, sports were one of the first cold, hard realities to hit a lot of people. The NBA canceled games. The NHL canceled games. Major League Baseball pushed back the start of its season. Freaking March Madness got canceled.

The premier event in college sports - and one of the premier events in American sports - is off the books for 2020.

When something like that happens, a whole segment of the population sits up and takes notice. This situation, which has been real for a long time, got really real for a lot of people because of sports.

On the other hand, sports still provide some sense of hope, some sense of normalcy. As businesses close and travel wanes and so many aspects of life seem to simply stop, talking about sports as if they are happening or soon to happen is one of the last branches we’ve got left, one of the last elements of “normal” life that we can cling to.

Everything around us is changing, but on Tuesday night I took Christian Yelich with the third overall pick in a fantasy baseball draft. Sure, he may or may not hit that 40/40 mark I’m projecting for him - volume stats are going to suffer this season, obviously - but I think he has the potential to be an MVP candidate.

More importantly, thinking about Yelich and who I might pick when the draft finally winds back around has allowed me at least a few moments to pretend like I know the baseball season is going to happen. Just like talking about Pitt football and debating minutiae like whether they need a grad transfer linebacker or who will be the right tackle or which quarterback should be the backup - all of those conversations give me a respite, a time when I can sit back and act like football is going to happen this fall.

Truth is, I don’t know if it will or won’t. Nobody does. But until we know for sure that it won’t happen, I think it can be a nice break from the non-normalcy of life these days to think about those things for awhile, whether it’s on a podcast or on message boards or in this column.

Assuming these sports will happen is one of the few connections to “normal” life that we have left.

Around the Coastal
So with that in mind, who do we like in the Coastal Division this year?

Sure, we’re a long ways away from the scheduled start of the season, but after conferring with the other guys who cover Coastal teams for Rivals.com and getting their feedback on the outlooks for the teams, I think a few things have emerged.

One is this: three teams stand above the rest in the Coastal. And in no particular order, they are Virginia Tech, North Carolina and Pitt.

Now, I know that Miami will always get some preseason love because they’re Miami and some percentage of Coastal Division reporters is contractually obligated to throw some preseason votes to the Hurricanes.

But I would expect to see the bulk of the first-place votes go to those three teams I mentioned. And it probably shouldn’t be much of a surprise. UNC is everyone’s darling, and for understandable reasons: the Tar Heels have a quarterback who will enter the 2020 season as no worse than the expected No. 2 at the position in the ACC after an outstanding freshman season.

Sure, UNC started the season 4-6 and rallied to a 7-6 finish by beating Mercer, N.C. State and Temple. But preseason poll voters love a good quarterback, and preseason poll voters in the Triangle love a good UNC quarterback, so the Tar Heels will get votes. Maybe the most first-place votes; it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see them No. 1 in the preseason poll.

Virginia Tech went 8-5 last season (with two FCS wins) and drew some praise for losing to Notre Dame by one, which seemed to overshadow a blowout loss to Duke and needing six overtimes to beat North Carolina before anyone thought UNC was good.

The Hokies also finished the season by losing to Virginia for the first time in forever with the Coastal Division on the line and then lost to Kentucky in the Belk Bowl. But like Carolina, Virginia Tech has its quarterback returning, and the Hokies seem to always get that “perennial contender” credit. I’m guessing they’ll get some preseason love, too.

And then there’s Pitt. If the writers look at it, they should probably throw some votes to the Panthers, what with a very good defense and a three-year starter at quarterback returning to a roster that blew it against some lousy teams late in the season last year.

2019 wasn’t the most inspiring 8-5 season we’ve ever seen from a team, but Pitt showed enough promise that at least a few voters will probably recognize the Panthers in the preseason.

I think it’s really those three teams. They each have flaws, but they also look better overall than the rest of the division. If you look at the other four teams in the Coastal, Georgia Tech is still continuing to rebuild, Duke went 5-7 last season and has questions at quarterback, Virginia is replacing quite a bit and is looking at a rebuild of its own and Miami is Miami: always hyped but rarely delivering.

So those are your way-too-early Coastal Division favorites. Place your bets accordingly.

The key factors
I think if we look at those three teams - Pitt, Virginia Tech, North Carolina - it’s a pretty good primer on what makes for preseason favorites.

The first is consistency in coaching. Did your team return its head coach and all of its coordinators from a team that showed promise the previous season? That’s a good start.

The next is to have a returning quarterback. If you have a starter coming back at the most important position on the team, it’s easy to buy into the prospect of continued success.

The third is to be good at something. Offense or defense - be really good at one of those. Ideally you would be good at both, but one will suffice. You need a strength.

Get those three factors in order, and you’ll be a preseason favorite.

So let’s look at the three teams in question again. All three have their head coaches back and almost all of the coordinators returning. Virginia Tech is the lone exception in that category since the Hokies are replacing Bud Foster as defensive coordinator. But UNC’s three coordinators are all back for Year Two of the Mack Brown era, and Pitt has both Mark Whipple and Randy Bates back - the first time Pitt has had the same coordinators two years in a row since Joe Rudolph and Matt House held those titles in 2013 and 2014.

(And if you don’t count Rudolph since Paul Chryst was the head coach, then the last time Pitt had the same coordinators two years in a row was 2009 and 2010. So yeah, this year is kind of notable.)

All three of those schools have quarterbacks returning, too. You’re probably already sick of hearing about Sam Howell, but you should get used to it, because the hype isn’t going to slow down anytime soon on that one. He was the ACC’s leading passer at 280.1 yards per game and he threw a conference-best 38 passing touchdowns. He completed 61.4% of his passes but had an adjusted completion percentage of 74.6% per Pro Football Focus.

If you’ve read these columns before, you know that I think that adjusted completion percentage stat is worth considering; PFF created it to account for drops, throwaways and other incomplete passes of that nature. As you might expect, it reflects well on Kenny Pickett: he ranked 15th among FBS quarterbacks with at least 370 drop-backs in adjusted completion percentage at 75.2%.

Virginia Tech’s Hendon Hooker wasn’t far behind Pickett and Howell. While he only had 199 drop-backs and only attempted 162 passes, his adjusted completion percentage was 73.7%.

For comparison in all of this, Clemson’s Trevor Lawrence had an adjusted completion percentage of 74.4%, or a little better than Hooker and a little behind Pickett and Howell.

Anyway, you get the point: all three of those teams have returning starters at quarterback and pretty good ones at that.

And then the third factor: you need to have a reputation of being good at something to get preseason hype. We know Pitt has the defense coming back and North Carolina had the No. 3 offense in the ACC last season. Virginia Tech wasn’t necessarily great on either side of the ball - No. 6 in the ACC in scoring offense and No. 5 in defense, although those defensive numbers were boosted by a pair of shutouts (including Pitt) - but the Hokies will continue to have the Beamer Ball reputation, even if Frank Beamer has been gone for a few years.

I think if you look at teams that preseason voters tend to favor, those three elements tend to show up the most. They are on-paper facts that are easy to stack up next to each other, and while I don't think it's a guarantee that one of those teams will actually win the Coastal, it's a safe bet that the preseason favorites will come from that group.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Which WPIAL player would have helped the most?
I am most certainly not above stealing a topic from the message boards, and that’s what we’re doing right here because there was a really good thread this week that I thought would be worth exploring a little further.

The question is pretty simple:

Which player from western Pa. who didn’t go to Pitt would have helped the most if he had picked the Panthers?

Now, I’ll be the first to say that WPIAL recruiting and its importance for the Pitt football program is a topic that, on occasion, gets a bit tired. But I like this twist on the “add one player to the roster” games we play from time to time. Part of it is trying to find the best WPIAL player to leave the area for college, but the other part is finding the team that he could have helped the most.

For instance, Lavar Arrington has gotten mentioned a lot in this discussion, both on the message board and on Twitter. But if the North Hills star had gone to Pitt, he would have played for the Panthers from 1997-99. So even if he was worth an extra win in every one of those seasons, that would have gotten Pitt from six wins to seven in 1997 or two wins to three in 1998 or five wins to six in 1999.

Not exactly game-changing stuff, even if Arrington is one of the great players in college football history.

Arrington is probably about as far back in history as I’ll go here, for a variety of reasons. From more recent years, some Pitt fans have suggested guys like Robert Foster or Miles Sanders. Those two are obviously very good players: they were both highly-rated prospects and they’re both playing in the NFL.

But I don’t know how much Foster would have changed things for the Pitt teams of 2013, 2014 and 2015. Those teams had Tyler Boyd and still managed to average seven wins per season. The same kind of goes for Sanders. He would have played at Pitt in 2016, 2017 and 2018: I’d be hard-pressed to say the Panthers needed a running back like him in 2016 or 2018, and in 2017, I don’t think a dynamic running back would have cured the ills of that season.

Maybe you get one or two more wins total over each of those three-year periods with Foster and Sanders.

Offensive linemen are always good options, since Pitt could always use another good player on the line. But again, if I’m looking to get the most bang for my buck, I need a player who can add multiple wins to a team that was already pretty good. I want to take a successful team and make it even more successful.

I need a quarterback.

And if I’m picking a western Pa. quarterback in the last 25 years who could put Pitt over the top during the period of his college career, I think there’s one obvious choice:

It’s Terrelle Pryor.

The Jeannette star is a no-brainer to me. He would have played at Pitt from 2008-10; the Panthers won 27 games over those three seasons, going 9-4 in 2008, 10-3 in 2009 and 8-5 in 2010. Look at the losses in those first two seasons:

Bowling Green, Rutgers, Cincinnati and Oregon State in 2008. N.C. State, West Virginia and Cincinnati in 2009.

Pitt beats at least two of those four teams in 2008 and at least one of the three in 2009 with Pryor. And I say this as someone who thinks Bill Stull gets overlooked as a quality Pitt quarterback, but I have little to no doubt that Pryor gets the Panthers to 11 wins - minimum - in each of those seasons.

Again, I’m not saying Bill Stull was the problem in 2008 or 2009. But Pryor was a different kind of player, and while some fans have rightfully wondered if Dave Wannstedt and Matt Cavanaugh (in 2008) would know what to do with him. I’m willing to believe that his talent was considerable enough that even those guys would get something out of him.

Who is hurt the most by missing spring camp?
Let’s swing back to what’s happening in the present.

Or, rather, what’s not happening in the present. As in, you know, spring camp. I was thinking this week about the cancellation of spring camp and how Pitt only got three practices in before the final 12 were canceled. And I started considering a topic that has been brought up in a few circles:

Which players are hurt the most by missing those other 12 practices?

I think there are a few answers to that question, and while I’ll offer the same caveat as always - spring practice kind of doesn’t matter - I think it’s probably important to consider that spring camp does have value.

We’re talking about 15 practices where the players can get on the field, take reps together, get coaching instruction and, ideally, improve. In between those 15 practices, there are five weeks of meetings, film sessions and general coaching that will all go a long way in determining the team’s success in the fall.

So it’s important. It’s important for the whole team to have those practice sessions, and when you take away 80% of that work, it’s going to leave a mark. Or, if nothing else, you’re not going to improve as much as you would have with those other practice sessions.

Who does it hurt the most? I think the first and most obvious place to look is with the freshmen. Jordan Addison, Israel Abanikanda, Aydin Henningham, AJ Roberts, Solomon DeShields and Buddy Mack were all getting their first tastes of college football; now they aren’t going to get that extra experience. Instead, they’ll have to learn like everybody else in the summer.

The same - or something similar - could be said for the transfers. Lucas Krull and Joey Yellen could be using this time to get more comfortable with their new teammates and learn more of Pitt’s offense. Krull, in particular, is going to be a big part of the Panthers’ attack this season, and he needs every rep he can get with Kenny Pickett.

But it’s not just new players who are missing out with the cancellation of spring camp. The biggest question mark on the roster is the offensive line, and that group can’t afford to have any missed snaps, drills or practices. I think the line entered spring camp in a very unsettled state, with at least three spots up for grabs.

Those position battles aren’t going to be settled on paper, and while the ultimate decisions on two-deep spots will be made in August, this spring was supposed to be a crucial time for figuring out something of a pecking order on the line.

That’s probably where these missed practices hurt the most. This team is going to have a very good defense; we know that. Where it needs to improve is on offense, and more acutely, on the offensive line. That means that any missed practice time is a drain on that unit’s improvement, and that’s a drain on the team’s improvement - and chances for success - overall.

ONE PREDICTION

These redshirt freshmen will make an impact
This is another topic that came up in a separate venue. It was actually asked on our weekly podcast; for the last two months we’ve been doing a live stream on our YouTube channel Tuesday nights, which is cool because it gives listeners/viewers a chance to interact in the comment section as the podcast is being recorded.

If you haven’t checked it out, you should. It’s fun.

This past week, someone asked what redshirt freshmen we should expect to see contribute for Pitt in 2020. As I worked my way down the list of redshirt freshmen on the roster, I saw a bunch of players who I think will be in the mix, so I thought we could talk about it here in the column.

On offense, I think Will Gipson is really intriguing. He missed last season due to injury but I suspect he might have gotten on the field at receiver if he had stayed healthy. I’m on the record with my expectation that this year’s top four receivers will be Taysir Mack, Shocky Jacques-Louis, Jared Wayne and Jordan Addison, but a few other guys will be in the mix for snaps, too, and I think Gipson could be one of them.

I’m also really interested to see what happens with Matt Goncalves. You don’t usually expect to see a redshirt freshman win a starting job on the offensive line, but there is a lot of optimism about Goncalves within the program right now. We know the Panthers don’t exactly have many sure things at offensive tackle, so there’s an opportunity for a guy like Goncalves to get on the field or at least crack the two-deep.

On the defensive line, Pitt is pretty strong and deep, but I’ve heard some really good things about a couple young guys who could force their way onto the field: defensive end Bam Brim and defensive tackle Calijah Kancey. Yeah, the Panthers can go two-deep at both end spots and both tackle spots, but Brima and Kancey could be really good.

And then at safety, Brandon Hill is going to be on the two-deep simply because the numbers are kind of tight. I mean, I think he’s got a chance to be a really good player and he saw the field this past season so it’s not just a numbers thing, but Pitt has Damar Hamlin, Paris Ford, Erick Hallett, Hill and Buddy Mack. With that roster, Hill is going to have to be on the two-deep.

Now, how much playing time will those guys get? That’s anyone’s guess and will depend on a number of factors, the most obvious of which is injuries. But those are a few guys in that redshirt freshman class who should get a chance to make an impact in 2020.