In this week's 3-2-1 Column, we're thinking about the official visits, Pitt's commitments, quarterbacks and a lot more.
THREE THINGS WE KNOW
#OVSZN
It’s happening.
Official visit season is here.
Pitt’s first official visit weekend of the summer started yesterday, and the Panthers will have two more before the month ends. The lists are still being confirmed for those next two weekends, but we know what this weekend will bring:
13 recruits and a pretty darn good chance of some commitments.
Four of the 13 recruits visiting this weekend are already committed to Pitt - quarterback Mason Heintschel, receiver Bryce Yates, offensive skill player Tony Kinsler and defensive lineman Trevor Sommers - but the other nine prospects present plenty of opportunities for the coaches to land some commitments and grow the current class of six potentially to double digits or more.
There are some obvious candidates, like tight end Max Hunt or receiver Damarion Fowlkes; both of those guys have said that Pitt is their top school, and they don’t have any other official visits scheduled.
The combination of those two factors elevates guys like Hunt and Fowlkes pretty high on our list of recruits to watch.
Similarly, linebacker Justin Thompson and receiver Madrid Tucker don’t have any other visits scheduled, which at least puts them on the radar for a possible commitment.
However the commitments shake out - and there will be commitments - this is when recruiting gets fun. Lots of visits, lots of commitments, surprises, shockers, new offers, flips - just about everything that can happen in recruiting does happen in June.
Pretty much the only recruiting “thing” that doesn’t happen in June is the actual Signing Day, and who knows? We might not be that far away from the NCAA adding one of those in June, too. Then we’ll get pretty much all of the recruiting events in one month.
It’s a lot of fun and it’s a good time to follow college sports. There will be recruiting misses, of course: guys who look like they’re close to committing but end up somewhere else, or even guys who do commit and then flip their commitments during the same summer.
That happens, and it’s just part of the deal. But on the whole, June and official visit season are all about hype and excitement. Your favorite team is loading up on players, prospects are saying lots of nice things about your favorite school and there aren’t any games to get in the way and rain on the parade.
It’s a great time of year.
What the official visits will mean to the class
For as long as I can remember, June has always been a big month for recruiting.
Dave Wannstedt used to clean up in June. Todd Graham did well during his lone June here. Paul Chryst was successful in June, too, and Pat Narduzzi picked up the trend.
Six years ago, though, things turned up to 11 when the NCAA decided to allow official visits in June. Now, instead of just the regular rush of commitments in June, you had official visits, which are designed to be a driver of positive recruiting momentum leading to commitments.
Things got wild. That first June official visit weekend in the summer of 2018 produced double-digit commitments on Father’s Day.
It was wild, totally unlike anything I had ever seen before, and it set the tone for the next few years. Nothing was quite as crazy as that first June official visit madness, but they were all productive and pretty exciting.
And what’s more, those visit weekends produced some pretty significant players.
Calijah Kancey? He was a June official visit commit (on that first one back in 2018). Jordan Addison and Israel Abanikanda both committed during June official visits the next year, as did Branson Taylor, Bangally Kamara, Solomon DeShields and Dayon Hayes.
The summer of 2022 was a powerhouse: Isaiah Neal, Kenny Johnson, Braylan Lovelace, Jordan Bass, Rasheem Biles, BJ Williams and Jesse Anderson all pulled the trigger while they were in town for June official visits.
I guess winning the ACC championship gives you a little momentum the following offseason. Maybe even creates a bit of a recruiting bump.
Numbers-wise, eight of the 19 recruits who signed with Pitt in the class of 2019 committed during official visits in June. 11 of 18 in 2020 came from June official visit commitments. Recruits in the 2021 class couldn’t take official visits due to the pandemic, but seven of Pitt’s 13 commitments in the 2022 class did and committed during their June visits.
The trend continued into the last two years, with 13 of 19 in the 2023 class and 10 of 21 in last year’s class all coming from June official visits.
Put it all together and you’ve got 49 out of 90 total signings in those five classes (2019, 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024) committing June official visits. That’s 54% of the total recruits who signed with Pitt - they all came from official visits in June.
So yeah, these next few weeks are probably going to go a long way in shaping what Pitt’s 2025 recruiting class looks like. And it starts right now.
The class so far
While we wait to see who is going to join the class, let’s talk about what the class looks like already.
Pitt entered June with six commitments; that’s quite a bit but it more or less follows the trend from last year. Eight of the recruits who signed with Pitt in the 2024 class committed before June (I think there was at least one other early commitment at that point, too).
Four of the six commitments this year are offensive players, while the other two are the bookends to the current class: defensive end Trevor Sommers, who was the first commitment in the class and defensive back Elijah Dotson, who was the most recent prospect to commit.
So far, Dotson looks like the star of the class. He’s a high three-star prospect, the No. 6 overall recruit in the state of Michigan, the highest-ranked three-star in the state and a top-50 cornerback prospect in the country. His offer sheet includes Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisville, Michigan, Michigan State, Penn State, Purdue, Tennessee and Wisconsin - or what I would call a pretty solid list of the kinds of schools Pitt competes against in recruiting pretty often.
Landing Dotson last month was a big win for the Panthers, and I think they’ll have to fight to keep him. That’s not to say that I think his commitment is less than firm; it’s just that I’m sure other schools will keep pushing for him.
I also think Bryce Yates is legit. I just can’t get over the stat line: 79 catches, 1,193 yards and 15 touchdowns in 14 games. That’s big-time production, and I don’t think they are empty stats. The film looks pretty impressive, too.
No, Yates isn’t exactly big, but playmakers come in all shapes and sizes.
Tony Kinsler, who might be a little shorter than Yates, is an intriguing athlete. He’s a playmaker, too, and he put up more than 1,300 yards of total offense while scoring 16 touchdowns last season. Kinsler averaged 13 yards per carry and 16 yards per reception, so basically anytime his team put the ball in his hands - which they did 88 times on offense - he made something happen.
At Pitt, Kinsler could line up in the slot or the backfield; it seems like Kade Bell wants to get creative with how he uses the Florida speedster. I’m intrigued enough to look forward to seeing what he does.
And I’m similarly intrigued by Mason Heintschel. Pitt’s first quarterback commitment with Bell as offensive coordinator - from the high school ranks, at least - Heintschel is a self-described “improviser” who accounted for more than 3,000 yards and 33 touchdowns as a junior last season.
Heintschel turned some heads this spring and could get some additional attention from other college coaches, but I think he likes Pitt and Bell quite a bit, and while the staff seems to be interested in taking a second quarterback in the class, I think they’ll be in good shape even if he’s the only signal-caller they take.
TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE
What’s the main selling point during official visits?
So what’s actually happening on these official visits? We talk so much about them and we preview them and get interviews and hear the recruits recap them, but what’s actually going on? How does the Pitt staff approach the official visits?
To me, there are a lot of goals on the visits, but it comes down to one main thing:
Giving the recruit a clear idea of what life is like as a student-athlete at Pitt.
Yeah, there are film sessions and meetings with the coaches and dinner at Acrisure Stadium and all of that - those are important elements of the visits. But I think the thing that makes the biggest impact, the part of the experience that can most directly lead to commitments, is the lifestyle.
That’s why the coaches give each recruit a player host. They pick a specific player on the team to be the host for each recruit, and that player’s job is to show the recruit what it’s really like to go to Pitt (the good stuff, at least).
Take them around Oakland. Show them how to get from class to class. Show them how to get from Oakland to the facility. Show them where you eat and study and hang out and spend time. Show them what it’s like to go to Pitt.
Show them why they would like to live at Pitt.
This, ultimately, is Pitt’s biggest sales pitch. I mean, yes, there’s football: the scheme and how the recruit fits into the system and how the coaches will develop the recruit into a pro prospect and all of that. That’s automatic. But the thing that I think the Pitt staff can emphasize the most is the lifestyle.
I’ve often said this:
Pitt can’t compete with a lot of schools on attendance. It’s a simple fact. Some schools draw 60,000 or 100,000 on a weekly basis. Pitt does not. There’s no massaging those numbers; they are what they are. And every time Pitt has a lackluster crowd for Youngstown State or Kent State or whoever, photos will get blasted on social media and fans of other schools will take shots.
If you’re Pitt, you can’t hide from the attendance factor. It is what it is. But you can work around it, and the way you work around it is with a pitch like this:
“It’s true: we don’t draw 100,000 for every game. We can’t even fit 100,000 in our stadium. And those schools that do draw 100,000, they have incredible atmospheres for their games. No doubt about it. For those seven Saturday’s every fall, it’s an amazing place to play football. But what about the other 358 days in the year? You’ll spend roughly 28 hours in that atmosphere, but that leaves just about 8,732 hours in the year where you won’t be in that atmosphere. So as you pick a college, you have to think about this: are you spending those other 8,000 hours every year in a place where you want to live?”
I think that’s a big way to offset the attendance topic, and quite frankly, a big part of the pitch for Pitt, even if attendance doesn’t come up. Sell Pitt on being a place you want to live. Sell Pittsburgh on being a place you want to live. Sell the lifestyle, not just the football.
And that’s what these official visits are supposed to do. They’re supposed to give the recruit an idea of what it’s like to live here, and if they are executed well, the recruit will leave thinking, “Their football is on point but I really think I would like living there even if I didn’t play football.”
That’s what you want recruits thinking when they leave campus after their official visits. And if that’s what they’re thinking, chances are pretty good that they’ll end up committing.
Why has the quarterback position been such an issue?
I’ve gone over this particular topic a few times, but let’s do it one more time here in the 3-2-1 Column.
It’s the matter of quarterbacks - specifically, quarterbacks under Pat Narduzzi. There have been 11 starters over the last nine seasons. Six of those starters have managed to post winning records, so that’s good, I suppose, although three of those six started three games or less, so that offsets it a bit.
Of course, the main element to consider is that two quarterbacks started more than 70 of Narduzzi’s 115 games at Pitt. That’s Kenny Pickett and Nate Peterman, as you well know, and it was easy enough to put those guys at the top of the list.
But while they accounted for a lot of games over the course of six seasons as starting quarterbacks, there are still more than 40 other games and three seasons to account for.
What happened there?
I’ll tell you what happened: Pitt went 17-20, including the two worst seasons Narduzzi has experienced, and a bunch of guys not named Pickett or Peterman started - and often lost - a lot of games.
Like Phil Jurkovec and Christian Veilleux both going 1-4. Or Max Browne and Ben DiNucci posting losing records. Nick Patti and Nate Yarnell started a combined total of four games in those seasons (to wit, 2017, 2022 and 2023; Patti also started games in 2019 and 2021), and they at least had winning records - but we’re talking about two guys who were each 2-1.
That’s not exactly something to write home about.
The question is, how did this happen? How did it get like this? Yes, two guys took up most of the seasons under Narduzzi, but why was it so bad in those other seasons?
To be sure, there are unique circumstances in each season. In 2017, Browne and DiNucci both struggled to start the season, but Browne was improving before he got hurt. In 2022, Kedon Slovis actually posted a 7-4 record, although his role in that record diminished as the season went on - particularly after he suffered an injury against Tennessee - and he was pretty directly responsible for two bad losses.
In 2023, it was just a disaster. Jurkovec never really gave Pitt a chance to win and Veilleux committed too many turnovers.
The other element is that, as we talk about the quarterbacks in those three seasons, four - Browne, Slovis, Jurkovec and Veilleux - were transfers. They had a combined starting record of 11-15 (you could add Joey Yellen’s 0-2 here as well if we’re talking about transfers).
So Pitt recruited the high school ranks poorly, which created the need for transfers, and then recruited the transfer ranks poorly, too.
Seems like a recipe for subpar quarterback play.
ONE PREDICTION
Nate Yarnell will move up the list
I settled on Nate Yarnell for the No. 5 spot in our ranking of Narduzzi’s quarterbacks, but I think by the end of this season, he’s going to move up from there.
Like, maybe as far as No. 3.
I know this is going a bit out on a limb, and maybe the summer haze and the waning months of the offseason are getting to me. This is kind of what happens at this point in the calendar: with just a couple months until training camp, after we’ve spent lots and lots of time discussing and thinking about every aspect and detail of this team, we end up talking ourselves into certain things that may or may not come to fruition.
I’m getting there with Yarnell.
The stats are what get me, and I’ve written about them a lot. He has just been so efficient in his three career starts: 45-of-66 (68.2%), 651 yards, 4 touchdowns, 1 interception. Even if he doesn’t maintain that level of play for a full season, coming close to it would be pretty good and likely lead Pitt to a pretty good season.
The prediction here is that Yarnell will do just that. I have as many questions as anyone about the new offense and if/how it will work. I have similar questions about the receivers and how they’ll play and who will emerge as playmakers from that group.
All of that remains to be seen. But I think if Yarnell is given a chance, he’ll do well. I think he’ll take care of the ball, make good decisions and give the receivers, tight ends and running backs a chance to make plays.
If he does all of that and Pitt wins seven or eight games this season, there’s no reason to keep him behind Patti or Slovis. I don’t know if he’ll do enough to move ahead of Peterman at No. 2, but he should climb at least to No. 3 with a shot at going into the top two after another strong season.
Of course, all of this assumes Yarnell keeps the starting job and holds off a surge from Eli Holstein. But let’s save the quarterback controversies for training camp (or the real doldrums of summer in July).
