The 3-2-1 Column: Recruiting, hot starts, grad transfers and more

MORE HEADLINES - Camp performance led to offer for WV OL | First Power Five offer for Ga. athlete comes from Pitt | Top 2021 target works with Pitt coaches at camp | FREE: Pitt lands a graduate transfer TE | Cass Tech safety breaks down top eight | FREE: Toney wants to be part of what Capel is building

Recruiting scenarios, comparable starts, local recruiting, collective recruiting, grad transfers and more in this week’s Panther-Lair.com 3-2-1 Column.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

This is how recruiting works - Part I
If you follow recruiting long enough, you notice the way things tend to work, and this week we saw a couple classic scenarios play out.

Scenario 1: The ‘Hey Wait’ Offer

Miami linebacker Joe Smith was at Pitt’s camp on Sunday and, by his account of the story, showed the Pitt coaches what they wanted to see. After the camp, he was very enthusiastic about Pitt and said an “answer” - his word - on a possible commitment could come when he visited campus on Monday.

Naturally, that interview started a firestorm of “Could this be Pitt’s first commitment?” message board posts and tweets and articles, starting with our first post and subsequent interview. The storyline was clear: Smith was going to follow the camp with an unofficial visit and would likely commit.

Nothing happens in a vacuum, though, and as that story was spread through Twitter, more than just fans and recruiting writers saw it. Other college coaches saw it, and sometimes the deciding factor in an offer might not be new film or an opportunity to evaluate a recruit in-person or get transcripts or anything like that; sometimes, the tipping point on an offer can be the fear that a recruit might come off the board.

And so it was - we presume - that Louisville offered Smith on Monday. Coaches play a balancing act with some recruits, hoping they’ll hold off on committing long enough for the coaches to decide on an offer on their own timeline, which can be affected by a lot of factors. But if they start to sense that a commitment to another school could be coming, then they might be motivated to offer sooner than they were planning.

I think the balancing act is probably an underrated element in recruiting. Coaches are constantly trying to read the minds of recruits: “If I offer this recruit, is there a chance he could commit on the spot? Do I want him to commit on the spot? Or if I hold off and wait, are we going to miss the boat?” A good deal of thought is put into each offer to make sure that the most ideal outcome is also the most likely. In most cases, college coaches aren’t quite as haphazard with these decisions as they might appear to be from the outside - these guys work 10 and 12-hour days pretty much year-round; they have to be thinking about something all day.

I can’t say with 100% certainty that Louisville operated on the motivation of trying to prevent Smith from committing, but the timing does line up quite well, and if that was the Cardinals’ intention, then they were apparently successful, since Smith left Pitt’s campus on Monday without committing.

This is how recruiting works - Part Two
Scenario 2: The ‘Blowing Up’ Offer

This was the other one we saw this week when Jaden Payoute, an unrated pro-style quarterback - according to the Rivals.com database - from Virginia showed up at Pitt’s camp on Sunday and impressed everyone. Playing through a shin injury, Payoute would limp to the line of scrimmage, run a crisp route and make a strong contested catch, then limp back to the sidelines to wait for his next rep.

And that came after he ran a sub-4.4 40 at the start of the camp. So yeah, Payoute had a good day, and he left the South Side with an offer from Pitt. The Panthers were the first team from a Power Five conference to offer Payoute, but that number grew pretty quickly.

He went to a camp at Virginia Tech on Tuesday and earned an offer from the Hokies. And then on Wednesday morning, Illinois, Boston College and Tennessee also joined the mix (and later Cincinnati, Charlotte and Delaware) . The list will probably keep growing from there, as you would expect for a 6’2” 190-pound receiver with his physical skills.

And thus, Payoute’s blow-up is happening.

The Virginia Tech offer makes sense; he camped with the Hokies and showed the coaches what he could in-person. But Boston College and Illinois and Tennessee were offering based on two things: the film and the hype, and the latter might be more important than the former. Or, at the very least, the latter made the former seem a little better.

I’m sure the coaches from Boston College and Illinois and Tennessee always liked Payoute’s film. But the only thing that really changed this week was that Pitt and Virginia Tech threw their hats in the ring with offers. An assistant at BC and Illinois probably saw the offers on Twitter and went back to their schools receivers coaches and said, “Hey, we should take another look at this guy;” from there, the receivers coach watched the film knowing that a pair of ACC schools offered after seeing him in-person and decided to add another offer to the list.

The ‘Blowing Up’ Offer is a real thing; hype gets a coaching staff to take another look at a recruit’s film - or brings that recruit to the attention of the staff in the first place - and that second look leads to an offer. That was more or less what happened with Pitt’s recruitment of Habakkuk Baldonado; Pitt recruiting GA Karlo Zovko noticed on Twitter that something was brewing around an unknown defensive end on the Gulf Coast, so he reached out to DL coach Charlie Partridge, who then contacted area recruiter Rob Harley, who went to Baldonado’s school that day.

Social media has changed a lot of the recruiting game, and it has added another dimension to the ‘Blowing Up’ Offer phenomena.

There’s a comparison point for Capel’s start
There’s no question that Jeff Capel is off to a smashing good start at Pitt. In less than three months he has rebuilt the Panthers’ back court into one that should be competitive in the ACC sooner rather than later by convincing four-star guard Trey McGowens to reclassify; by getting three-star Xavier Johnson to commit after he backed away from a Nebraska pledge; by securing the graduate transfer of New Mexico State guard Sidy N’Dir; and, most recently, by landing the commitment of three-star wing Au’Diese Toney.

That’s quite a start and reason enough for enthusiasm among Pitt fans. But, given that subculture’s in-born - some might say in-grown - inclinations, there have inevitably been comparisons drawn between Capel’s hot start in recruiting and the football program’s current slow start in recruiting.

To sum up: Jeff Capel has four commitments in two months and Pat Narduzzi has none after four months (if we’re back-dating to the February Signing Day) or six months (if we’re going back to the December Signing Day) or 16 months (if we’re taking it back to Signing Day 2017, since the current recruits have been targets since then) or longer.

Whatever timeframe you want to put on it probably depends on the point you’re trying to make, but the gist is the same: Capel has had a lot of success this spring and Narduzzi hasn’t. Which is true. I can’t deny that.

I do think it’s interesting, though, that while the two coaches aren’t experiencing similar results in their current situations, there is still a parallel. In fact, Narduzzi’s first couple months on the job were rather quite like Capel’s.

When Narduzzi was hired in December 2014, his first job was to hold onto Jordan Whitehead’s commitment; he did that. Then he needed to close on some top targets like Anthony McKee and Saleem Brightwell and Jay Stocker; he did that. He needed someone to help provide immediate depth - and maybe something more - at quarterback; he did that with grad transfer Nate Peterman. And he topped it off that spring by getting Dewayne Hendrix as a transfer from Tennessee.

Now, all of this happened three years ago so it’s not relevant to what Narduzzi and company are doing right now with the class of 2019. But as a comparison to Capel’s first few months on the job, it’s curiously similar.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Has there been a shift?
Two interesting offers from Pitt in the last two weeks:

Aliquippa’s MJ Devonshire and Pine-Richland’s Mike Katic

Both are interesting for a couple reasons. For starters, they’re both local prospects who earned multiple Power Five offers prior to Pitt coming through with a scholarship. That’s notable enough on its own and we could probably spend quite a bit time talking about that angle (in fact, we already have and likely will continue to spend a lot of time talking about that angle).

But just as interesting is what Pat Narduzzi said to Devonshire and Katic when he offered them. Along with the standard “We’re building something” and “You can help us” stuff that always gets said, Narduzzi added something extra. Here’s Katic’s retelling:

“He was saying how he needs to incorporate the local kids more and how local talent is very good and it can make Pitt better.”

I think the word “more” is key in there, and Katic isn’t the only recruit who has heard that sentiment from Narduzzi and company: the staff seems to be emphasizing an increased focus on local recruits. That’s not to say the coaches haven’t been emphasizing local recruits, but in light of some recent difficulties in landing players from western Pennsylvania and, perhaps, some relationships that haven’t been as strong as they should be, it seems like the staff is putting some extra effort in.

And that’s a good idea. We can debate forever about whether the Pitt coaches should prioritize the WPIAL and whether the WPIAL is all that important to Pitt, but the truth is, they should prioritize it and it is important. You’re not going to build your roster off your home territory - not all of it, not even half of it. But you do need to have strong relationships within an hour’s drive of your school, particularly if that hour circumference regularly turns out good talent. The numbers may be down, but you still have to work hard to get those kids.

No, Pitt’s not going to get everyone from the WPIAL; with the area being centrally located between Penn State and Ohio State - and not too far from Notre Dame or Michigan - there is simply too much competition to expect any one school to “own” the area. By my count, Pitt offered 144 WPIAL kids in the 10 classes from 2008-17 and signed 63 of them. The total number of actual offers might be a few less since some kids lost their offers or what-have-you, but still, if you take off two from each year, you’re looking at about a 50% success rate on local prospects.

But that doesn’t mean Pitt should stop recruiting the WPIAL or back off. The Panthers have to recruit locally. They have to have good relationships locally. They have to make the WPIAL a priority - not at the expense of recruiting beyond the area, but as a key piece of the foundation to go with the other out-of-state efforts. Local recruits who excel at Pitt can help build the pride that so often seems to be lacking around the program.

It seems like Narduzzi recognizes that and is trying to emphasize that.

Can Pitt get a trio from Cass Tech?
Like I said, Pitt is still going to recruit outside the local area, and one place we’re all watching is Michigan, in general, and Detroit, in particular.

Even more precisely, we’re watching Cass Tech, a school that regularly turns out Division I talent and has been the target of a number of Pitt offers over the last few years with no results to speak of. We’re all curious to see if defensive backs coach Archie Collins, himself a Cass Tech grad, can turn Pitt’s fortunes in the Motor City, and the litmus test in that regard will be in the trio of Technicians considering the Panthers:

Running back Lew Nichols and defensive backs Jalen Graham and Ormondell Dingle.

All three are high on Pitt and all three are close with Collins. Graham released his top eight schools this week and Pitt made the cut; that wasn’t a surprise. What was really notable was what he said about the possibility of playing in the future with his current teammates.

“We still talk about it a lot. All the schools we have offers from - like, Dingle has the same as me, so we talk about schools like Iowa State and Pitt a lot; me and Lew talk about Pitt and Minnesota a lot; Kyron is the same thing. We all talk about if we could play together.

“It’s pretty big for me, really; it would be nice going to college with a close friend. I consider them brothers so it would be nice.”

The “Kryon” that Graham mentioned is three-star athlete Kyron McKinnie-Harper; he doesn’t have quite the offer list that Graham, Dingle and Nichols do - his lone Power Five offer is from Syracuse - but the other three have a lot of overlap, as Graham laid out.

And you probably noticed that he brought up Pitt when he talked about the overlap with Dingle and the overlap with Nichols.

Now, we’re definitely keeping this topic in the “Two Questions” section and not the “One Prediction” section, because I’m not predicting that Pitt will get all three Cass Tech standouts. But I do think Collins and Narduzzi have positioned themselves well for those three players. Grabbing any one of them would be a good land for Pitt; getting two or even all three would be a huge boost to the 2019 class.

ONE PREDICTION

This grad transfer will catch more passes than the last one
Okay. That’s probably not fair. Will Gragg is coming to Pitt from Arkansas with two years to play, while the last grad transfer tight end, Matt Flanagan from Rutgers, had one year of eligibility and missed several games due to injury.

Still, Flanagan’s numbers in his one season at Pitt weren’t overwhelming. He caught 17 passes for 160 yards in the nine games he played; that’s not a lot of production, but it nearly matched what he did at Rutgers, where he played 33 games over four seasons and recorded 18 catches for 145 yards and three touchdowns.

By comparison, Gragg was at Arkansas for three years and caught five passes for 61 yards in that time. And all of that production came in 2017; he redshirted in 2015 and didn’t appear in any games in 2016. That’s not much for the player who was ranked as the No. 4 tight end prospect in the nation in the class of 2015 (interestingly, the No. 1 tight end in that class was Chris Clark, who transferred to Pitt from UCLA two years ago and then left the Panthers this spring after minimal production in 2017).

Given his production at Arkansas, it’s probably wise to set realistic expectations for Gragg’s time at Pitt. But the depth and experience of the Panthers’ current tight ends make him a good addition regardless of what he ends up producing. Pitt has three tight ends on the roster: two redshirt freshmen who have never played in a game before and one sophomore who has one career catch.

Even Gragg’s five-catches-in-three-years tops that collective stat line. So he’ll bring experience, physical maturity as a fourth-year player and, if nothing else, an extra body at a position where Pitt could probably use one. This should create a little more flexibility for the staff, too; now they can look a little more closely at possibly moving one of the current tight ends to offensive tackle, and they also might be able to get away with not moving one of the incoming defensive ends to tight end.

Also, if you’re keeping score at home, Gragg is the seventh graduate transfer Narduzzi has added in four years and the second one this year:

2015 - QB Nate Peterman, DT Mark Scarpinato

2017 - QB Max Browne, OL Brandon Hodges, TE Matt Flanagan

2018 - TE Will Gragg, OL Stefano Millin