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In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about the end of Pitt’s season, third downs, quarterbacks and more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Happiness is based on expectations
There’s a quote or a cliché or an axiom out there somewhere about happiness being tied to expectations. Simply put, you’ll be happy if your expectations are exceeded, so the level of those expectations has a direct influence on your level of happiness.

That’s not to say you should lower your expectations in order to be happy. Rather, it’s an observation on the relationship between the two.

And to that end, I think you have to be pretty happy with how Pitt’s season ended over the last week.

If you’re like me, you went from talking yourself into a bubble bid to the NCAA Tournament after the Florida State win to seriously doubting that the team would reach three victories in the conference. Somewhere around the Wake Forest game or the Boston College game or the Georgia Tech game or, if you really held out hope, the Miami game, you probably came to terms with the fact that the Panthers would finish with two conference wins.

And that would be fine. Two is more than zero, right? Sure, Notre Dame looked beatable, but so did those other teams I mentioned, and Pitt failed each time (admittedly, those failures were on the road, but they were failures nonetheless).

Then the Panthers beat the Irish to get win No. 3. Expectations exceeded.

But they weren’t done, because they flew to Charlotte and grabbed one more win before hanging up the sneakers. I’ll be honest right there: that exceeded my expectations. Regardless of anything, I didn’t think Pitt’s freshmen would show up like they did on the tournament stage for the first time.

But they sure did show up, and it was impressive.

(Wednesday night, not so much, but still.)

So, all in all, I think it’s tough to have much negativity about this season. Pitt wasn’t really competitive with the teams at the top of the conference, but I don’t think anyone (realistically) expected the Panthers to be competitive in those games. And while there were some wins that got away, I think any victory is pretty much cream cheese when you’re coming off a winless season.

So with all of this in mind, where are the expectations going to be next season? We can all talk a good game now, keeping up the theme of letting Jeff Capel build and how it might take another year - beyond next season - before things really get rolling. We can say that the 2020-21 season is the time when Capel’s rebuild should turn in serious dividends.

That’s what we can say now. But I have a feeling that’s going to shift. Capel has already added three recruits to his 2019 class and has a handful of spots left to fill. If he grabs another high school prospect or two and then adds JUCO or grad transfer options at some key positions, the expectations are going to go up.

No one will come out and say that Pitt should win the ACC. But the target number for ACC wins is going to be set somewhere higher than three - perhaps inching close to double digits, which might be aiming a little too high.

The best of a bad situation
In terms of casting, Jeff Capel has been hailed as the savior Pitt hoops and Xavier Johnson and Trey McGowens are the program’s fire, the energy that will lead to victory.

But Jared Wilson-Frame has, in recent weeks, moved into a different kind of role. He has gone from being a reminder of the Kevin Stallings era to a legitimate fan favorite, a grizzled veteran who made a very public apology for his play early in the season and then proceeded to more or less deliver on his promise to improve.

Wilson-Frame has been positioned as a leader and a key piece in the sale of Capel’s vision to the rest of the team. Capel himself seems to have been impressed with how Wilson-Frame bought in, as the head coach’s comments make it clear that there was at least some amount of skepticism.

For me, Wilson-Frame’s career is going to be defined by growth. I’m sure you saw Craig Meyer’s nice piece on Wilson-Frame last weekend, detailing his journey from high school to prep school to junior college to Pitt, the toils of the Stallings era and one final transition when Capel was hired.

It takes some resiliency to stick with it through all of that and, perhaps more importantly, to come out of it on the other end looking like someone who truly grew.

The Jared Wilson-Frame who tied a Pitt record with eight three-pointers against Syracuse on Wednesday night was not the same guy who signed on to play for the Panthers two years ago. Players change in college; everyone does. But Wilson-Frame’s growth on a lot of levels - his growth in basketball, the change in his body, his development as a leader - is stark and impressive.

And a lot of it happened this season. It wasn’t all that long ago that Wilson-Frame was suspended for the season opener against Youngstown State for “a violation of team rules” - some transgression that occurred last spring.

The specifics of the offense were never revealed, but they didn’t need to be in order to create the impression: Wilson-Frame screwed up. It was obviously something minor, but even minor offenses don’t exactly befit a leader.

So Wilson-Frame grew into one.

I’m willing to wager that his growth, just as much as anything he says, had a positive impact on the young players Pitt relied on this season. Johnson and McGowens and Au’Diese Toney and the rest saw Wilson-Frame from start to finish, and they saw how he personally developed. That’s going to leave an impression, I imagine.

Ultimately, if Pitt gets back to prominence, it will be on the backs of guys like Johnson and McGowens. Wilson-Frame will, over time, slide into the footnotes. He’ll be the guy before the guys, but he’ll also have an important place as a role model for those young players - someone who showed freshmen how to grow and how important it is to grow.

An area to improve
Switching to football…

David Hale from ESPN.com had an interesting tweet the other day about the average distance teams faced on third down last season.

The national average was 7.1 yards, so I wanted to see what Pitt’s number was for the 183 third downs the Panthers faced in 2018.

By my math, it was 7.68, or roughly a half-yard more than average. I was a little surprised by this, because in theory, a team that runs the ball as well as Pitt did should have been able to get an average distance of less than seven yards.

My thinking on that is, a team that can run the ball should have more success on first down, at the very least, and potentially also second down. Hand it off, pick up four - the Panthers averaged 5.6 yards per rushing attempt - and then even if you hand it off again and only get two, you’re still looking at third-and-4.

Heck, even if you throw an incomplete pass on second down, you’re at third-and-6, which is better than that average.

Either way, Pitt ended up averaging just under 7.7 yards to go on third down, and that obviously factored into the Panthers’ ultimate third-down conversion percentage of 37%. That ranked No. 96 nationally - below teams like Maryland and Kansas, who had higher average to-go distances on third downs.

A big part of that success rate - or lack-of-success rate - was how poorly Pitt performed on third-and-long. The Panthers converted third-and-7 just twice on nine attempts, third-and-8 three times on 10 attempts and third-and-9 four times on 14 attempts. That’s a collective 9-of-33 success rate on third downs with a distance of 7-9 yards.

And don’t even think about 10+; Pitt had 10 conversions all season on third downs of 10 or more yards and half of those came in the Wake Forest and UCF games.

If we go back to that average distance faced of 7.6 yards per third down, Pitt converted just 19 third downs of seven or more yards. Those 19 conversions came on 94 attempts - 20.2% - and those 94 attempts represented more than half of Pitt’s total third downs (183).

So more often than not, Pitt was facing a third-down distance that it converted at a rate of 20%.

Obviously the lack of a downfield passing game (and sometimes the lack of any passing game) played into the struggles on third-and-long; in fact, only six of those nine long conversions came via the pass. But if you’re looking for one more way to say the offense had major issues last year, there it is.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

What’s a good success rate for quarterbacks?
Let’s talk about another David Hale tweet, because the guy is good for interesting and informative tweets.

Okay, that was a series of tweets, but it’s still interesting to me and provides a jumping-off point for a discussion. David was talking about the Florida schools there, but it got me thinking about Pitt’s history with quarterbacks and what that looks like.

So here’s what it looks like:

(Sorry if some of the names get cut off; I assume you know who those guys are.)

It’s not quite the same as the Florida schools, but it’s…not good. Or at least not great. I think I’ll stick with not good. A few things stick out to me.

For starters, 34 of the 65 wins represented there came from two players: Tino Sunseri (20-19 as a starter) and Nate Peterman (14-10). That’s more than half of the wins over a 12-year sample.

Sunseri and Peterman combined to start a total of five seasons. Chad Voytik, Tom Savage and Kenny Pickett started one season each; Max Browne and Ben DiNucci split a season, Pat Bostick started some of one and Bill Stull started two. Stull also had a 19-7 record as a starter, but I didn’t include him or Kevan Smith, who also had a win as a starter, because I was just looking at quarterbacks Pitt acquired from 2007-17.

So on first glance, much like the numbers for the Florida schools, it’s pretty abrupt to see most of the wins centered around two or three players and then a litany of DNF’s for the rest of the list. But at the same time, it makes sense. You can only use one quarterback at a time, and under ideal circumstances, you have one guy start for at least two seasons, if not three.

But you don’t only recruit one quarterback every two years, so there’s going to be a pileup and guys are going to leave the team or change positions. Really, that puts some context not just Pitt but also the Florida schools, and it means that you would probably see similar data on most schools’ quarterback situations, I would guess.

Still, when you look at Pitt’s list and see exactly one quarterback since 2007 who was recruited by Pitt and finished his eligibility playing quarterback at Pitt, that’s pretty striking. I mean, you don’t even need to qualify it with “games started” or “games won” or anything like - although the number would still be one - you just need to look at the simple measure of, “How many guys came to Pitt as quarterbacks and stayed at Pitt as quarterbacks?”

And the answer is one: Tino Sunseri.

You know, say what you will about Tino, but the guy had quite a career at Pitt. He played for four different offensive coordinators (five, if you count Calvin Magee and Mike Norvell in 2011), he was a three-year starter and he is one of four players in Pitt history to throw for 3,000 yards in a season. His 3,288 yards in 2012 is actually second-most all-time, behind only Rod Rutherford’s 3,679 yards in 2003.

But I digress. The point is, quarterback recruiting is a crapshoot. You could say that about any position, but quarterback is so important that you have to keep taking guys every year, no matter how confident you feel about the guys you’ve already gotten. And when you look back over a decade’s sample, you’ll probably find something similar: a lot of transfers and switched positions and only a couple of graduations. That’s just how it goes.

Why do people still talk about Jamie Dixon?
A thread on our free basketball board got me thinking this week.

It was started Wednesday night and the subject line was simple enough:

“TCU”

Now, to the outside observer, this might look weird: a thread about TCU on a Pitt message board? With 40+ replies and nearly a thousand views? What gives?

But to most who know Pitt, who know this fanbase, who know the collective history shared by those two parties, they know why there’s a thread about TCU on a Pitt message board. They know it’s because of Jamie Dixon, Pitt’s coach for the first decade or so of this century who is now a Horned Frog.

Where it gets a bit trickier is the question of why Pitt fans keep talking about Jamie Dixon. That thread wasn’t an anomaly or a one-off; go search for the terms “Jamie” or “Dixon” on the Basketball Board or the premium Center Court at the Pete board and you’ll find plenty of results, most of them in recent posts and active threads.

But Dixon was two coaches ago, three years removed from leading the Panthers. The roster has completely turned over and the coaching staff has, too (save for Director of Basketball Operations Brian Regan, who served in that role under Dixon and is back in it again under Jeff Capel after spending the Stallings years in the Athletic Department wilderness).

Even the Athletic Department itself has experienced huge turnover. It’s a different Pitt - soon with new colors, right? So why keep dwelling on a guy who has been gone for as long as Dixon has?

First off, we don’t let go of things around here. That should be obvious. People still debate Dave Wannstedt’s departure and that was eight years ago. People still debate Jackie Sherrill’s departure and that was nearly 40 years ago. People still debate Jock Sutherland’s departure and that was more than 80 years ago.

So yeah, we hold onto things.

But Dixon is different. Ben Howland started the renaissance of Pitt basketball, but Dixon was the one who carried it on, who really built the program into the national power that it was. And yes, Pitt basketball was a national power under Dixon. It was, for the better part of a decade, the best team - or one of the best - in the best conference in America.

The Big East was widely considered the best conference for quite a few years there, and Pitt was a big part of the reason why.

But it’s not just success that keeps Dixon in the conversation at Pitt. It’s that an entire generation of Pitt hoops fans came up during the time he was here. An entire generation of kids in the Zoo grew up knowing Pitt to be one of the best programs in America, a level they expect the Panthers to reach again, and the reason they have those expectations is because of Jamie Dixon.

Dixon is in the past, but he’s also…not. He’s a central figure in the formative experiences of so many Pitt hoops fans - maybe a majority of current Pitt hoops fans, and when someone has that level of sustained success over a period as long as Dixon did (13 seasons), it’s hard to separate.

For a lot of people Dixon is synonymous with Pitt hoops; as such, he’s probably not leaving the conversation anytime soon.

JUST ONE MORE THING

A few more, actually…

- Earlier, I wrote about Jared Wilson-Frame going out on a high note, which he did with his performance against Syracuse on Wednesday night (as well as most of his senior season). But a little credit should go to Malik Ellison, too.

He hasn’t been great this season; after we heard all of last season how good he was going to be, he pretty much played himself out of the starting lineup due to ineffectiveness. But in the last few games, he has found a role. It’s not necessarily scoring - he had eight points in the loss to Syracuse and four total against Boston College and Notre Dame - but he’s doing a lot of other things. He’s rebounding well (22 rebounds in the last four games) and playing with more focused energy.

I don’t know what Ellison’s future holds - and if that future’s at Pitt, I suspect it would still be in a reserve capacity - but I’m a little more encouraged by his play of late than I was early in the season.

- If Ellison decides to leave, he’ll be another in a certain group of players who will ultimately not occupy much space in the minds and memories of Pitt fans.

They are the short-term players of the Kevin Stallings era.

Marcus Carr, Parker Stewart, Monty Boykins, Crisshawn Clark, Corey Manigault, Shamiel Stevenson and Peace Illegomah are already in that group. Jared Wilson-Frame is, too, as a short-term player who came in under Stallings, but I think he’ll be remembered a little more fondly. Ellison, Khameron Davis and Samson George could also conceivably join the group after this season. Terrell Brown could, too, really.

It’s a rather large group, when you look at all the names on the page. Seven already in the club with the potential to get to double digits. And yet their legacies at Pitt will probably be even less than that of Stallings himself. The coach, like Todd Graham on the football side - or even Michael Haywood - will be a punchline to a perpetual joke among Pitt fans. The players…they’ll fade into obscurity, included in the media guide but not memorable for much more other than one fan impressing another with his or her powers of recall.

- A day after getting bounced from the ACC Tournament, Jeff Capel landed another commitment for the 2019 class in Justin Champagnie, a three-star wing who reclassified from the 2020 class to join the Panthers in the upcoming season.

It’s not a terrible surprise that Champagnie committed; what’s more interesting is that his twin brother, Julian Champagnie, did not commit. Instead, he decided to stay in the 2020 class, so one brother will head off to Pitt in the fall and the other will not. That’s a unique and unexpected development.

We’ll see what comes out of this and a lot of people are already penciling Julian Champagnie in as a 2020 commitment for Pitt, but I don’t know if that’s what will happen. He could have committed on Thursday when his brother did; there’s no rule against a commitment from a junior recruit, which is effectively what Julian Champagnie is. If he knows he wants to go to Pitt with his brother, there was nothing preventing him from committing.

But he didn’t. Which is curious.

There’s plenty of time for the situation to play out, of course. And plenty of time for Julian Champagnie to develop as a prospect.

- Finally, there was some news on the radio front this week. Dick Groat, who has been providing color commentary for Pitt basketball since the 1970’s, will no longer serve in that position. That brings an end to a 40-year partnership with Bill Hillgrove, the voice of the Panthers who does play-by-play.

By all accounts - by Groat’s own account - Pitt made the call to remove Groat from the broadcasts. There have been mixed responses to this move from the fans, which is understandable. Groat is 88 years old, and fans have commented for years that his age shows - that his commentary is not as sharp as they would like to hear. At the same time, a lot of fans feel that a legend such as Groat should be able to go out on his own terms.

And Groat is certainly a legend. I’m not going to be the umpteenth person to say this, but the guy is an absolute legend. There should be books written about him. And he deserves every bit of respect he can get.

That said, I can’t entirely disagree with the decision to make a change. In the best scenario, Groat makes his own call to step aside. It doesn’t seem like that happened. So Pitt had to make a decision. It probably wasn’t an easy decision, but it was probably also the best decision. The people in charge will find someone who will likely provide better commentary and enhance the radio broadcast. The overall product will improve.

They won’t find another legend, though.