Advertisement
football Edit

The 3-2-1 Column: The hoops road ahead, football recruiting and more

MORE HEADLINES - Capel takeaways: Players returning, Brown vs. the zone, scheduling and more | In the film room: Champagnie's impact | Five-star Whitehead has been watching Pitt closely | Pitt is still in the mix for Hood-Schifino | PODCAST: Postponed games, parity, a new commit and more | Four-star DE Nolton maintaining contact with Pitt | Champagnie getting closer to returning

In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about what’s coming for Pitt basketball, whether parity can come for college football and a lot more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

The upside of postponements
Another week, another postponed game.

Welcome to the latest edition of the 2020-21 basketball season, which is feeling an awful lot like the 2020 football season, or basically anything else from the last 10 months. You see, schedules don’t mean a whole lot in sports these days; games can be postponed or canceled at pretty much any time, and we’re seeing it happening at every level, from high school to college to pro.

It’s no surprise, then, that college basketball has been impacted. Pitt has had four games postponed so far this season and a fifth game was moved up on the schedule because, well, why not? Might as well play them when you can.

Pitt’s own COVID-19 issues led to games against Duke and Notre Dame getting bumped; then issues at Florida State and Georgia Tech put those two games on ice, at least temporarily. The result is that the Panthers have played exactly one game since Christmas when they should have had four. And the one they played was the game at Syracuse, which was originally scheduled for February but got bumped up to last week.

That’s a lot of time off, and it has led to a general feeling, at least for me, that the season isn’t really happening. I mean, it’s happening; I know that. I know that Pitt is 6-2 overall and 2-1 in the ACC, but when you get just one game over the course of nearly four weeks…I don’t know, it kind of feels like it’s not really there. I’m sure this will change when Pitt actually plays a game and hosts Syracuse tomorrow, but until then…

There might be an upside to the chaos for Pitt, though. I’m not the first person to suggest this, but every game in this stretch that gets postponed to later in the season is one fewer game that the Panthers will play without Justin Champagnie.

That’s big. The initial word after Champagnie suffered a knee injury in practice was that he would miss six to eight weeks. That was the weekend before Pitt’s loss to Louisville on Dec. 22, and with no postponements, he would have missed five games to this point. Instead, he has only missed two.

Throw in the fact that Jeff Capel said this week he expects Champagnie “to be back before 6-8 weeks,” and you’re opening up the possibility that instead of missing 10 games - that’s how many Pitt would have played without him if there were no postponements over the course of eight weeks - the Panthers could have their best player back on the court after half of that number.

There was the Louisville game on Dec. 22. There was the game at Syracuse last Wednesday. And there’s the game against Syracuse at the Petersen Events Center tomorrow. That’s three (assuming Champagnie doesn’t return tomorrow). Then Pitt hosts Duke next Tuesday and goes to Boston College next Saturday. The six-week mark for Champagnie’s injury would be after that BC game; if he makes it back for that trip, he could end up missing as few as four games.

That’s huge.

Pitt has been showing some signs of promise this season, and this team could have some real potential if it gets whole in the near future. Getting Champagnie back on the court would be a considerable boost and could lead to more success than we’ve seen from this program in quite some time.

More on that in a bit. But for now, I think we can say that limiting the number of games Champagnie misses is an unintended upside of all those postponements.

Advertisement

The parody of parity
Clever play on words, right? I’m sure no one has ever matched those two homonyms. We’re blazing new ground at Panther-dash-Lair-dot-com.

So the national championship game was earlier this week, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of hype leading up to the game. Part of that might be due to COVID fatigue - that general malaise that I think we all have about a lot of things right now - or maybe the events that took place in Washington, D.C. during the week before the game.

There’s also the matter of seeing Alabama and Ohio playing in the national championship game - two familiar faces when familiarity might be breeding a bit of contempt, or at least disinterest.

In seven years of the College Football Playoffs, the 28 available spots have been filled by 11 teams, and four of those 11 teams have filled 20 of the 28 spots. You don’t need me to spell out which four those are, but let’s go over them just so we’re all on the same page:

Alabama. Clemson. Ohio State. Oklahoma.

The first two have made the playoffs six times each (again, out of seven years using the playoff system). The other two have been in four times each. And of the other seven teams who have made the playoffs, most are names you would expect to see:

Notre Dame (twice). LSU. Georgia.

The group is rounded out by Florida State (who should expect to be in the category of teams who regularly compete for the playoffs, but the Seminoles have fallen on hard times), Oregon (who is right outside that group of top schools but seems to be forgotten on the west coast), Michigan State and Washington.

Those last two are interesting to me. Michigan State made it as a 12-1 Big Ten champion, got slotted into the No. 3 seed and promptly got trounced by Alabama 38-0. Washington met a similar fate: 12-1, PAC-12 champs, 24-7 loss to Alabama in the first round.

I guess if somebody outside the club somehow gains entry, the CFP committee feeds them to Alabama; the Tide take care of that intrusion right quick.

This year there was no such intrusion. Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Notre Dame were the four playoff teams, with the Tide beating the Buckeyes in the championship. Second verse - or, in this case, seventh verse - same as the first.

I have a few thoughts on this. Here’s one:

The current lack of parity isn’t really all that different from what college football has historically been.

Seriously, we talk about how the last seven years have basically seen the same 3-5 teams more often than not, but look back beyond that and you’ll see that college football has always been the haves and the have-nots.

In the 44 seasons from 1970 until the start of the playoff era, the NCAA recognizes 53 national champions (gotta love those shared titles). 35 of those 53 national championships are claimed by Alabama, Miami, Nebraska, USC, Oklahoma, Florida, Florida State and Notre Dame. That’s 35 titles in 44 seasons for those eight teams, which basically means one of those teams was a national champion in four out of every five years from 1970 to 2013.

Sure, you’ve got the plucky upstarts like BYU in 1984 or Colorado and Georgia Tech in 1990 or Washington in 1991 or, you know, Pitt in 1976. But 80% of the time, it was one of those eight teams.

Tell me again about the parity that we’ve lost in college football, because I’m not seeing it.

Now, you can make a case that the upper level has shrunk even more in the last seven years, and yes, only having four teams win a title in that span backs up that point. But I would counter that 44 years is a bigger sample size, and even if we keep the same playoff format, the next 37 years will likely see the group of champions expand a bit. I think schools like Florida, Georgia, Texas A&M and Texas are going to be at the top of the mountain sooner rather than later, and even some playoff regulars - Oklahoma and Notre Dame - will probably be added to the list of champions, too.

Either way, the point remains: college football has never had the kind of broad parity that some seem to be pining for. Yes, it’s a small group right now, but the separation between the Top Tier and Everybody Else has always existed.

The source
So how do those top teams separate themselves?

Brace yourself for this ground-breaking answer:

It’s the recruiting.

Yes, Nick Saban is very good. Dabo Swinney is very good. Ryan Day and Lincoln Riley seem to be pretty good, too. But you know who else is good?

Devonta Smith. Najee Harris. Trey Sermon. Justin Fields. Mac Jones. Trevor Lawrence. And a whole host of other studs that line up for Alabama and Ohio State and Clemson and the rest. I mean, Monday night’s national title game was pretty close to an NFL contest in terms of talent, and there’s a handful of teams in college football who have that level of players across their rosters.

So it only makes sense that we see the correlation between recruiting success and on-field success, right?

No surprises here.

In the last five years - 2016-20 - Alabama’s recruiting classes ranked 1, 1, 7, 2 and 3. Clemson’s classes were 6, 22, 8, 9, 2 (and that 22 was a year where the Tigers only signed 14 recruits - three of the 14 were five-star prospects and six were four-stars, so yeah, that was a pretty good class).

Ohio State has had four top-5 classes in the last five years. Oklahoma has been in the top 10 three times in the last five years. LSU has been in the top 10 four times and the top five three times.

In the last five years, Georgia, Alabama, LSU and Ohio State have accounted for 60% of the total top-five classes. Most of the talent is funneling to a few schools.

This isn’t rocket science. The best teams are the best teams because they get the best players. And the big difference between college sports and pro sports is that in college, the players pick the teams - not the other way around. In pro sports, the worst teams get top draft picks so they can ostensibly select the best players and improve their teams.

This balances out the competition (or at least it’s supposed to) and moves things closer to parity. In college, that’s not the case. The best players want to win championships so they go to the teams where they have the best chance to do just that.

Which is how we end up with the same teams seeming to be locked in at the top.

It’s also why I think we’ll see that top tier expand a bit in coming years. Georgia has been good and made the College Football Playoffs once, but the Bulldogs didn’t win it all; I expect that to change after Kirby Smart has signed the No. 1 class in the country three years in a row and has Georgia sitting at No. 5 for the class of 2021, which would be their lowest-ranked class since 2016.

I think Texas is on the way, too. The Longhorns have the No. 16 class for 2021, but they were in the top five twice in the last three years, and that’s the kind of recruiting success you need to get to the top. Florida is recruiting at a high level with a top-10 class in three of the last five years, as well, and Texas A&M finished with the No. 6 class in 2019 and 2020, so I would keep an eye on the Gators and Aggies in the coming years.

This is how you get into the top tier. I think we all recognize that. But I also think we all know what the next question is, right?

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

How does Pitt get into that tier?
This question could be asked a few ways.

How does Pitt get into that tier?

Will Pitt ever get into that tier?

Can Pitt get into that tier?

That last one is probably the biggest, and it’s the question that a lot of programs - not just Pitt - are facing:

Can they get into the top tier?

It’s certainly not just Pitt who is facing that question. There are 130 FBS programs, but how many of them realistically have a shot at the College Football Playoffs in any given year? Never mind the 60 teams in the Group of Five conferences or the five independents not named Notre Dame; they have no shot, which has been made abundantly clear in the last few years. So that’s half of the 130 taken right off the top.

What about the 65 teams in the Power Five conferences (or, rather, 64 plus Notre Dame)? How many of those 65 have a chance? Like we mentioned before, four teams have taken 20 of the 28 available spots in the College Football Playoffs through the first seven years of the CFP, which doesn’t seem to leave a lot of room for others. But there’s a real question of how far can you go beyond those four and say, “This program can realistically expect to get a shot.”

I don’t know the answer here. I mentioned a few other programs earlier, like Florida or Texas or Texas A&M, who should be in the conversation over the next few seasons based on how they’ve been recruiting, but those are hardly schools I would consider to be clearly outside the top tier. They’re not Michigan State or Washington, whose appearances in the CFP represent that committee’s lone attempts at inclusion.

I’m afraid that there’s a real barrier to entry here when college football is a self-perpetuating enterprise. Like I said before, the best players tend to go to the best teams and the best teams continue to be the best teams because they get the best players.

In the last five years, Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, LSU, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas A&M and Michigan have signed a combined 31 top-10 recruiting classes. Eight schools out of 130, and they signed more than 60% of the top-10 classes.

How can you compete with that? Can you compete with that?

I’m not sure you can, not on a consistent basis. That cycle of the best players going to the best teams isn’t going to fade; the best teams will keep getting the best players, and those best players will keep the best teams in position to be the best teams. Schools like Pitt or Michigan State or Washington or Colorado or Minnesota or Wisconsin or Virginia Tech - it feels like the best they can hope for is that one magic season where things line up just exactly perfect, both in how they perform and how other teams in the country perform.

Unfortunately, there’s no secret pill for making that happen. A good coach is a good start; getting consistent 10-win seasons will give you a better shot at landing a few top targets, and maybe you’ll get enough to put you in position for that magic year. But doing it consistently? That just doesn’t seem realistic, not under the current system.

Maybe you expand the playoffs; that would help on a few levels, but I don’t see a lot else that’s going to make much of a change.

I do see one thing that’s encouraging, though: I think college football programs still take pride is non-national title achievements. Win 10 games, win your division, win your bowl game - these things will hang on the wall in your facility. Accomplishments like those always meant a lot in college football, especially the part about winning a bowl game, and I think they do still carry some meaning. Yes, we’re very obsessed with national championships, and that is only going to grow. But that next level of achievements still means something. It means there’s still something to play for, something to cheer for. A reason to watch.

This year, with truncated schedules and canceled bowl games, almost all of the focus was on the playoffs. When we get back to a normal year with a full schedule and a complete slate of bowls and all of that, I think we’ll slide back into the normal rhythm of college football. I’m looking forward to that. It won’t make the playoffs less important, but I do think it will lessen the feeling that only four or five teams had something to play for, which was the case this year.

What will Pitt’s 2022 class look like?
Let me say this right from the start:

The next 12 months of recruiting might be one of the most interesting any of us has ever seen.

This past year bizarre to the extreme, as we went from the last few years of having more recruiting with the spring official visit period to almost no recruiting with the NCAA’s emergency dead period running from March 2020 through Signing Day 2021. The result was that some recruits signed with schools despite never setting foot on campus and some coaches signed recruits despite never meeting them in person.

We’re going to be seeing how that works out for the next few years. But if it looked like the recruiting class of 2021 had it rough, let’s just wait to see what’s in store for the class of 2022.

I’ve talked about this before. The NCAA’s decision to give a free year to everyone who was on a roster in 2020 seemed like an altruistic move, but the reality is, it’s got the potential to create a considerable logjam in the coming years. Assuming the NCAA doesn’t introduce any scholarship exceptions for those players who return, each of the “super-seniors” is going to take a spot on the 85-man roster that would have gone to a recruit.

If you’ve read these columns before, you know that I think the NCAA should issue a ruling that any player using his extra year doesn’t count against the 85, but I don’t know if that’s likely to happen, for a variety of reasons. And if it doesn’t happen, there’s going to be a numbers crunch at a lot of schools, and the recruits in the class of 2022 will be the ones getting squeezed.

To use a close-to-home example, we’re talking about guys like Carter Warren, Gabe Houy, Todd Sibley and anybody else who signed in the class of 2017 - players who were juniors or redshirt juniors in 2020, will be seniors or redshirt seniors in 2021 and will have the option to return in 2022 as “super-seniors.” Every one of those guys who comes back in 2022 will take a spot that could have gone to a recruit, so you can see where the numbers issues are coming from.

And you can see why college coaches are flying somewhat blind when it comes to recruiting the class of 2022. They all probably have some idea of which players would likely return in 2022, and they’ll be able to project their recruiting classes accordingly. But they don’t know for sure, and that leaves a lot up in the air.

With that in mind, let’s get back to the original question:

What will Pitt’s 2022 recruiting class look like? This is relevant since the Panthers added a new commitment from the class last Friday in Elijah Statham, a defensive tackle prospect and the younger brother of Pitt freshman offensive lineman Michael Statham. Elijah Statham was Pitt’s second commitment in the 2022 class, joining Mansfield (Oh.) cornerback Aveon Grose.

So that’s two commits; how many more will there be?

That’s an interesting question, because even before you bring in the “super-senior” factor, Pitt’s 2022 recruiting class was always going to be small. Like I mentioned, the spots for that class will come from the players who were juniors at Pitt in 2020, and that’s not exactly a large group:

Todd Sibley, Shocky Jacques-Louis, Daniel Moraga, Grant Carrigan, Owen Drexel, Gabe Houy, Carson Van Lynn, Carter Warren, Deslin Alexandre, Cam Bright and Kirk Christodoulou

That’s 11 players. Plus Damarri Mathis, who will be a redshirt senior in 2021 and could come back in 2022, but for now, he’ll make that class count 12. If everything was normal, the class of 2022 would probably be somewhere around 16-18 recruits. But the possibility of those guys returning starts dropping the number lower. I don’t think all of them will return, but some will, and in the end, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Pitt sign something like a dozen or maybe 14 recruits that year.

It’s going to be very interesting to watch.

ONE PREDICTION

Pitt will have its most ACC wins since Jamie Dixon left
This prediction hinges on quite a few things. The first is that Pitt actually plays enough games to hit any kind of benchmark. We already talked about all the postponed games, and at this point, I don’t see the Panthers - or any other ACC team - playing a full 20-game conference schedule.

The fewer the games, the fewer the opportunities to stack up wins, so that has to be taken into consideration.

The other caveat in this discussion is that we’re not getting the bar very high. Dixon won 11 ACC games in Pitt’s first season as a conference member, eight the next year and nine in his final season at Pitt. In the four seasons since then, the Panthers have won a combined total of 13 ACC games, posting records of 4-14, 0-18, 3-15 and 6-14.

So if the goal is to get back to outpace those four seasons, then the target is seven, which isn’t very many.

But it’s doable. Here’s Pitt’s remaining schedule as it currently looks:

Vs. Syracuse
Vs. Duke
At Boston College
Vs. North Carolina
Vs. Notre Dame
Vs. Virginia Tech
At Wake Forest
At Louisville
Vs. N.C. State
Vs. Clemson
At Virginia
At N.C. State
Vs. Wake Forest
At Clemson

And then there are games at Duke, at Georgia Tech and home vs. Florida State that were postponed and haven’t been rescheduled. But of the 14 games listed above, I think Pitt should beat Boston College, Notre Dame and Wake Forest for starters. Those three teams are a combined 1-14 in the ACC this year and Pitt has four games total against them.

That should bring the Panthers’ conference record up to six wins. Then there’s N.C. State; the Wolfpack are 2-3 in the conference this year and Pitt will get two shots at them. The Panthers already beat Syracuse on the road, so they should have a good chance against the Orange at home tomorrow. Get two wins out of those three games and now you’re at eight, topping the records of the last four seasons.

I don’t think Pitt should stop there, though. Jeff Capel said it this week: the ACC doesn’t have a clear top dog this season.

“I haven’t seen anyone that’s been dominant like that and you kind of anticipated that with what the league lost. If you look at the players that we lost, you anticipated that, but I think it’s been incredibly competitive. When you look at a team like Wake Forest led Virginia at the half the first time that they played. So I think any given night anyone can beat anyone.”

Louisville is 9-1 overall and 4-0 in the ACC, but Pitt nearly beat the Cardinals before Christmas in a game where neither Justin Champagnie nor Au’Diese Toney played and Jeff Capel wasn’t on the sideline. Get a full roster against Louisville and it would be very interesting to see what could happen. And if these guys really start clicking - by which I mean they keep playing tough defense and rebounding well and then pick it up on offense - then I think they could have those kinds of opportunities against some of the other teams on the schedule.

I don’t know how many games Pitt will ultimately play, but I think the Panthers can legitimately flirt with 10 wins in the ACC. They’ll have to work hard to get there, and it’s not hard to remember what happened against St. Francis. But I think that’s in reach this season.

They just have to get the damn games played.

Advertisement