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In this week’s 3-2-1 Colum we’re talking about Pitt's big official visit weekend, the WPIAL and more.
THREE THINGS WE KNOW
The storm is coming
So, it should be a nice quiet Father’s Day this weekend, right? Nothing much happening as we move through June into the truly dead month of July before August training camp. Yep, a nice quiet weekend coming up; looks like we’ll have to dig deep and get creative in coming up with fresh content.
Wait. What’s the date for this weekend?
June 14?
Oh, hell.
To quote the song, it’s going down. For real.
In case you don’t follow Pitt recruiting all that closely, we are on the precipice of Pat Narduzzi’s second annual visit-palooza. Yes, I know it’s a tired cliché to use -palooza, but I don’t have time to invent some new way of describing an event of outsized proportions, because this weekend is the Big Visit Weekend.
The template was created last year, when Narduzzi and company hosted 18 recruits in one weekend and landed commitments from nearly half of them before they left campus (nine of those 18 would ultimately sign with Pitt). I didn’t think we’d ever see anything like that again; it was a supernova of recruiting, an astronomical event so unprecedented that it couldn’t possibly be topped or even approached in future years.
That sentiment lasted about 12 months, because the Pitt coaches are about to top themselves with more than 20 recruits expected on campus for official visits this weekend.
It’s a wild number - 22, at last count - and one that pushes the boundaries of what can actually be accomplished on official visits. Individual attention is a big component of a successful official visit, as the coaches try to convince the recruit and his parents or guardians that the young man will be taken care of during his years at the university.
Conveying that point takes direct contact, not just between the parents and coaches but also academic advisors and tutors and professors and other leaders the players will come in contact with and rely on while they’re in college.
With a group this big, it’s really, really hard to get that individualized. It also requires a ton of organizational and logistical planning. Graham Wilbert and Karlo Zovko and the rest of the recruiting staff have to have this weekend planned down to the minute so that everything runs smoothly and everybody gets the time they need with the various coaches and advisors and other Pitt representatives.
I don’t envy that job. It’s all I can do to get a kindergartener ready for school.
But all of those headaches are for Pitt to manage. For those of us out here - media and fans - this weekend is about the buildup to Sunday. Because while there are no guarantees in life, let alone recruiting, it’s also highly, highly unlikely that all 22 visitors head to the airport uncommitted. Some of them will commit; it’s virtually inevitable. And if it’s anything like last year, once the ball gets rolling, look out.
That’s probably the biggest upside of taking the shop-in-bulk approach to the official visit weekend. Aside from the fact that bringing in a ton of kids increases the probability of landing commitments, you’re also upping the possibility of momentum. These visitors will bond with each other during the visit; they’ll talk, they’ll have fun and, most importantly, they’ll be thinking about Pitt together.
That last word is key: together. They’ll be talking to each other about Pitt and about what they think of Pitt and about playing at Pitt, and that kind of thing can snowball. It did last year, and I’m not betting against it happening again this year.
An important element
I’ve written about this before, but I think it’s important for understanding how the official visit weekend can be successful.
The Pitt coaches obviously need to do a great job making the case for why these recruits can benefit from being Panthers. The Pitt recruiting staff obviously needs to do a great job of making sure the recruits see everything they need to see and do everything they need to do. And the various advisors and tutors and Life Skills workers all obviously need to do a great job of showing the recruits how they’ll become well-rounded, ready-for-life individuals at Pitt and not just football players.
All of that needs to happen. But there’s one more piece to the puzzle that can really set the whole thing off:
The players on the team.
When I caught up with some of the guys who were part of last year’s big official visit weekend, they talked about a lot of things that led them to commit to Pitt. But one that really stood out was the players on the team. When the recruits were in town, they felt like they were part of the team already, and that’s entirely a credit to the players.
For as much as the coaches work to foster a “family” environment, it’s the players on the team who truly make up the family, and their words and actions can go a long way in making the recruits feel like they really are part of the family.
And that’s what official visits really come down to: the goal is to make a recruit feel so comfortable, so “part of the family” and so “at home” that by the end of the weekend, they can’t imagine going anywhere else.
Like Brandon Hill said of last year’s visit weekend:
“For me, it was the feel..I just felt like I was at home. It felt like the place where I could be my best. It was really just the feel, the atmosphere. I didn’t need to take any more visits because I saw what I needed to see.”
Or like Daniel Carter said about that same weekend:
“I had other offers but I don’t think anything could compare to that weekend we had in Pittsburgh.”
It wasn’t the Primanti’s sandwiches or the museums or the bridges or even the entrance to the city from the Fort Pitt Tunnel that Carter was talking about; he was talking about the same thing Hill was talking about: the feel.
And the feel comes from what it’s like to actually be on campus. The visits are a chance for the recruits to experience life as a player, and who better to show that experience than the players themselves?
So those guys will be crucially important.
Also important: Michael Statham, Jaylon Barden and Sam Williams.
Also known as, Pitt’s three commitments for the class of 2020.
All three of those guys will be on campus this weekend for their official visits, too, and if all goes as planned, they’ll serve as extra recruiters, further driving home the point:
“Come join us and help win ACC championships.”
There’s something to be said for having a peer tell you, “Look, I had other options” - and these three commits did have other options - “But this is where I’m going and I want you to come here, too.”
That can create some momentum, too.
A few players worth noting
There are a lot of players on the team who do some good work in recruiting. The coaches will usually pick player hosts for the recruits based on position or, more often, geographic point of origin.
Create a connection that way, and it goes a long way in establishing that home/family feeling we talked about. That’s a big part of any official visit experience.
But in a broader sense, I think there are a few guys who have a bit more prominent of a role. Kenny Pickett, of course; he’s the quarterback, and that’s always going to elevate his position.
Damar Hamlin, though, can be a pretty big factor in recruiting. I think he’s had kids locally looking up to him since he was in high school, whether it was his play at Central Catholic or his exploits on the seven-on-seven scene. Now, as he has found success at Pitt, I think his stature has only grown. So it’s a big deal when he shows up at something like the NFBD all-star game earlier this month - an all-star game featuring all players from Pittsburgh and western Pa.
Hamlin is a celebrity among youth football players in western Pa., but more relevantly, he’s a role model.
His spot could be surpassed by someone else this year, though:
Paris Ford.
If Paris Ford has the kind of year a lot of people expect him to have - and hope he will have - he could explode as a factor in Pitt recruiting. I really believe that a breakout season from Ford can have a positive impact on the Panthers’ recruiting efforts locally. It may not fully bridge the gap (or mend the fence, as it were) that exists for Pitt in local recruiting, but it can go a long way.
That duo of Hamlin and Ford could be really strong on the field and even stronger off it. Pitt’s been getting more contributions from local products than a lot of people will acknowledge, but if 2019 is the year of the Hamlin and Ford show in the secondary, it will be the kind of thing Pitt can put on billboards.
And I think that a lot of local recruits will respond to it.
TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE
Where are the locals?
So it’s a big official visit weekend and, like we said, that means Pitt foots the bill for travel. But Pitt won’t be saving on those travel costs, because just about every one of those recruits will need a plane ticket (save for maybe a few of the kids from Ohio).
What I’m getting at, of course, is the WPIAL. As in, there aren’t any WPIAL recruits scheduled to visit this weekend.
That’s not entirely surprising. Last year’s big June official visit weekend didn’t have any WPIAL recruits either. In fact, both of these big June visit weekends - last year and this year - have been missing not just WPIAL recruits but any recruits from Pennsylvania.
18 kids visited last year and 12 of them were from Florida with the other six spread over New Jersey, Maryland, South Carolina and Alabama.
This year, we’re expecting 22 visitors - that’s our current list, which is subject to change but probably pretty accurate - and once again, Pennsylvania is absent. Instead, Pitt will be hosting six from Ohio, five from Florida, four from Georgia, three from Michigan and one each from New York, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey.
That’s quite a spread and somewhat reflective of how Pitt is recruiting these days: heavy presence in Florida, somewhat-less-heavy-but-not-by-much in Georgia and then reaching through Maryland, New Jersey and Virginia for whatever the Panthers can grab. The half-dozen from Ohio is a bit higher than I would have expected, but that’s more than 20% of the total recruits has offered from the state in this class, so that’s a decent pull for the weekend.
In a number of ways, it makes sense to approach the official visit weekend like this, targeting out-of-staters for a visit and building the weekend around guys who might not have come to town on an unofficial visit.
That’s the course of the recruiting cycle: a lot of kids commit in June and July and August, and if you are a coach and one of your top targets is planning to commit before his senior season, then you want to do everything you can to recruit them prior to that decision. Now that the NCAA allows for official visits in the spring/early summer, that pre-commitment pursuit includes hosting them for a weekend.
So the makeup of this official visit weekend is understandable, but still, the numbers stand out: between last year’s big visit weekend and this year’s big visit weekend, Pitt will have hosted 40 recruits for official visits and every single one has been an out-of-state prospect.
Maybe we’ll have to play the hometown game and start referring to 2020 offensive line recruit Michael Statham as a Philly native, even though he’s playing in Maryland at IMG-of-the-north St. Frances.
In the meantime, Pitt will have Woodland Hills tight end Josh Rawlings on campus next weekend and they’ll keep working to get Westinghouse defensive end Dayon Hayes in as well. But the June focus will be what it was last year: out of state.
Why doesn’t this get mentioned?
It’s funny: people talk a lot about Pitt and the WPIAL and Pitt not respecting the WPIAL enough and the WPIAL not respecting Pitt enough and Pitt not playing the WPIAL kids and WPIAL kids not looking at Pitt and on and on and on.
It almost gets to the point where you wish that either Pitt would stop recruiting the WPIAL or - and this is the real solution - people would stop talking about it so much.
Anyway, lost in all the talk about Pitt and WPIAL is this little detail that doesn’t seem to get talked about enough:
Pitt had a ton of WPIAL kids playing on defense last year.
Damar Hamlin. Dane Jackson. Dennis Briggs. Elijah Zeise. Seun Idowu. Quintin Wirginis. All full-season starters (or half-season, in the case of Wirginis, who got hurt) and all from the WPIAL.
I know Pitt tries to push the WPIAL-to-Pitt success stories (I think “WPIAL Wednesday” is what they call it) and the coaches try to emphasize the idea of being a hometown hero. But outside the walls of the South Side facility, it seems like the perception is different.
Out in the community, it seems like Pitt is either too late to offer a local prospect or, if they offer early, they don’t show enough love or, if they offer early and show enough love, they’re not going to use them at the right position or, if they offer early and they show enough love and they are going to use them at the right position, they’re failing by not offering other WPIAL targets who are friends with the targets they are pursuing.
That list could keep going. And at some point, it’s going to include “all the WPIAL kids who go to Pitt but don’t play,” of which there are…some?
On Pitt’s spring roster, I count 17 WPIAL/City League players. Of those 17, five were true freshmen last year. Of the other 12, six started at least one game (including long-snapper Cal Adomitis). Of the remaining six, one made a game-clinching play against Syracuse (Therran Coleman), two are in line for starting positions this year (Paris Ford and Gabe Houy), one will likely have a role in the offense (Jim Medure) and the other two (Brandon Ford and Rashad Wheeler) will be on the depth chart, at the very least.
I don’t know, it kind of sounds like the WPIAL kids are playing and contributing. At a rate that approaches 100%.
JUST ONE MORE THING
Actually, a few more on the official visits…
- Pitt got nine commitments from last year’s big official visit weekend, but not all nine commitments came from recruits who were in town for official visits. Eight of the visitors committed and then commitment No. 9 came Sunday night from Brandon George, who was not visiting.
- Pitt signed nine of the recruits who visited that weekend, but not all nine committed then. Jason Collier left town uncommitted and didn’t make the call until a week later, after he took an official visit to the University of Virginia. And Daniel Carter played his recruitment out until December, when he finally committed during the ACC Championship Game.
- Davis Beville gets a lot of the credit for being the recruit that got the commitment rush going last year, but while it’s true that he was the first commitment on Sunday morning, defensive tackle Calijah Kancey was actually the first one; he opted not to wait until the final day of the visit and committed Saturday night.
- Even Kancey wasn’t the first official visitor to commit in the 2019 class, though. He and Beville and the rest of the 18 visitors arrived in town on Friday, shortly after JUCO tight end Travis Koontz wrapped up his own official visit with a commitment. Koontz would later decommit, as we all know, but he started what turned into a run of 10 commitments over three days.
- The momentum carried into the week, too. Bam Brima committed on Tuesday. Kyi Wright committed on Thursday. And then Collier capped it with his commitment. Throw in Leslie Smith pulling the trigger the week before the official visit, and you saw Pitt close out June with 14 verbal pledges for the class.
- You may recall there was considerable teeth-gnashing as Pitt went into the month of June without any commitments, which was rather unprecedented. Well, one unprecedented event merited a few more it seems. The staff turned the fruitless spring into a legendary June.
- Of course, the big question is, what commitments will Pitt get this year? There will certainly be some on Sunday (much to my family’s chagrin as they try to plan Father’s Day gatherings: “Oh, don’t mind Chris; he’s just upstairs on the phone with high school kids”) but predicting them is rather tough. I think we could have predicted a few of the commitments last year; Davis Beville seemed pretty likely to pull the trigger, and I think Vincent Davis was probable as well.
Some guys, like Calijah Kancey, we didn’t know enough about to make a prediction; others like Brandon Mack and Khadry Jackson and Brandon Hill had plans for future official visits and seemed unlikely to pull the trigger. So there were a lot of surprises, and as I look at the list for this weekend’s visits, I can’t say that anyone jumps out as an obvious option.
As I mentioned above, I think it will help to have the three commits - Jaylon Barden, Michael Statham and Sam Williams - on campus; they can do some of the recruiting work and help make the uncommitted guys feel like they’re part of something, like they have bonds with the other players. All of that works toward that No. 1 goal:
Making the recruits feel like Pitt is home.
We’ll see how many feel that way this weekend.
