7/3/2020 football Edit

The 3-2-1 Column: Tight ends, sacks, 2020 football and more

Chris Peak • Panther-lair

Publisher

In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about a new tight end commitment, tight end play this season, local defensive line targets and a lot more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Pitt (finally) gets one
You know the old saying in recruiting:

If you can’t find a tight end in your backyard, go across the country to find a kid from Utah who’s serving a mission in California and hasn’t played football since the fall of 2018.

Classic adage right there.

By now you’ve seen the news that Pitt got a tight end commitment this week. Trey Andersen is the newest member of the Panthers’ 2021 recruiting class; he’s the aforementioned tight end who is originally from Utah but is currently living in California on a mission trip. That mission will end in November, at which point he’ll visit Pitt for the first time and then move to Pittsburgh in January.

It’s an atypical story, to be sure, but Pitt’s tight end recruiting, as you well know, has been anything but typical.

Just in this recruiting class, Pitt has seen one tight end target opt to play basketball while another was high on the Panthers but decided to head to college this summer instead of next; it has just been that kind of year for Pitt with a position that has been a struggle for at least five years, if not more.

But the Panthers got one on Tuesday, and he’s intriguing for more than his unique story. Andersen is 6’6” and 250 pounds, he was a pass-catcher in high school, not just an extra offensive lineman, and he can move pretty well for his size.

I think this is a pretty good pickup for Pitt. The coaches had to go to some extremes to get their first tight end for the class and the actual process of finding Andersen had as much to do with luck and coincidence as anything else, but credit to Tim Salem for being rather tireless in his efforts to land someone at his position. That’s one down with one to go.

Growing concerns
Ah, the ongoing cycle of optimism and its opposite when it comes to the prospects of football in 2020.

Okay, that cycle isn’t limited to sports. It’s in everything. Sure, every day I ask myself multiple times whether or not there will be football this season, but I also ask if my kids will be in school probably even more than I wonder about sports. And my thoughts on those topics never seem to stay in the same place.

Some days I’m feeling pretty confident about what the fall will look like. Other days…not so much. For awhile there, I was grooving on the high end of the cycle; the conversation had turned from adjusting the college football schedule - playing only conference games or things like that - to having a regular schedule with limited capacity.

I can take that. I’ll take 50% or 40% or 30% fans if it means a full 12-game regular season. I’ll take 0% capacity - no fans, no media, just essential personnel like players, coaches, trainers and refs - if it means a full season. That’s fine. And when those different scenarios were being discussed, it gave me hope for the season.

Similarly, when Pitt and other schools started unveiling their plans for the fall, my optimism grew. I’ve said all along that you can’t have college football if you don’t have college, and if you’re not compelling the general student body to be on campus, I think you’d have a hard time compelling the student-athletes to be there.

So as long as Pitt and other schools were laying out plans for having on-campus classes, I was feeling pretty good about the prospects for the fall. The cycle was trending up.

This week, I feel like the cycle is trending down.

Pitt is still working on plans for in-person classes, so that’s good, and the University is doing things like reserving a bunch of hotel rooms to help space out students who live on campus. That’s all very good. Plus, the Chancellor rolled out the various approaches Pitt will take based on changing mandates from the state government.

Like I said, plans are good. Plans point in the right direction.

But there’s still a growing feeling of uneasiness, a sense that the ground is very unstable at this particular moment. There is still a month and a half until the fall semester starts, and it seems like there is a growing shift toward giving students the option on attending classes in-person or not. That worries me, because it’s only a step or two away from full-blown remote instruction.

As for the football team, I think I just get uneasy when I think about the nitty gritty details of how this will actually work in the fall. We won’t have a vaccine for COVID-19 by then, so we’re still going to be in the endless cycle of testing - and believe me, it will be endless. I imagine players will get tested weekly, if not more often, because a positive case has to be identified as soon as possible. A player with a positive test will have to be quarantined immediately, and any players he came into contact with or played against - Pitt players or opponents - will have to be quarantined and tested right away, too.

The potential for a snowball effect is so high it’s scary, and these things, these minutiae and details of how it will really work this fall - these are the things that worry me. Then you add in the fact that it looks like the Ivy League is seriously considering moving the season to the spring, and the anxiety grows because I could see that kind of decision having a domino effect. This is why I feel like we’re in a low point of the cycle of optimism. Or at least I am.

Hopefully by next week we can cycle back up.

A democracy of sacks
This is a revisiting of a topic we have discussed before. The last time it came up, I put it in the “Two Questions” section of the 3-2-1 Column, and the question was something along the lines of, “Can Pitt lead the country in sacks again?”

Well, I did a little more research on the topic, so I thought we’d come back to it.

The last time I discussed this, I pointed out that teams with 50 sacks in 13 games don’t have a great history of repeating. Only four teams hit 50 sacks in a 13-game season from 2006-18, and none of them came close to getting that number the next season.

Texas A&M fell from 51 to 31 from 2011 to 2012. Arizona State dropped from 52 to 44 from 2012 to 2013. Utah had 55 in 2014 and 37 in 2015. And Florida State recorded 51 sacks in 2016 and just 29 in 2017.

Those numbers are troubling and create historical precedent that Pitt would probably prefer to avoid. SMU, too, for that matter, since the Mustangs tied the Panthers with 51 sacks in 2019.

But does the history of those 50-sack teams having a drop-off the next season apply to Pitt? Maybe so, maybe not.

Two of those four teams I mentioned were quite distinct from Pitt in a particular way: they had one player produce a big portion of the team’s sacks. Florida State got 16 sacks from Demarcus Walker in 2016 and Utah got 18.5 sacks from Nate Orchard in 2014. Both Walker and Orchard went to the NFL the following season, and the Seminoles and Utes were unable to replace their production.

But since Pitt’s spread of sacks was a bit more democratic - Jaylen Twyman led the team but only had two more sacks than Patrick Jones, who was second - the situations for FSU and Utah weren’t exactly comparable to Pitt.

Texas A&M in 2011 and Arizona State in 2012 are better comparisons. A&M’s top two leaders in sacks had 9.5 and 8.5; ASU had two players record 10.5. But three of those four players produced fewer sacks the next season, and both teams lost their No. 3 and No. 4 leaders in sacks in the offseason, creating a void that their replacements were unable to fill.

As for Pitt, the Panthers had six players record at least four sacks last season, and five of them are returning to the roster. Plus, Pitt is bringing back Rashad Weaver, who had a team-leading 6.5 sacks in 2018 before missing last season due to injury, and Keyshon Camp, who has some skill as a pass-rushing defensive tackle and also missed last season.

I really think Pitt has as good a shot of repeating in the 50-sack club as any other team that has reached that level in the last 15 years. If nothing else, the Panthers look like they’ve got a better personnel situation entering their follow-up season than any of those other teams did.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

Will Pitt get another tight end?
Picking up the tight end conversation again…

I know beggars can’t be choosers, and right now we should be just enjoying the fact that Pitt finally landed a tight end (albeit in nontraditional fashion). But at the same time, we’ve talked many times about how this recruiting class will be a large one for the Panthers, which means they have the room to take two tight ends.

And the roster could certainly use an influx of talent and depth at the position. Pitt’s 2020 scholarship roster at tight end, as it is currently constructed, looks like this:

Lucas Krull (RS senior)
Daniel Moraga (RS junior)
Kaymar Mimes (RS sophomore)
Kyi Wright (RS freshman)

That’s not much, and it’s not hard to look at that list and say, ‘Hey, they could use another tight end to go with Trey Andersen.’

Of course, deciding to get a second tight end is the easy part; actually getting one is something different altogether.

A quick glance at the offer sheet doesn’t show a lot of obvious options among the tight ends who have offers from Pitt. The Panthers are involved with a number of prospects at the position, but it’s tough to say that they are the favorites for any of them.

There’s Khalil Dinkins at North Allegheny; he would be a great addition as a complementary piece to go with Andersen. There’s Mitchell Evans in Ohio; he’s another big-bodied tight end who has been pretty high on Pitt in the past.

That doesn’t mean they won’t land one of the other targets on the board, but I would imagine that a second tight end in this class will probably be a recruit who doesn’t have an offer from Pitt yet.

Is there an all-western Pa. DL in Pitt’s future?
Keeping up the theme of defensive lines and pass rushers…

I’ve talked before about the 2021 recruiting class locally and how it really looks strong. In particular, the class of defensive linemen in western Pennsylvania might be as good as we’ve seen in a decade or more; I would probably have to go back to the class of 2006 with Jason Pinkston, John Malecki and Justin Hargrove to find a trio that comes close to this year’s group (and two of those three guys ended up on the offensive line in college).

The 2021 trio, of course, is Nahki Johnson from West Mifflin, Elliot Donald from Central Catholic and Dorien Ford from Baldwin. Johnson is already committed to Pitt, as you know, and I’ll say right off the bat that I think he is probably the best of the three. He’s the highest-rated recruit in Pitt’s class so far, and I believe he has earned that ranking. He’s really that good.

But that doesn’t mean Donald and Ford are slouches. They’re really good prospects, too - hence the whole “best DL class in western Pa. since 2006 or longer” theory. The question isn’t about their playing ability; it’s about Pitt’s ability to get Donald and Ford to join Johnson with the Panthers.

Because if Pitt could pull off the sweep and land Johnson, Ford and Donald, there’s a real chance that in three years or so, the Panthers could be sporting an all-western Pa. defensive front. Add those three linemen to go with Dayon Hayes, who signed with Pitt as a four-star defensive end in the 2020 class, and you’ve got it: the all-western Pa. defensive line.

Of course, one of the ends - maybe Elliot Donald - would have to bulk up and move inside to defensive tackle for that to work. And you would also need all four of those guys to stay on the defensive line and not move to offense (like Pinkston, his Baldwin predecessor, Ford could have a future on offense), but western Pa. is in the middle of a really strong two-year stretch of defensive linemen, and Pitt is in unique position to capitalize.

Will it happen? That remains to be seen, but I think the odds are pretty decent. Hayes is already on campus and Johnson is already committed, so the Panthers are halfway there. Donald has been considered a Pitt lean for quite some time and hinted this week that he could be committing sooner rather than later. The biggest wild card, at this point, seems to be Ford; most informed opinions have him staying in-state, but it’s a question of whether he chooses Pitt or Penn State. That one looks like a dead heat right now.

We always talk about how western Pa. doesn’t produce the quantity of talent that it used to turn out, and we often talk about how Pitt has struggled in recent years to land the talent that is present locally. But as we sit here in July 2020, I see the Panthers having a good shot at putting together a little run on local talent at some key positions.

ONE PREDICTION

Krull will catch 35 passes
Going out on a limb here.

Seriously, I am. This is not one of those “this prediction is obvious so I’m going to pretend that it’s not” situations. It really is a bold prediction to claim that Lucas Krull will catch 35 passes this season, and I say that for a few reasons.

The first is Pitt’s recent history with tight ends. Forget the last few seasons when the tight ends have made minimal contributions; you can look beyond that and see that Pitt tight ends haven’t historically been all that productive. For instance, in the last 15 seasons, a Pitt tight end has caught 35 passes or more just twice.

Scott Orndoff made 35 receptions in 2016 and Dorin Dickerson had 49 catches in 2009.

That’s it. And there has only been one other season in the last 15 when a tight end even topped 30; that was Manasseh Garner, who caught 33 in 2013.

In the other 12 of the last 15 seasons, Pitt’s leading receiver among tight ends caught fewer than 30 passes. And in nine of those 12, nobody even topped 25. So it’s not exactly common for a Pitt tight end to get to 35 receptions. That’s the first problem.

The second is Krull’s history. He comes to Pitt after two seasons at Florida that saw him catch just nine passes in 25 games. He would need to quadruple his two-year career production in just one season to get to the number I’m projecting for him.

That’s asking a lot. It’s asking a lot of Pitt’s offense, which hasn’t historically gotten that kind of production out of the tight ends, and it’s asking a lot of Krull, who hasn’t historically had that kind of production.

But I’m sticking with the prediction and I’ll tell you why. Just like the reasons it won’t happen, I have a few thoughts on why it will happen.

The first is Krull himself. No, he doesn’t have much of a resume from his time at Florida. What he does have is a very particular set of - no, stop; I’m not going to do the corny Taken paraphrase. What I will do is point to his size and the fact that he runs really well for a guy who is 6’6”. He can also catch pretty well, which I suspect Pitt fans will appreciate after last season’s issues.

And the mention of last season brings me to my second point on why I think Krull will get to 35 catches. One of the things we know about Mark Whipple from his history is that he is willing to get the tight ends involved.

We saw that last year at Pitt. Say what you will about Nakia Griffin-Stewart and Will Gragg - and there is plenty to say - but they had their opportunities in the passing game. Griffin-Stewart and Gragg were targeted 62 times in 2019, according to Pro Football Focus, more than any other two-man combo at Pitt that didn’t include Maurice Ffrench (123) or Taysir Mack (111 targets). Basically, the priority list went Ffrench->Mack->tight ends, for better or for worse.

And we saw it in Whipple’s time at UMass, too: when he had Adam Brenneman on the roster, the Penn State transfer was heavily involved - 92 targets in 2017, 105 in 2016.

So we know that Whipple wants to use the tight ends and we’ve been told by people close to the program that Krull can excel as a pass-catcher. It’s a leap to assume that he will put up numbers that rival Orndoff in 2016 or Dickerson in 2009, but I’m going to make that leap and say he gets to 35 catches.

And if, by chance, he could get into the end zone a few times - since, you know, Pitt tight ends have scored a total of two touchdowns in the last three seasons - well, that wouldn’t be a bad thing either.