It's been a wild week for Pitt, and we're breaking it all down in this week's 3-2-1 Column.
THREE THINGS WE KNOW
The upside this week
You may have been distracted by other things - off-field things - but Pitt sports had a pretty good week on the field and the court.
Where should we start? I guess we can go in chronological order.
It started Saturday afternoon when the Pitt women’s volleyball team blanked Boston College to claim a share of the ACC championship for the fourth time in the last seven years.
Then came Saturday night, when the Pitt football team closed its regular season with its best performance in more than a year, positively crushing Miami 42-16 for a rare win over the Hurricanes on the road. We’ll talk more about that game in a minute, but that was quite a finish to the season.
Sunday kept up the good vibes when the Pitt men’s soccer team knocked off No. 1 Kentucky in the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Men’s Soccer Championship. The Wildcats were undefeated this season and the No. 1 overall seed in the Tournament, but the Panthers eliminated them with a 2-1 victory.
That same night, the volleyball team received word that it would enter the NCAA Tournament as a No. 2 seed - the Panthers’ highest seed ever.
The momentum didn’t end when the new week began, although its continuation relied on the most unlikely of suspects:
The Pitt men’s basketball team.
The Panthers went to Northwestern Monday night as part of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge. Turns out, that’s going to be the final ACC-Big Ten Challenge, and if that was the last time Pitt plays a game in the event, it was one hell of a way to go out, as the Panthers positively owned. Pitt won by 29, hit 14 three-pointers, assisted on 13 of them and generally ran circles around the Wildcats.
We’ll talk more about that game in a minute, but taken together, that’s one heck of a run. Really, we could back-date it to Friday night, when the Pitt men’s basketball team overcame a slow start to blow past William & Mary at the Petersen Events Center.
So over a four-day period, you had two men’s basketball wins, a football win, a volleyball win and a men’s soccer win. There was a women’s basketball win on Friday night, too, but if we count that, we have to include the two games the Panthers lost over the weekend.
Still, that’s like a 6-2 record in four days, including some downright awe-inspiring performances (football on Saturday, men’s soccer on Sunday, men’s basketball on Monday).
That’s pretty good.
The downside this week
And now to the parts of the week that weren’t so hot.
Like Tuesday. Tuesday wasn’t so hot.
It was kind of a mess actually, as the football team lost two commitments from its 2023 recruiting class: defensive back Brice Pollock and offensive lineman Phillip Daniels.
Pollock and Daniels each had their own reasons for decommitting, and their decisions to leave the class certainly stung. But it wasn’t just Pollock and Daniels that gave Pitt fans chest pains on Tuesday. It wasn’t just those two decisions that created a whole lot of angst and aggravation.
It was Pollock and Daniels following Zion Fowler, who followed Kenny Minchey, who followed Colin Van Rooy, who followed Daidren Zipperer, who followed Shelton Lewis.
Seven in all - seven recruits who were committed to Pitt at one point but now they’re not. Each situation is unique, of course; Minchey heading to Notre Dame or Lewis going to Clemson is not the same as Pitt parting ways with Van Rooy, for example.
But the sum result is hard to ignore: Pitt’s 2023 class has 13 recruits in it, and it’s tough to feel particularly secure about retaining all of that particular baker’s dozen.
So what’s this all about? How did Pitt go from 11 wins and the ACC championship last December to a class ranked outside the top 60 as defections pile up?
The answer, which is always perplexing in this single-serving world of hot takes and hit-and-run pronouncements, is complicated.
For starters, each of those seven recruits left Pitt’s commitment list under different circumstances. I mentioned a few examples above, and it really does apply to the whole group: they all have their own reasons, which doesn’t easily fit into the idea of one big problem being the source of all the strife.
It’s not one thing causing this, and yet, there are some big-picture conclusions to draw. Chief among them:
Recruiting has changed.
Not just for Pitt and not just because of these decommitments. Recruiting has changed significantly in the very recent past. Like, five years or less. Maybe three.
NIL is a factor here. It’s undeniable that a lot of recruitments are being affected by Name, Image and Likeness deals. And I think the transfer portal is having an effect as well. It used to be that a commitment to a school was a four-year decision. You were committing to where you planned to spend the next four years.
Now, it doesn’t feel that way. The next four years are not riding on which school gets a fax from you on Signing Day. Because if you go somewhere for a year or two and it doesn’t work out, you have an escape hatch. A way out. A means to find a new home with the added benefit of knowledge and experience.
And I don’t mean to say this in a disparaging way. NIL and the transfer portal are, in basic principle, welcome developments to college athletics. But the reach of these things goes well beyond getting a car from the local dealership or transferring after three years because you’re down the depth chart.
It’s a different world right now, and schools across the country are scrambling to figure out how to operate and succeed in this new system. It’s not just for Pitt either; schools at all levels, from the elite of the Power Five to the bottom of the FCS are being affected by it.
The schools that will rise from this period of transition, if I’m putting it lightly and trying to avoid the hyperbole of calling it turmoil, will be the ones that can figure out how to navigate this new landscape, who can manage NIL and the transfer portal and a world of college football that is a whole lot closer to the professional game - at least in terms of roster management - than it is to the amateur game all of these coaches grew up with.
Can Pitt adjust to it?
Well dude, we just don't know.
Pitt was the king of the Coastal
The Coastal Division is dead. Long live the Coastal Division.
I’ll wax nostalgic about the Coastal in a minute, but for now, let’s just say it like this:
In a division defined by parity, with every team having about an equal share of 10-win seasons and five-win seasons, Pitt was arguably the King of the Coastal.
How did I come to this conclusion? A few factors.
For starters, there are the championships. Pitt won the Coastal twice, and only one other team did that: North Carolina, who won the division in 2015 and again this year.
Then there’s the ACC Championship. Nobody in the Coastal did that prior to Pitt last year. UNC could match it this year if the Tar Heels beat Clemson in Charlotte next Saturday. If they do pull out that win, we’ll revisit this discussion. But for now, Pitt is the only Coastal team to win the league.
And then there’s the overall records. Since the ACC expanded in 2013, Pitt is 74-54 overall and 48-34 in the ACC. Miami is the only team in the division that can match those numbers; the Hurricanes are 75-51 overall and 48-33 in conference play (Miami only played nine conference games in 2020; Pitt played 10, hence the discrepancy).
That’s one more win for Miami in the overall record and the same number in ACC games. Pitt can match the overall win total in its bowl game, which Miami won’t have a chance to raise since the Hurricanes are staying home this postseason (thanks to Pitt’s win last Saturday night).
So you’ve got Pitt and Miami with almost identical records, and Pitt and North Carolina with an equal number of division titles, as well as a possible tie in conference championships, pending Saturday night’s game.
There’s one other factor to consider, I think. It’s the floor. All three of those teams have shown their ceilings; they each have won at least 10 games once since 2013 (UNC has a chance to do it again this year, either on Saturday night in Charlotte or in a bowl game). And they have each had down years.
For Pitt, it was 2017, when the Panthers went 5-7. For Miami, it’s this year, as the Hurricanes have their own 5-7 record.
For North Carolina, it was 2017 and 2018. The Tar Heels won three games in 2017 and two in 2018 (do yourself a favor and don’t think too much about the one team that contributed two of those five wins).
I guess I would look at that and say, each of those teams has had a peak year or two and each has won a Coastal title or two, but UNC’s floor has been lower than either Pitt or Miami over that span.
Pitt has been consistent since joining the ACC in 2013. And I would say the Panthers have also consistently improved. They went 3-5 in the conference in 2013 but have finished below .500 just once since then.
So you’ve got one team that is tied for most conference wins since 2013, almost tied for most overall wins, has won two Coastal titles and one ACC championship and has never really dipped all that low in the last 10 seasons.
I don’t think it has been a run of domination or anything like that, but I’m calling it:
Pitt was the king of the rebuilt Coastal.
TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE
Was the Coastal bad or fun?
Or was it fun because it was bad?
We can play with semantics here, but let’s face it: Pitt’s nine seasons played as a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference’s Coastal Division made up a chunk of our lives that we’ll never get back - er, I mean, they made up a chunk of our lives that were often frustrating, occasionally satisfying but never all that boring.
Even if Pitt was stuck playing in front of 35,000 people while hosting Duke and Georgia Tech - and even less when the Panthers played those teams on the road - there was always an element of sheer unpredictability when it came to Coastal games.
I think a lot of that comes from the somewhat level playing field of the seven teams that called the division home since the expansion in 2013. There was no Clemson in the Coastal, no Florida State. There’s a Miami, but that’s the 2013-22 Miami, not the 1991-2003 Miami. The Miami that participated in the final incarnation of the Coastal Division went 75-51 over 10 seasons from 2013 to 2022; hardly a run of dominance.
And like I mentioned earlier, that’s pretty much the best overall record in the division since 2013. Miami was 75-51. Pitt was 74-54. Three other teams - North Carolina, Virginia Tech and Duke - each won 64 games or more. The only two teams in the division with an overall losing record since 2013 are Virginia (50-70) and Georgia Tech (56-66).
Duke gets added to the Cavaliers and Yellow Jackets on the list of Coastal teams with losing records in conference play over that span, but the other four teams - Pitt, Virginia Tech, Miami, North Carolina - all won anywhere from 42-48 ACC games.
There was a bottom in the division and it was Virginia, who went 50-70 overall and 28-51 in-conference, but even the Cavs won the Coastal once, as did everyone else.
I guess what I’m saying is, there wasn’t a ton of separation in the Coastal, and the sun shined on all of these dogs’ behinds at least once.
Does that mean the Coastal was bad? Maybe, maybe not. But because all of the teams were right around the same level, because they were bunched up like they were, the division was pretty ridiculous in how competitive it was.
And if you want to tell me the Coastal was the worst division in Power Five, I don’t have a lot of ground to argue on, at least if we’re talking about the entirety of the last 10 seasons. But it was competitive as hell, and I don’t think you could ask for much more than the year-in, year-out changes in the balance of power.
Will we ever see parity - in any sport - like we saw in the Coastal’s different-champ-every-year stretch from 2013-19? I’m guessing not (especially not in college football).
It was something to behold and it was something to enjoy. It was a special little creature in a sport where the split between the Top and the Bottom grows every year toward what feels like an inevitable Next Chapter that might not be too good for a lot of programs.
So let’s pour one out for the Coastal, this odd little club we all belonged to for the last 10 years, and let’s try to keep its faded glory alive in our memories. I don’t know what the next era of college football will look like, but I doubt there will ever be another Coastal.
Can Pitt hoops do that again?
Seemingly lost in all the chaos of football recruiting - and chaos is a good word for it - was a pretty damn fine performance by the Pitt basketball team on Monday night.
Do you remember that it happened?
A brief recap: Pitt crushed Northwestern, a team of questionable overall talent but with a pretty strong resume defensively, by 29 points behind near-perfect execution of offense. The Panthers shot well and passed even better, which likely played a big part in the good shooting.
And they did it all without anything from John Hugley. I mean, at least as far as the box score was concerned, Pitt’s Best Player contributed nothing to the game on Monday night. Of course, he had an impact; any time Hugley is on the court, he’s going to draw attention, and that opens up opportunities for other players.
But even in the second half, when Hugley played just three minutes, Pitt was pretty much unstoppable, scoring 50 points and hitting 8-of-12 three-pointers to embarrass Northwestern on its home court about as bad as West Virginia did to Pitt earlier in the season.
That was a different Pitt team that lost to WVU, though. Hugley didn’t play in that game. That Pitt team wasn’t comfortable together yet. That Pitt team didn’t have the collective confidence that comes from having some success. That Pitt team didn’t understand that, if you dribble into traffic and draw extra defenders, you’ve got shooters on the outside who can knock down shots, so pass to them and get three easy points instead of trying for two tough ones.
The Pitt team that crushed Northwestern got it. So instead of posting seven assists on 20 made field goals like they did against WVU, the Panthers had 22 assists on 26 made baskets Monday night - including 13 assists on 14 three-point shots.
There’s a whole lot to read into that particular stat, and just maybe a few things that might be relevant for the rest of the season.
The big thing that stood out to me was how the players all seemed to buy into the idea of the extra pass. Nelly Cummings, in particular, really was the king of this on Monday night, and all six of his assists were on three-pointers. Some of those were situations where he drove and kicked out to a shooter. But a few more came when he was outside the arc himself, took a pass and then opted to pass again rather than take a shot.
Nike Sibande really stood out on Monday night, too, which makes a pretty nice run of games for the senior guard who seems to be finally coming into his own. He has always had the ability to drive and play in chaos, but he is seeing the court better and turning his penetration into passes.
And for all of these passes, whether they come as an extra pass from Cummings, a kick-out from Sibande, a dish from Hugley when he gets double-teamed or an old-fashioned good pass from Jamarius Burton - they’re all getting converted. Or, at least, a lot of them are.
Because this team can shoot, and it can shoot better than any team Jeff Capel has had at Pitt. It’s really remarkable to watch, because while we know it won’t be there every night, it’s going to be there a lot of nights, and it’s going to help this year’s Panthers win some games.
And when Hugley gets going - and I have no doubt that he will - I have to say, I’m intrigued.
Very intrigued.
ONE PREDICTION
There will be more transfers
Well, if that’s not the most obvious statement of 2022, I don’t know what is. But, as I often do, I’m making an obviously prediction simply as a means to discuss a topic I want to cover in the column but haven’t gotten to yet.
So let’s talk transfers.
As of this writing, Pitt’s got five players in the transfer portal:
WR Jaden Bradley
WR Jaylon Barden
S Judson Tallandier
S Khalil Anderson
DE Sam Williams
The Anderson one stings, because I had high hopes for him coming out of high school. I thought he was going to be a stud in college, but sometimes things don’t work out, and when that happens, the transfer portal provides a chance to look for a new opportunity.
Ultimately, this is what every offseason is going to be like. Pitt had 17 players leave via the transfer portal last year in the wake of an ACC championship. It’s notable that, of those 17, just four went to Power Five schools - Wendell Davis went to Northwestern (and is back in the portal this year as a grad transfer); Cam Bright went to Washington; Davis Beville went to Oklahoma; and there’s one more I am drawing a blank on right now so we’ll just move on, safe in the belief that there were four.
Regardless of the destination, transfers are a part of life. The players understand the situation for what it is, and coaches do, too. College coaches now have to consider the potential of transfers in their roster and scholarship management decisions.
And it works both ways: as coaches try to find that magical number of open scholarships for a given year, not only do they have to consider how many they will lose to the transfer portal - they also have to think about how many they will look to add from that very same portal.
Will Pitt end up with 17 transfers this year like they had last year? I have no idea. My guess is yes; 17 seems like a lot, but when you look at how many players have entered the portal this week alone - there’s really no point in me typing a number here, because it will probably change by the time you read it.
This is the way things work now. Teams will lose players every year, and coaches will have to hope that they don’t lose too many top contributors. For now, Pitt hasn’t really lost any top guys yet (although Bradley and Barden seemed to have unrealized potential); what remains to be seen is if the next 10 guys who transfer will be down-the-depth-chart players who weren’t seeing playing time, or if they’re prominent pieces on the roster.
