Watson's challenge

When Shawn Watson was hired to be Pitt’s offensive coordinator in January 2017, he took over an offense that had produced at record levels the previous season.

In 2016, Pitt had been phenomenally productive, averaging a school-record 40.9 points per game. A year later, the production fell off considerably, as the Panthers averaged more than two touchdowns less per game. In fact, the 23.9 points per game average from 2017 wasn’t just a drop-off from 2016; it was the lowest scoring average for a Pitt team since the 2007 squad that averaged 22.8.

How did the Panthers’ offense fall off a 17-point cliff from one season to the next?

There were certainly personnel turnover to consider. In 2016, Pitt had a redshirt senior returning starter at quarterback in Nate Peterman; two seniors among four returning starters on the offensive line; and a future NFL running back playing his fourth season of college ball.

In 2017, the quarterback, the two seniors on the offensive line and the running back (not to mention the tight end) were all gone. So, too, was the production from Jester Weah, Quadree Henderson and George Aston; those three combined for 30 touchdowns in 2016.

Last season, they scored six.

Of the various reasons for the fall in Pitt’s offense, Henderson is particularly notable. He was a breakout star in 2016, a return specialist who exploded in a jet-sweep package and finished the season as Pitt’s second leading rusher with 631 yards and five touchdowns on the ground.

As much as any individual player, Henderson personified the success, explosiveness and unpredictability of Matt Canada’s offense. The coordinator, who left for LSU after one year at Pitt, mastered the art of deceiving defenses, and Henderson averaged more than 10 yards per rushing attempt as a result.

So when Watson arrived, he was hoping to do the same thing - or at least build on what Canada had accomplished with the 2016 offense. Henderson averaged seven yards per rushing attempt but didn’t have a run longer than 26 yards and never reached the end zone.

“We were trying to do it,” Watson said recently. “We wanted to keep that element in the offense. How much? Really, honestly, that always depends on if it’s available. After a year and the success of that 2016 season, everybody kind of figured out - they started researching it and it’s become a little more prevalent, like even NFL teams are running it. So there are starting to become some answers for it.

“As the season went on, we always would continue to carry some elements of it, but sometimes we would just be running a zone and not running it; it would just be a mask for the regular zone. We kind of evolved because of what defenses were doing as the season went on.”

Head coach Pat Narduzzi thinks there was a turning point in how the offense was operated.

“I think it’s just trying to find out where you are, personnel-wise, and what you do well,” Narduzzi said Wednesday. “I think when we went down to Duke, we kind of found out who we were last season.”

That Duke game - a 24-17 Pitt win in Durham in Week Eight - was highlighted by a breakout performance from Darrin Hall, who rushed for 254 yards and three touchdowns. Hall put up at least 100 yards in each of the next two games, and Pitt’s offense as a whole followed suit: in the final five games of the season, the Panthers rushed for 986 yards, an average of 197.2 yards per game.

For comparison, they had just 796 yards on the ground through the previous seven contests. And while Hall provided the bulk of those 986 yards in the final five games - he had 486 in three games alone - Pitt still managed to put up 152 rushing yards in the finale against a Miami defense that had held its previous three opponents to a combined total of 266 yards on the ground.

If something did change in Pitt’s offense, then the key for Watson in his second year at Pitt is finding a way to replicate the late-2017 production better than he did the production from 2016. Hall is back in the offense for his senior season, as is redshirt senior Qadree Ollison and second-year players Todd Sibley and AJ Davis.

Plus, Pitt added another piece to the offense this season who Watson thinks can help in line coach Dave Borbely. Watson and Borbely worked together at Colorado from 2000-05 and Louisville from 2011-13, and Watson has mentioned Borbely’s addition as a positive for the offense from a strategic perspective as well as the coaching he will provide to the line.

“Dave Borbely has been a big part of my career as a line coach; he and I think a lot alike in a lot of different ways, so we’ll be able to expand on - not giving away any family secrets - we’ll be able to expand on what we’ve done here, for example the jet game, and kind of add our twist to it.”

Whether that means Pitt’s offense in 2018 will look like 2016, late 2017 or, in the worst case scenario, early 2017 remains to be seen.

“I think every offensive coordinator or defensive coordinator, for that matter, has got to put his stamp on what we do,” Narduzzi said. “We’ve got some adjustments this year, but we’re going to continue to do what’s going to help us against a certain defense. It’s not necessarily what you want to do, but sometimes what an offense or defense will give you.”