Per the terms of my employment and at the request of the head coach, I am required to generate a weekly report regarding the state of the program as a whole. This is my unedited and unqualified analysis of the University of Pittsburgh’s football program.
There are certain liberties taken when observing and projecting a program. It is not until you find yourself inside a program that you realize running a successful college football team is more of a daunting task than most would believe. After six years at the helm, it would be easy to believe that a program’s trajectory is, at the bare minimum, due to trend upward. This line of thinking is for those not entirely familiar with the sport of college football. In order for such things to occur, consistent recruiting at a high level must be the priority. Even when these recruits arrive on campus, convincing the recruits that committed to the program to play for the team can be considered an even bigger task. How does a coach tell his star player in the middle of the season after a string of embarrassing losses that there are 4 games left to play? This question is not rhetorical as in my time of employment I have not seen it effectively executed yet. Pat Narduzzi has undoubtedly been able to develop recruits that were not highly coveted into the stars of teams that win 6-8 games a year. This develop is surely a testament to his abilities as a head coach. For those tired of waiting for success, just wait till Mark Whipple has his guys in his system as we waited for Pat Narduzzi’s guys to fit in his defensive scheme. Surely as we have seen in his tenure there is no reason to doubt that this wait is worth it.
Coaching staff is yet another task that seems to be scrutinized unfairly. In a league where the young minds of the sport are at the forefront of innovation and constantly evolving, finding the next Lincoln Riley is incredibly difficult. It is hard to blame a coaching staff to find comfort in an archaic offense that does not play to the strengths of its offense and can be easily diagnosed by opposing defenses because its simple and easy to learn for young players. The offense of Shawn Watson could not have succeeded and the blame does not fall on the staff or the players. The game just evolves too fast for people to change. Only those entirely competent are able to see where the sport is trending towards. Even after the aforementioned disaster it is easy to look towards a young offensive mind begging to bring their offense to the power 5 stage. Rather than taking a chance, bringing in a former head coach, who could not take a UMass team to more than a 4 win season in his second go around, who arguably reached his offensive prime when his current players were conceived, brought an element of predictability which the program was in need of. Flipping an offense which had been recruited to play the opposite of what is asked of them, is a task even the greats would struggle with. It is not reasonable to believe that the offensive should be responsible for a smooth transition into their offensive scheme. It is reasonable to believe that sometimes genius’s miss. Objectively, that is what Pitt has in Mark Whipple. A man so dedicated to his craft that his refusal to change his scheme reinforces the idea of sticking to your guns, a way of thinking long gone in college football. Pitt’s future remains in the revival of the offense which was incredibly successful in the years 2000 and 2001, it’s only a matter of time before Pitt sees that success in the upcoming 2020 decade.
This brings me to what happened to the Pitt Panthers on Saturday. This was not a winnable game. Clemson has done everything right for the past decade. It is undeniably hard to replicate that. You can’t keep a promising young couch at a middle of the pack ACC team and turn that program into a consistent National Contender. It is just not possible. Pitt did not have the players nor the scheme to take down a titan. This loss puts the most talented Pitt football team sitting at a familiar .500 on the year. So when a fan, a player, Heather Lyke, or the team’s only donor Aaron Donald asks themselves, is a completely inept coaching staff? Just know, that isn’t the case, it’s an instance where College Football forgot to tell Pat Narduzzi it was changing. Blame it on the warning signs that weren’t loud enough. Rest assured, an inexplicably underwhelming season will not offer the program any answers other than, why us?
This has been The Grad Assistant’s weekly report.