The Weekly Report 12/8

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.

It is a little late, whatever I’m just the grad assistant but anyways… Pitt did not play this week yet it did provide a rare feeling of giddiness. The recruiting guru Chris Beatty managed to flip Virginia native Naquan Brown from LSU to Pitt. Though it was likely that LSU processed him out, stealing him from schools such as UVA, V Tech, and PSU feels like a big win. With Brown’s commitment, the Panthers grab the # 5,9,14, and 19th ranked recruits out of Virginia in the 2021 class according to Rivals (if you have a problem with either Rivals or 247 grow up, its arbitrary, the people who rank these guys are 35 with wives who participate in MLM schemes). With similar results in the state of Pennsylvania, it seems as if Duzz bought himself some more time. Cheers to a top 20 class and Army Navy being this week.

Unrelated to Pitt, but I went 0 for on my bets this weekend after amassing substantial wealth betting on CBB, I will be posting an update with a link to a GoFundMe page so I can pay my rent, thank you to those with compassion and empathy.

Psych 101

This is a traumatic response. I read about this one in my Intro to Psychology class back in sophomore year, shoutout Prof C. It is not abnormal once someone endures a traumatic event, severe attention deprivation maybe, that a typical response to that event is obsession. This fanbase is seemingly obsessed with acceptance and the attention they feel they have been deprived of.

Honestly, we should all kneel down and pay homage to Notre Dame. Thank you to Notre Dame for bringing the ACC back into relevancy? This borderline group of 5 conference owes everything to the program who drubbed almost every ACC opponent they faced and killed Paris Ford’s career at Pitt (you bastards!). This will be a theme carried on over the next 3 or 4 seasons maybe. Next year when an unranked coastal team meets Clemson in the ACC championship it’ll be “I bet you wish you had another Notre Dame-Clemson matchup in the national championship”. “Look at me! I told you I’m relevant!” At least when the coastal team that falls ass backwards into the ACC championship, they receive the benefit of exposure on the national stage (something that these programs benefit immensely from). I’d rather have another year watching the coastal crapshoot play out instead of having another Notre Dame Clemson championship. I won’t miss Notre Dame when they bounce. I will enjoy the comments that come after their departure. Call me salty, that’s fine. Go back to playing a great(?) Michigan team, Navy, and a Clay Helton led USC team every year. I’ll be relishing in the return of the coastal division, still coming to terms that I’m going to have another year of an offensive coordinator who calls plays like Joe Biden speaks in Public, unaware of his surroundings and unable to form a complete sentence (will you shut up, man).

Weekly Report

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.

Welcome | NDFB Teaser ?

Sorry for the wait. There won’t be much in the way of thematic consistency or journalistic standards at COS, but we’re excited to have you along for our journey to 100,000.

A good place to start is with the NDFB piece so many of you have been asking about. Unfortunately it can’t be published in its entirety until we come to terms with our staff data scientist (you know who you are) – here’s a preview/preamble for now.

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The modern success of Notre Dame’s football program is an anachronism. 

Most of the school’s distinctive features – rural Indiana locale; religious affiliation; academic standards; small student body – are unattractive to high-level high school football players. If you reset college football today, Notre Dame would fall somewhere between Rice and Kansas in the sport’s hierarchy. 

Nevertheless, and by the grace of god, Notre Dame persists as a top football program and, despite recent shortcomings, maintains the capacity to compete with the sport’s elite. This reality is overwhelmingly attributable to its large fanbase. The attention Notre Dame commands from fans across America and the world assures that it plays before packed crowds; demands national telecasts, including a relationship with a broadcaster unlike any other in college football; receives outsize attention from the media, guaranteeing recognition for games and players; and generates revenue sufficient to hire top coaches and build state-of-the-art facilities. This phenomenon is a necessary, if not the essential, condition for recruiting top athletes to South Bend. Other FBS schools offer its academic rigor (think Duke or Northwestern); Catholic identity (Boston College); and charming winters (South Dakota State), but none combine these features in a package that features national relevance. 

But the Irish hegemon is shrinking.

Soft signs indicate a diminishing fanbase. Not long ago, a lottery determined access to Notre Dame Stadium, making it the toughest ticket in the sport. Today, the school no longer even pretends that all of its games are sold out. In games that do fill up, a disturbingly large portion of the stands are painted in opposing colors, with visiting fans drawn to the sport’s greatest museum. Yes, it’s tough to get to South Bend, and game weekends are expensive, and CFB on TV is pretty appealing. But it’s always been tough and expensive to get to South Bend, and high definition TV isn’t exactly stopping Ohio State fans from flocking to the Horseshoe. 

The Irish once commanded the largest TV audiences in the sport; viewership is now declining, despite recent strong seasons. NBC, the Irish patron saint of television, has elected to demote several of Notre Dame broadcasts to its second tier platform, NBSCN, in recent years. And social media presence – an indicator dismissed by some gray hairs, but a crucial reference of influence among both the peers of recruits and the future of college football fans – is lagging.

This could, and should, have been predicted. A private school, it does not attract the loyalty of its surrounding area as effectively as other blue bloods. Notre Dame’s small undergraduate and graduate programs don’t compare to the 12,000 new student-fans Michigan prints annually. Membership in the Catholic Church is declining in America and, even more devastatingly, religiosity is diminishing; young fans won’t tune in to Notre Dame simply because it represents the best of Catholicism like their grandparents did. 

In short, and in order to remain competitive, Notre Dame needs to find more fans.