I probably put too much in here, but there's a lot to talk about on this particular Monday morning.
1. A fitting end
Well, that’s about as good a finish to the season as you could have asked for. I mean, what’s better than playing the absolute best game of the season, with incredibly strong play on both sides of the ball, and beating a team you almost never beat in a venue where you almost never win? It truly was a perfect ending to the regular season. Finally, after 11 games over the last three months, Pitt’s offense achieved actual balance: 248 rushing yards, 256 passing yards, three rushing touchdowns, three passing touchdowns. Perfection. Meanwhile, the defense just kept dominating, which has been the theme this month. More on that in a minute, but, yeah, that was what you wanted to see from the end of the season.
2. Strong finishers
In eight years at Pitt, Pat Narduzzi’s teams have gone 5-3 in regular-season finales. Pitt has beaten Syracuse in 2016, Miami in 2017, Georgia Tech in 2020, Syracuse in 2021 and now Miami in 2022. What’s particularly interesting there is that the Panthers have won three season finales in a row. Yes, we can get in the weeds about the level of competition faced, but I think we can take the broad-brush approach and say that Narduzzi’s teams have done a good job of not quitting late in the year and finishing strong.
3. November to remember
Do we have to credit Pat Narduzzi for that phrase? It does rhyme, and it certainly sounds better than October to forgetober.
Anyway, you’ve seen the stat: Pitt is a perfect 8-0 in November games over the last two seasons and has just one loss in November since the 2020 season. Pitt actually had one-loss Novembers in 2016 and 2018, too, so it’s not entirely a new phenomenon. But winning every game in November the last two years is really impressive.
Curiously, those eight wins include two victories each over Duke, Syracuse and Virginia, plus one extra win over North Carolina last year and Miami this year.
4. Fare thee well
With the end of last night’s game, we bid a fond farewell to the Coastal Division. That was the last divisional game played in this era of the ACC, as the conference will go to a single-division format starting next season. The Coastal was a beautiful beast, mocked for its mediocrity and put to shame for its parity. And yet, there was something special about the Coastal. Maybe all seven teams were pretty firmly in the range of winning five-to-eight games every year, led by that one team that pushed above eight wins to get the honor of being fed to Clemson in the ACC Championship Game.
But the parity really was pretty great. Anybody could win the Coastal in any given year. Think about Pitt in 2018 or Pitt (again) in 2021. Every outcome was improbable, which tends to happen when you keep predicting the same team will win every year.
5. Perception vs. reality, pt. 1
I’m not joking about the media picking the same team to win the Coastal every year. There was a variety of different preseason No. 1 picks, but there was one common theme: Miami. In the nine seasons of the division since it expanded in 2013 - there was no division in 2020 - the Hurricanes were picked to win the Coastal five times and they were picked to finish second three other times. Only one preseason poll - 2015 - didn’t have Miami picked to finish first or second.
Of course, the Hurricanes only won the division one time. That was 2017, and you probably remember how that regular season ended.
6. Perception vs. reality, pt. 2
In the nine seasons since the Coastal expanded (again, there was no Coastal in 2020), the preseason favorite won the division just twice: Miami in 2017 and Virginia in 2019. In the other seven preseason polls, the eventual Coastal champ wasn’t picked to finish in the top two at all.
You might say that’s an example of how sportswriters don’t really know what they’re talking about, and while I am inclined to agree on the premise, I would say it’s more a byproduct of this glorious division being incredibly unpredictable.
Who’s going to be good in a given year? Who’s going to be bad? It was always pretty tough to know heading into a season. Shoot, there were plenty of times in the middle of a season when we really didn’t know which Coastal teams were good and which were bad.
I liked that about the Coastal. I liked the unpredictability. You might say it was a mediocre division, but if all the teams are the same level of mediocre, then you end up with a pretty entertaining product.
7. The new ACC
Now we move into the single-division future of the ACC. Or the no-division future. Everybody’s in this thing together, and the top two teams go to the conference title game. I’ve pointed out before that, in most seasons since 2013, a single-division format would have produced the same two title contenders as the two-division format did, despite contentions that Clemson and Florida State would have played for the championship every year if not for the pesky Coastal needing to get its own champ into the game. It will still come down to winning the games on your schedule, and with Syracuse, Boston College and Virginia Tech as annual opponents, Pitt should have a chance to play itself into contention most years.
8. The 2023 schedule
Pitt’s first run through the new ACC will have those three teams (Boston College at home; Syracuse and Virginia Tech on the road) in addition to home games against Florida State, Louisville and North Carolina and road trips to Duke and Wake Forest. That’s in addition to home games against Cincinnati and Wofford and road games at West Virginia and Notre Dame. What will be interesting to watch is how the first week of the season gets scheduled; the Cincinnati game is on the books for Sept. 9 and the WVU game is the next week, leaving the first and last weeks of September open. Wofford would be a candidate for the opening weekend, but the Terriers are already booked for a trip to Clemson that day, so it seems like they’ll slot into the final weekend of September (following the last few seasons’ model of ending September with an FCS opponent). Notre Dame also has games scheduled for Aug. 26 and Sept. 2, which means you’re looking at opening the season against an ACC team. But every conference team on Pitt’s 2023 schedule already has something scheduled for the opening weekend, so I’m not sure how that’s going to break. Florida State, Louisville and North Carolina have Power Five opponents lined up for the opening weekend, so those games aren’t getting dropped. I guess that means Duke (at UConn), Syracuse (Colgate), Virginia Tech (Old Dominion), Wake Forest (Elon) or Boston College (Northern Illinois) will have to find a way out of their opening games. A quick glance at fbschedules.com seems to indicate that Elon has openings in its September schedule, so maybe that game gets moved and Pitt opens the 2023 season at Wake Forest. We’ll see.
UPDATE: I'm actually hearing that Pitt-Wofford will probably be the first week of the season, and the Clemson-Wofford game will get rescheduled or canceled altogether.
9. A fine finish
Okay, let’s get back to Pitt’s 2022 season, and let’s talk about the quarterback. I said way back in August that the play at quarterback would be the biggest factor in determining whether the Panthers went back to Charlotte or back to eight wins. They’re at eight wins, and I think that reflects pretty directly on the quarterback, in particular, and the offense overall. But I’ll say this for Kedon Slovis: he threw three touchdown passes in the loss to Georgia Tech, with two of them coming in more-or-less garbage time. Then he went four games without throwing a touchdown, only to finish with five in the final three games - including three in the win at Miami. Throwing just 10 touchdown passes in a season is pretty bad, but getting half of those in the final three games is an encouraging finish.
10. The playmaker
I used to call Jared Wayne a possession receiver, and I said that in the fondest way possible. But he has definitely changed the game this season. Or, put another way, he has changed his game. Or maybe he just has had an opportunity to expand his game, and it sure was expanded. 55 catches, 1,006 yards, five touchdowns. Career highs in receptions and yards, and only shy of matching his career high in touchdowns (he caught six last year). According to Pro Football Focus, he also set career highs in yards after the catch, average depth of target, long reception, contested catches and first downs gained. He was eighth in the ACC in receptions and receiving touchdowns but third in yards and yards per reception and second in yards per game. He was, quite legitimately, one of the best receivers in the conference this year, and he should be recognized as such in the postseason awards.
Continued...
1. A fitting end
Well, that’s about as good a finish to the season as you could have asked for. I mean, what’s better than playing the absolute best game of the season, with incredibly strong play on both sides of the ball, and beating a team you almost never beat in a venue where you almost never win? It truly was a perfect ending to the regular season. Finally, after 11 games over the last three months, Pitt’s offense achieved actual balance: 248 rushing yards, 256 passing yards, three rushing touchdowns, three passing touchdowns. Perfection. Meanwhile, the defense just kept dominating, which has been the theme this month. More on that in a minute, but, yeah, that was what you wanted to see from the end of the season.
2. Strong finishers
In eight years at Pitt, Pat Narduzzi’s teams have gone 5-3 in regular-season finales. Pitt has beaten Syracuse in 2016, Miami in 2017, Georgia Tech in 2020, Syracuse in 2021 and now Miami in 2022. What’s particularly interesting there is that the Panthers have won three season finales in a row. Yes, we can get in the weeds about the level of competition faced, but I think we can take the broad-brush approach and say that Narduzzi’s teams have done a good job of not quitting late in the year and finishing strong.
3. November to remember
Do we have to credit Pat Narduzzi for that phrase? It does rhyme, and it certainly sounds better than October to forgetober.
Anyway, you’ve seen the stat: Pitt is a perfect 8-0 in November games over the last two seasons and has just one loss in November since the 2020 season. Pitt actually had one-loss Novembers in 2016 and 2018, too, so it’s not entirely a new phenomenon. But winning every game in November the last two years is really impressive.
Curiously, those eight wins include two victories each over Duke, Syracuse and Virginia, plus one extra win over North Carolina last year and Miami this year.
4. Fare thee well
With the end of last night’s game, we bid a fond farewell to the Coastal Division. That was the last divisional game played in this era of the ACC, as the conference will go to a single-division format starting next season. The Coastal was a beautiful beast, mocked for its mediocrity and put to shame for its parity. And yet, there was something special about the Coastal. Maybe all seven teams were pretty firmly in the range of winning five-to-eight games every year, led by that one team that pushed above eight wins to get the honor of being fed to Clemson in the ACC Championship Game.
But the parity really was pretty great. Anybody could win the Coastal in any given year. Think about Pitt in 2018 or Pitt (again) in 2021. Every outcome was improbable, which tends to happen when you keep predicting the same team will win every year.
5. Perception vs. reality, pt. 1
I’m not joking about the media picking the same team to win the Coastal every year. There was a variety of different preseason No. 1 picks, but there was one common theme: Miami. In the nine seasons of the division since it expanded in 2013 - there was no division in 2020 - the Hurricanes were picked to win the Coastal five times and they were picked to finish second three other times. Only one preseason poll - 2015 - didn’t have Miami picked to finish first or second.
Of course, the Hurricanes only won the division one time. That was 2017, and you probably remember how that regular season ended.
6. Perception vs. reality, pt. 2
In the nine seasons since the Coastal expanded (again, there was no Coastal in 2020), the preseason favorite won the division just twice: Miami in 2017 and Virginia in 2019. In the other seven preseason polls, the eventual Coastal champ wasn’t picked to finish in the top two at all.
You might say that’s an example of how sportswriters don’t really know what they’re talking about, and while I am inclined to agree on the premise, I would say it’s more a byproduct of this glorious division being incredibly unpredictable.
Who’s going to be good in a given year? Who’s going to be bad? It was always pretty tough to know heading into a season. Shoot, there were plenty of times in the middle of a season when we really didn’t know which Coastal teams were good and which were bad.
I liked that about the Coastal. I liked the unpredictability. You might say it was a mediocre division, but if all the teams are the same level of mediocre, then you end up with a pretty entertaining product.
7. The new ACC
Now we move into the single-division future of the ACC. Or the no-division future. Everybody’s in this thing together, and the top two teams go to the conference title game. I’ve pointed out before that, in most seasons since 2013, a single-division format would have produced the same two title contenders as the two-division format did, despite contentions that Clemson and Florida State would have played for the championship every year if not for the pesky Coastal needing to get its own champ into the game. It will still come down to winning the games on your schedule, and with Syracuse, Boston College and Virginia Tech as annual opponents, Pitt should have a chance to play itself into contention most years.
8. The 2023 schedule
Pitt’s first run through the new ACC will have those three teams (Boston College at home; Syracuse and Virginia Tech on the road) in addition to home games against Florida State, Louisville and North Carolina and road trips to Duke and Wake Forest. That’s in addition to home games against Cincinnati and Wofford and road games at West Virginia and Notre Dame. What will be interesting to watch is how the first week of the season gets scheduled; the Cincinnati game is on the books for Sept. 9 and the WVU game is the next week, leaving the first and last weeks of September open. Wofford would be a candidate for the opening weekend, but the Terriers are already booked for a trip to Clemson that day, so it seems like they’ll slot into the final weekend of September (following the last few seasons’ model of ending September with an FCS opponent). Notre Dame also has games scheduled for Aug. 26 and Sept. 2, which means you’re looking at opening the season against an ACC team. But every conference team on Pitt’s 2023 schedule already has something scheduled for the opening weekend, so I’m not sure how that’s going to break. Florida State, Louisville and North Carolina have Power Five opponents lined up for the opening weekend, so those games aren’t getting dropped. I guess that means Duke (at UConn), Syracuse (Colgate), Virginia Tech (Old Dominion), Wake Forest (Elon) or Boston College (Northern Illinois) will have to find a way out of their opening games. A quick glance at fbschedules.com seems to indicate that Elon has openings in its September schedule, so maybe that game gets moved and Pitt opens the 2023 season at Wake Forest. We’ll see.
UPDATE: I'm actually hearing that Pitt-Wofford will probably be the first week of the season, and the Clemson-Wofford game will get rescheduled or canceled altogether.
9. A fine finish
Okay, let’s get back to Pitt’s 2022 season, and let’s talk about the quarterback. I said way back in August that the play at quarterback would be the biggest factor in determining whether the Panthers went back to Charlotte or back to eight wins. They’re at eight wins, and I think that reflects pretty directly on the quarterback, in particular, and the offense overall. But I’ll say this for Kedon Slovis: he threw three touchdown passes in the loss to Georgia Tech, with two of them coming in more-or-less garbage time. Then he went four games without throwing a touchdown, only to finish with five in the final three games - including three in the win at Miami. Throwing just 10 touchdown passes in a season is pretty bad, but getting half of those in the final three games is an encouraging finish.
10. The playmaker
I used to call Jared Wayne a possession receiver, and I said that in the fondest way possible. But he has definitely changed the game this season. Or, put another way, he has changed his game. Or maybe he just has had an opportunity to expand his game, and it sure was expanded. 55 catches, 1,006 yards, five touchdowns. Career highs in receptions and yards, and only shy of matching his career high in touchdowns (he caught six last year). According to Pro Football Focus, he also set career highs in yards after the catch, average depth of target, long reception, contested catches and first downs gained. He was eighth in the ACC in receptions and receiving touchdowns but third in yards and yards per reception and second in yards per game. He was, quite legitimately, one of the best receivers in the conference this year, and he should be recognized as such in the postseason awards.
Continued...
Last edited:
