Wanny had the team ranked 9th on Thanksgiving and within a crazy 0.1% cenario of playing for the natty. So lets not pretend like his 4 stars didn't pan out. He wasnt a very good coach but he brought in talent. You are expecting Narduzzi, who may be a better coach than Wanny but not by much, to get premium results despite a massive downgrade in recruiting, even by his modest standards.
TJ OL to Pitt
- Thread starter TheSpecialSauce
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Wanny had the team ranked 9th on Thanksgiving and within a crazy 0.1% cenario of playing for the natty. So lets not pretend like his 4 stars didn't pan out. He wasnt a very good coach but he brought in talent. You are expecting Narduzzi, who may be a better coach than Wanny but not by much, to get premium results despite a massive downgrade in recruiting, even by his modest standards.
Not just replying to you but in all honesty, Duzz was never the best recruiter. Nobody is going to argue that. I'm assuming he won't be here much longer because it's just getting to be that time (I think he'll hang it up).
My question is, what does Pitt do now that it's not just personality anymore? We know Pitt doesn't have the booster fire power to just buy talent so is there a reason to focus on guys who are great recruiters or do you look for an X's and O's guy that can cobble something together out of the scraps that kind of works? It's an interesting dilemma if you assume Pitt is staying at the top level.
I'm not too sure where we would go next. It feels like most hires tend to be the opposite of the last guy if the last guy wasn't performing well toward the end, so I would expect someone who is charismatic and an offensive guy.
Honestly, there probably isn't a good answer when the other guys have more money than we do. The most I would hope for is that "new start" galvanization that Syracuse is currently experiencing. Unfortunately, I don't see NIL going anywhere. If anything, it will go through the schools and become tax deductible. I haven't paid much attention to the articles out there that mention revenue sharing, contracts, etc., but maybe that's our lifeline. I honestly don't know, but I think there are plenty of decent to good coaches (I would put Narduzzi in this category) who are basically becoming obsolete.
I think what Pitt needs to do for its next coach is find a younger guy with a plan, a guy who WANTS to coach pro college football. A guy who will shakedown the biggest of donors. Honestly, the HC at Pitt should be spending just as much time golfing and dining with millionaires than on football. There’s enough assistant coaches to do the football stuff. We need players. The Pitt HC's ass shouldnt leave the country club from May to July.
Than answer doesn't jibe with what I asked. There aren't any big donors. Got it?
Does Pitt not have any ultra wealthy alums? Play golf with them. Does Pitt not have any alums who are doctors, higher level lawyers, or successful business owners? Have dinner with them. A new coach has to raise money for payroll. That's job #1.
He started out decent his first year. Hamlin and Chase Pine were nice wins. Flipped Aaron Matthews from the nits and very close to flipping Sanders. And at MSU he got WPIAL d-backs who Pitt was recruiting (Cox and can't remember the other one) by showing them what a terrible scheme Paul Chryst used on defense.
But yeah something happened and things tapered off. That 2017 class seemed to put a damper on him. Looked like Jeter was a sure thing then he suddenly spurned Pitt. Wade, Lugg, Hinish were also losses, and a few weeks after signing date Jurkovec for 2018 picked ND (Hinish still the only big loss from those two classes).
Hopefully he can get his mojo back as the next few local classes are loaded. Hoping it isn't like Walt who lost his fastball with the 2004 signing fiasco.
The problem lies more with the lack of financial support from the boosters rather than the HC (i.e. Walt Harris or Pat Narduzzi).
I think this can be broken down into two parts. There is recruiting on paper and then who he actually brought in and how they developed.
1) Paper recruiting has not been great. We can downplay it all we want by how some of those guys turned out. For instance, that 2017 WPIAL class looked great on paper but most of them sucked. However, Narduzzi still tried to get them and didn't, so they're still misses. He put a ton of time into guys like Jeter and Wade, even if they didn't turn into much in college football.
2) He has had a fair amount of success developing lesser heralded guys. Dane Jackson, Pinnock, Weaver, Jones, Kancey, Dennis, etc. Is some of that luck? Absolutely. Luck of other guys decommitting and us ending up with them instead, etc. Is some of it skill? Absolutely. Still have to identify these guys and develop them.
However, it seems like he is losing his touch with #2 a good bit, while #1 continues to trend even more in the wrong direction. We no longer have cornerbacks and d-lineman bursting at the seams. Instead, we're scavenging the portal for warm bodies. A lot of those under the radar studs were a long time ago now. Like 2019, for instance, had a lot of them. There have been five full classes since then.
I agree that if you traded Franklin for Narduzzi PSU recruiting wouldn't be that much worse but I think Pitt would be a lot better. I don't think boosters handing out bags were the major factor with Wade or Hinish. Obviously Foster but he was a 5-star with Bama in pursuit.
No. Pitt doesn't. They would already be tapping them for donations if it were possible.
A better salesman never hurts but can you win with a salesman in charge if you can't buy the very best talent. Even Franklin is suffering more "L's" these days, even after he gets them on campus via transfers.
Your 2nd paragraph sums it up perfectly. On-paper recruiting getting worse. And not finding enough diamonds in the rough.
And yet, right out of the gate, you chose to crap on Duzz for going after a guy who has that kind of potential.
Totally agree. Offer sheet does matter. It's sad to see where we have fallen, most of our recruits in the NIL era have had unimpressive offer sheets. Narduzzi really let the program slip. We were pretty much a top 10 team with a Heisman candidate and a Belinikof award winner. Now we struggle to attract any recruits with solid offers.
In the country, overall. Had Pickett played in the Peach Bowl, we would have finished 12-2 and been right at the cutoff of top 10. Seems like that was a decade ago already, as we have really nose dived.
Okay, I understand now. Fair enough.
But, I still say that's a moment in time snapshot, and not a sustainable trend.
Cignetti was an awful hire. We might have been 11-1 in 2022 with a legit coordinator. Then you would assume we're at least 7-5 last season.
Amazing how much life he sucked out of the program.
Totally agree it was not sustainable. That said, I didn't expect to become a 4-9 team two years later. The Cignetti hire and bringing the Jurk with him quickly sapped any momentum this program had.
I think part of the problem is that the golden panther generation is getting up there, so those that didn’t abandon ship have begun to die off. There just haven’t been donors to replace them. I know a bunch of guys who were at Pitt with me that are multi millionaires. A few of them support very generously. But others stopped going to games or only go to homecoming. Pitt football just isn’t a priority for them because it wasn’t really a priority to watch them go 2-9, get pasted by any decent team, or lose to Temple when we were in school.
That's part of it but Pitt never had a ton of those people to begin with. Just not a huge group of alumni like a large diploma factory.
no cutoff....would have been a Top 10 team. I love Pickett but man that hurt not playing that game. I've said before the way the Whipple leaving went down played a part in it too.
Not saying Whipple should have stayed in 2022, but him not coaching the Peach Bowl and Pickett sitting out started a funk that Narduzzi really needs to end this year or things could get ugly.
Not arguing about Cignetti since he was obviously not good, but think about if a few breaks fell our way in the Tennessee game. Maybe the momentum then carries us to wins over a bad Georgia Tech team and an over-rated UNC.
Or maybe not playing Tennessee & WVU in the same year, back to back. Open with WVU and then play Thiel.
Might have still returned to Charlotte even with Cignetti.
But last year was just bad. The whole Jurkovec thing was almost like Scott Barnes brining in Stallings (well maybe not that bad). And then thinking Vellieux was a capable P5 QB.
I still think Cignetti was the main culprit. Slovis is an okay college QB who did not mesh with him. We had more talent than most teams we played in 2022 and should have gone 10-2ish at worst.
Then we were going to take a step back in '23 either way, because we had been taking smaller recruiting classes and kept devoting roster spots to 6th year guys, and that was just going to be somewhat of a transition season as a result. But Jurkovec and that clown instituting the offense turned what should have been 6-6 or 7-5 into 3-9.
Yeah, we should have beat Tennessee, GT, and Louisville without a doubt. You could argue we should have lost to WVU. Then again, we shouldn't have been in a position where we could have lost to WVU, but Cignetti sucks.
And Cignetti's suckness is compounded in the age of transfers. Good offensive players didn't want to come here, and losing breeds a negative culture that causes losses on both sides of the ball.
