Paul Zeise revealed something very interesting in his Q&A this past week.

Q: Last year a lot of fans wondered about why Pitt didn’t blitz more and we read that Paul Rhoads and Dave Wannstedt didn’t want to. Now I read that the Panthers are adding the safety blitz. I’m just wondering, if it was so obvious to me and so many other fans last year that the Panthers needed to blitz more, why didn’t Wannstedt and Rhoads make the adjustment during the season, why did they wait until now?

Chris Tabay, Hamilton, N.J.

ZEISE: Oh no, not this again. I knew that as soon as Wannstedt talked about doing some blitzes with the safeties this spring all of the second-guessers who think the blitz is a cure-all would come out of the woodwork again.

Give me a break with this, please.

I’ll give you the short version one more time as to why Pitt didn’t — and couldn’t — blitz very much.

Pitt’s safeties STUNK last year. Period. They weren’t good enough to make the plays, they weren’t fast enough to get to the point of attack and the evidence was that just about every time the Panthers tried to blitz, they got burned.

They didn’t blitz because they weren’t good enough and they didn’t have much faith in about nine of the 11 guys on the field, particularly by midseason when they were hit with some injuries.

And it was worse when they’d blitz a linebacker because not only were Pitt’s safeties not quick enough to get to a point where they could make a play on the ball, the linebackers who blitzed — the outside ones — didn’t usually make the play either, which was a double disaster.

Further, the defensive line didn’t dominate anyone and there wasn’t one lineman who the other team had to worry about double-teaming, which meant the other team always had plenty of free blockers to pick up the blitzers.

That’s a fact. I asked Dave Wannstedt about blitzing several times because I wondered some of the same things that some fans were wondering but rather than get defensive — like many coaches would — he took me into the film room late in the season and showed me on film what happened on the plays that Pitt did blitz — and it wasn’t usually a very good outcome. The film does not lie.

Pitt did not have enough good players at the right positions to take many chances or to be very successful stopping anyone. Their defense needed better players, not better schemes.

And to compare that situation, to the situation right now when the Panthers appear to have much better players at safety, when it looks like Gus Mustakas and Joe Clermond have progressed to the point where teams will have to focus on stopping them, is trying to compare apples to oranges.

Eric Thatcher is healthy now. Mike Phillips is healthy now. Elijah Fields has more upside and athletic ability than anyone they’ve had in a long, long time. When they blitz, they made things happen.

Coaches feel far more comfortable taking a few chances with this group than they did last year. Good coaches know their personnel and also know their limitations and try to put them in the best position to make plays.

Rutgers, Louisville, West Virginia — they all had the right personnel, the right kind of athletes and the one or two studs up front to pull off a lot of blitzes that the Panthers couldn’t even have dreamed of trying. They all had at least one and in the case of Rutgers and Louisville, two, defensive linemen that required double teaming, which helped create mismatches for the extra attacker be it a safety or a linebacker.

You must put in a system that fits your personnel and Pitt’s coaches finally feel like they are starting to get the right kind of personnel to take a few chances. Last year, they didn’t.

I haven’t always agreed with Paul Rhoads philosophy on defense and there are times I think he could be a little more creative and times when I think criticism of him was fair. On this one, this whole blitzing thing, however, I have no problem at all with how they approached it last year given what they had to work with.

[Emphasis added.]

That would have been very interesting to learn — last year!!!

Here you have the Pitt beat writer getting really interesting stuff about why Pitt wasn’t capable of blitzing. Knowledge gained thanks to the access to the Head Coach and being part of the media. Something many of the fans were dying to know/understand.

When do we read about it? In an online Q&A? In April? Why?

There are only two reasonable explanations. The first is that Coach Wannstedt didn’t want to make it known — even late in the year — that the team was incapable of  pulling off a safety blitz. I could almost excuse that, except he gave the information and even broke it down for a beat writer.

The other reason is that Zeise didn’t want to humiliate some of the players like Sam Bryant. After all, if he made it known that players on the team simply couldn’t get the job done, Bryant and other safeties might be a little ticked. Then other members of the team might rally to them and some of the precious access to the players could be diminished.

Which of course begs the question of what is the purpose of the access? Zeise can feel good about knowing the reason, but  what was the point of holding onto to the info past it’s useful point? He admits he was wondering about the lack of blitzing before talking to Wannstedt. Apparently it wasn’t as obvious as he contends until he sat down with Wannstedt and had game tape broken down for him.

Look, I think Zeise is a good beat writer. I like reading him. His biggest problem, though, is protecting his access to the detriment of actually reporting.