The USF game was a very good day for Jonathan Baldwin — notwithstanding having the wind knocked out of him for a few minutes.
Baldwin (Aliquippa) had six catches for a career-high 144 yards, Dorin Dickerson (West Allegheny) had five catches for 58 yards, and each had a touchdown as the Panthers picked apart the nation’s ninth-ranked scoring defense.
“(Offensive coordinator Frank) Cignetti switches it up so they can’t know what route I’m running,” Baldwin said. “It makes it good for me and easier.”
It seemed that Baldwin has faded out of the Pitt offense in the past couple of games, because of the double-teams.
The P-G’s Paul Zeise has noted in blog and Q&A that the offense somehow manages to forget Baldwin too often in the redzone or when he’s getting covered. Or even more bizarrely taking him out in favor of Cedric McGee for blocking purposes. In the USF game, Stull was definitely looking for Baldwin to take advantage of things.
He burned the USF secondary — especially Jerome Murphy — so badly that USF Coach Leavitt started threatening to bench top defensive players.
I should be focused only on this year, but I can’t help but think a little bit about next year (likely Baldwin’s last year) when he and Mike Shanahan will be the two top WR targets for whoever is the QB. Shanahan may have been slowed by the injuries in getting out there, but he is living up to a good deal of the training camp hype.
Those are two big guys that can run and stretch the field.
The nice thing is that both were catching balls in the second half, even when Pitt was up big in the 3d quarter (the 4th quarter was just fun for seeing the 2nd and 3d stringers get action). Watching Pitt continue to press its advantage on offense rather than simply try to run clock and let the defense do it all is a welcome change.
Q: I must admit, this team looked as good as they have at any time since Dave Wannstedt became the head coach. And just when I thought Wannstedt would take his foot off the gas, the team kept pouring it on to run USF out of the building. My question is — do you think that Wannstedt finally gets it, that he has to keep scoring to put teams away?
ZEISE: Well, yes, I think the N.C. State game showed him two things — you can’t shut it down with a lead and also you have a good offense, so you don’t need to. The whole evolution of this team and offense has been trust — the better the offense performs, the more trust the coach has in it. And the more trust he has in it, the more he’s willing to let it open up and fully realize how good it could be. This team is too good offensively to be afraid to let it continue to be aggressive and I don’t think that we will see that conservative shell again this year.
Some of that trust has to be coming from OC Frank Cignetti. He believes in the offense and to keep it going.
I hate to keep hammering on Cavanaugh, but his NFL mentality was not one that bred trust in the offense — especially by Cavanaugh himself. That meant not pushing harder and pressing the advantage. Instead pursuing a more risk averse strategy that can be more reasonable when the talent gap and mismatches are much smaller and every mistake can create a bigger swing. In college the gaps are larger and too conservative an approach on offense leaves not nearly enough room for what else can happen.
I also think that Coach Wannstedt realizes that no matter how he masks it, the secondary will be a concern. And especially when a team is trailing, they are going to throw — and go at an area of defensive weakness for Pitt. So the best way to deal is to keep building the lead — not just running the clock and keeping the defense off the field — to have a larger margin of error.
