Take this one with some incredibly huge grains of salt. After all, it comes from a high school recruit being told something by a coach.

Mountain Ridge’s Jarrod Harper, who inked his letter-of-intent to join the Mountaineers on Wednesday afternoon, said that WVU head coach Dana Holgorsen told him during the recruiting process that the Backyard Brawl would continue.

“It’s going to happen every other year, I’m pretty sure. Coach Holgorsen said that we’re going to switch, playing Maryland and Pitt,” said Harper. “I come from Maryland, so a lot of my friends are Terps fans. They always talk about West Virginia playing Maryland, whenever I’d get up there [to join the team]. Now we’re going to be playing them, I guess, every other year, I’m not sure yet.”

“At this time, we don’t have any information on future schedules,” said West Virginia football sports information director Mike Montoro via e-mail.

Not surprisingly neither did the SIDs at Maryland or Pitt. Maryland and WVU have a deal to meet every year through 2017.

Considering the unknown conference status of WVU for 2012 and Pitt for 2013, I have a hard time believing this is anything more than a coach blowing smoke up a recruit. Something that at worst Holgorsen can claim he merely speculated was a possibility, while talking to a recruit who asked about the Backyard Brawl.

One of my favorite things about signing day period is the day or two after. When the stories are told of these kids. I try to round-up all the local stories on each of the recruits. The kids who are getting a chance to have a full scholarship. Get to play football at the 1-A level. The brief chance to actually see the kids in their hometown when they are certainly the BMOC.

We have lauded them for their wisdom in choosing Pitt. For their potential. For many things, but almost as soon as they are signed we expect much of them from the moment they show up on the campus as freshman — and even before. Plus, with recruiting we are already turning to the next kids who should/must/have to be recruited. I’m as guilty of that as anyone else.

But, these posts are the ones to link and highlight the kids themselves and their decision. For every blue-chip recruit who could go anywhere and has a legitimate shot at the NFL, there are many more who are excited to compete at a high college level and get a scholarship for a great education.

(more…)

As the article below states, team rankings for recruiting swings like a pendulum depending on the source.  Chas did a good post regarding the differences in the recruit ranking services.  I decided to look back over the last six years of PITT recruiting to see what we actually did and it is kind of interesting.

Year       Coach          Rank          Avg.         # 5* & 4*                  W/L

’12           PC               39th            3.11       1-5*  3-4*

’11           TG               47TH          2.68         2-4*                   6-7

’10          DW              17^TH           3.21        1-5*  5-4*            8-5

’09          DW              31ST           3.11         5-4*                    10-3

’08          DW              25TH           3.37         3-5*  4-4*            9-4

’07          DW              8th              3.38         3-5*  8-4*            5-7

The highest ranking classes are when we had DW coming off a contract extension and the year afterward.  Our two worst classes were in the midst of the recent coaching changes. That isn’t rocket science to figure out why but I was interested in how the years stacked up in comparison.

This 2012 class ended very well and I give Paul Chryst a lot of credit for closing the recruiting season out in such a strong manner.  We probably will never know if our five defections were cases of the kids just not wanting to be at PITT or vice versa, PITT not really wanting them to accept the scholarship for any reason (which I lean toward).

I think Conwell was a player the new staff would have liked to keep but the AZ draw was too much and Conwell wanted to go to the guys who had been recruiting him.

We had some two academic casualties and  one rescinded scholarship offer for bad tweeting.

That said, Paul Chryst stated in some interviews yesterday that PITT still had some scholarship available for 2012 to use if they wanted to.  We know they are keeping one open for Standifer when he visits on Feb 10^th, two days after he visits Vanderbilt.  Not sure we’ll get that one.

This was a good recruiting job by Chryst & Co. and should calms the fears PITT fans had on the rumors that Chryst wasn’t a good recruiter.  It was pretty obvious that he made the important phone calls early on to secure our top recruits; those who publicly stated they didn’t receive calls from him… well, there was a reason for that apparently.

I think we should be getting pretty excited about what the 2013 recruiting class can bring in Chryst’s second year as HC.  IMO we’ll field a decent team in 2012 and one that will be competitive in every game.  Do that and PITT becomes more of an attraction than perhaps it was this year overall.  Chryst will have established his offense and defense so recruits will see what his over-arching football philosophies are and that will help to publicly cement his ‘brand’ of football.

Maybe most importantly recruits will see how well Chryst and Bostad develop players, even in their first year.  I think this will apply to the OL especially.  We all know how they played this last season and we’ll have essentially the same personnel returning in 2012 with the addition of Ricketts.  If they can mold that group into an effective unit and get our offense going from that starting point then we’ll see other prospective OL recruits sit up and take notice.

Good class but not a great one, which is to have been expected.  But hey – when you land players like Shell, Voytik, Bisnowaty and Holtz;  players at positions of need and ones who will see playing time in 2012, or certainly in 2013… it’s a good class.

Congrats to the PITT staff for their hard work.

P/S: Sorry about the graph but I’m not messing with it any longer.