Now is the time, before football is being practiced and scrimmages played, where we fans like to sit down and compare what we have seen in the past from Pitt football and then speculate how the new kid on the block is going to handle his first time at the rodeo.

Our new kid is Pat Narduzzi, a first time head coach and a football mind that should fit right in with the Western PA football traditions of an aggressive and strong defense. The thing is that we can’t really look at his individual history, most recently as the Defensive Coordinator at Michigan State University, and see that for as successful as he was it doesn’t predict his success as a new head coach.

What we can do though is look backwards 18 years to 1997 when the first of our last three coaches who had at least three seasons under their belts at Pitt was hired.  That guy is Walt Harris, a second time HC who did a stint as the HC at Pacific University out in California.

The second guy we had with that three year criteria is Dave Wannstedt who coached the Panthers from 2005 until 2010.  Wannstedt was a HC in the NFL for two teams before being hired as Harris’ replacement.

Following Wannstedt we jump to Paul Chryst who coached Pitt from 2012 until he left for his alma mater Wisconsin after the 2014 season.

That’s three HCs who we’ll compare to each other then we’ll discuss if we think Narduzzi will fare better or worse during his first few years.  I suppose the easiest thing would be to winnow out each HC’s first year in the saddle and try to figure out if Narduzzi meets those seasons in 2015.

We’ll do that but we’ll also look at how those HC’s progressed into their 2^nd and 3^rd seasons when they started being able to field their own recruits and transferred players and after their offensive and defensive planning had started to be more polished..

The table below lays out the actual numbers rather concisely but there is always a back story to any sports issue especially when you take into account the turnover in the rosters in college ball from one recruiting class to another.

 SRS — Simple Rating System; a rating that takes into account average point differential and strength of schedule. The rating is denominated in points above/below average, where zero is average.  SOS — Strength of Schedule; a rating of strength of schedule. The rating is denominated in points above/below average, where zero is average.

First thing to do is look at the HC’s first year’s Won/Loss records. Here we see that Harris was at 5-6; Wannstedt at 5-7 and Chryst came in a bit better at 6-7. See a trend there? Each started off with losing seasons. It is interesting to note also that the HCs had 11, 12 and 13 games respectively in their first seasons.

But we really have to take a closer look at what the program and the teams were like in the immediate period before the coach’s hire before we can appropriately judge how they did.

Walt Harris came in on the heel of one of the biggest blunders in Pitt football history when we hired Johnny Majors a second time and he wasn’t up to the task.  JM2 as that period is dubbed was losing seasons across the board with Majors having a 12-32 record with no bowl appearances.

The players Harris inherited were not the greatest either.  He did get Pete Gonzalez as a QB and he was a good one as shown by his career stats below.

Since Harris was an OC at Tennessee under Majors and came to Pitt from the QB coaching job at OSU he leaned toward the offense in his approach and it showed with his QBs’ successes.

Here is what Gonzalez gave Harris during that ’97 season.  Damn good play especially the TD:INT ratio at 4.2 TDs to every INT.

So Harris moved the numbers in the win column up by two from the previous season.  Over his three initial years Harris had a 13-21 record before ripping off winning seasons starting in 2000 and over his last five years he had a very respectable (for PITT) 39-21 record.

Even with the dramatic dip to 2-9 in his second year at the helm I think it is safe to say that most Pitt fans feel that Harris had some pretty big obstacles to overcome to rebuild the team and the program in his first three years.

Enter Dave Wannstedt in 2005. He was hired when Pitt was coming off the best season, 8-4, that Pitt had registered since Mike Gottfried’s last year back in 1989 when he posted an 8-3-1 record.

That 2004 season was Harris last as a Panther and saw us end up as Co-Big East Conference Champions.  That was the only year that happened in our time in the Big East.  Wannstedt inherited some very good players from that 2004 roster, most notably Tyler Palko at QB. Here is the difference in Palko’s play between ’04 and ’05.

Wannstedt always had an emphasis on defense as that was his strong suit in his previous staff coaching jobs. In that first season he very good had JR LB H.B. Blades, rsSR DB Tez Morris and soon to be all-everything SO DB Darrell Revis.  That was a solid nucleus to work with and that ’05 defense played pretty well giving up only 21.1 ppg (see table below).

However he produced a very disappointing first season at 5-7. It was poor especially in light of what Pitt did the year before and with the existing talent on the roster returning for the ’05 season.  We were ranked #23 going into the season and when the dust settled we had bookended the season with two horrendous losses.  The first was a 42-21 ass-kicking by the Fighting Irish and then we ended with a very disappointing 45-13 loss to the Hoopies.

The worst part of that WVU game was that we couldn’t even blame Tino Sunseri for the team’s terrible play… just DW himself.

His next two seasons didn’t show much improvement.  In 2006 he broke even at 6-6. This was after he had the team standing at 6-1 and everyone feeling good about his hire.  In the time honored “Same Old Pitt” tradition Wannstedt then led the team to five straight losses and any shot at a bowl game slipped out of sight.

He then followed that up with another 5-7 ’07 season. Even with the talented SO RB LeSean McCoy having a great 2007 freshman season that wasn’t enough as we went through QBs until we were forced to play true freshman Pat Bostick.

That season looked to be a total wash when we went into Morgantown for the season ending game against WVU. That season WVU was poised to play for the national championship as long as they beat a ragged 4-7Pittteam which everyone thought was a lock.

The result of that game, a 13-9 win for PITT that ripped WVU’s dreams apart, remains sublimely fresh in the fan’s minds and is firmly ensconced in Pitt lore. It can easily be said that win was the high point of DW’s disappointing initial three years.

After DW was fired Pitt had one season with Todd Graham as the head coach, however because Graham didn’t have a full three years at Pitt we’ll skip him in this conversation.

Paul Chryst was hired away from the OC job at Wisconsin to become Pitt’s HC in late 2011 and it was his first time as a HC also.  Even with the program being in poor shape from the previous three years worth of off the field problems, Chryst’s roster in 2012 was a solid group of players.

On offense he was getting RB Ray Graham, WR Devin Street, QB Tino Sunseri and WR Mike Shanahan; on defense were NT Aaron Donald, DB Jason Hendricks, DB Jared Holley and  LB Todd Thomas.  So you can see that the talent was there to win games.

Well, he won six games and lost seven which was a lesser season than most fans believed Pitt would have given the returning talent and Chryst’s reputation as having a great offensive mind.

But a remarkable thing with 2012 is that we scored a decent 26.2 ppg and only gave up 21.2 ppg which was an increase on both sides of the ball from 2011.  Here are the numbers for the HC’s first three years both as produced and as ranked nationally.

There are a few good, bad and ugly things we can take away from these numbers…

*  Johnny Majors’ last defense at PITT was horrendous in giving up 39+ ppg.

*  Harris first year showed the biggest improvement over the previous season overall even though his strength of schedule (SOS) and SRS were very low that season.

*  The three coaches national rankings of SOS were in order: Wannstedt 48^th; Chryst 48^th and Harris at 66^th.

*  In turn their average SRS, which includes SOS, were as follows: Wannstedt 55^th; Chryst 56^th with Harris again sucking hind tit at 73^rd.

*  Chryst’s best of all coach’s 23rd ranked defense (21.1 ppg) in 2012 wasn’t enough to carry a winning season in his first year.  That is surprising that season’s offense was a relatively poor average 26.6 ppg given Chryst’s reputation and the fact he had so many good offensive players.

So what to all the numbers, facts and observations above mean to the PITT fan who is wondering how Narduzzi might fare in his first year at PITT and as a head coach?  Also, what might transpire over his first three years once he starts getting his personnel, players and plans in place?

I think we’ll see less of a positive jump from 2014 to this season then our emotions and excitement might lead us to believe will happen, both in wins and losses and in the numbers.  First off looking at the schedule for 2015 I see only one (1!) game that I’d say is a sure win and that is, maybe, Akron.

But even Akron raises my eyebrows because of the loss we suffered under their hands last season when they soundly beat us both on offense and on defense.  Terry Bowden as their HC has a nice pedigree and who knows how well they will hang in going into the important 4^th quarter.

YSU isn’t a lock in my opinion, not with Bo Pelini bring his juice and energy in as their new HC.  Along with Pelini at HC the ‘Quins have Ron Stoops, jr as the DC and Bo Pelini, jr as the ass’t DC.  We know they can beat us because it happened In 2012 in Chryst’s opening game.

Other than those two teams I don’t see any sure wins for us at all.  I also expect a drop in production from the offense this year.  Maybe not a big one but 31.6 ppg is going to be hard to match.

On defense I think we’ll be better but we really have the same personnel we did last season with a new transfer and recruit or two that may contribute but I have always thought that a new defense isn’t an easy thing to introduce and there will be mistakes.

With Narduzzi’s super aggressive defense he wants to put out there mistakes ,mean six points.  I think we’ll be maybe three point better on defense to around 23 ppg but we won’t have the big meltdowns we saw last year.

My early prediction this much before fall camp is a 7-5 record with 6-6 more possible than 8-4.

What’s yours?

Here is a nice interview by James Conner on ESPN regarding Narduzzi and Cheney.  This is part of the ‘three down back’ talk about Conner staying in on 3^rd down.

BTW – here is a very interesting listing of the seasons in which Pitt was ranked nationally in the Associated Press polls and how we were looked at in the preseason; how we moved up and down weekly and where we ended up at the end of the year.