PITTSBURGH – Rosters for the 2016 Spring Game at Heinz Field were finalized on Wednesday morning at the second annual Blue-Gold Draft.
The seniors were drafted on Tuesday by the coaching staff, and those seniors then drafted the remaining players to form Team Cavanaugh (Gold) vs. Team Dorsett (Blue).
In the realm of sanity, the coaching staff for Kevin Stallings looks pretty damn good with the final hire.
University of Pittsburgh head coach Kevin Stallings announced the addition of Kevin Sutton to his staff Wednesday afternoon. Sutton joins Tom Richardson and Jeremy Ballard as an assistant coach for the Panthers after spending the previous three seasons at Georgetown.
“I got to know Kevin in 2007-08 when we were recruiting one of his players out of Montverde Academy,” said Stallings. “He has a wealth of experience and is an excellent teacher and mentor. Kevin is well connected in the recruiting world particularly at the prep school level and within the ACC footprint. When you ask people in the profession about Kevin the feedback is extremely positive and flattering. I am very excited to have him on our staff.”
Sutton, a coaching veteran with 27 years of experience, joined the Georgetown staff in 2013. He helped the Hoyas to a 55-44 record with a pair of postseason appearances. In his second year with the program, Sutton saw the Hoyas go 22-11 overall and reach the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
Sutton arrived at Georgetown following two seasons as an assistant coach under Mike Lonergan at George Washington. He also had a pair of two-year stints as an assistant coach at both James Madison and Old Dominion.
In addition to his collegiate coaching experience, Sutton coached at five nationally-ranked high school programs – Flint Hill Prep, Harker Prep, St. John’s Prospect Hall, Montrose Christian and Montverde Academy – amassing a 489-102 record and winning two national championships. In 1998, he was the associate head coach on the USA Today Super 25 National Championship team and in 2007, he was the head coach of the Montverde Academy Hoops.com National Championship team. He also coached Montrose Christian and Montverde to second place finishes in national championship tournaments.
Sutton has also been selected as a coach for USA Basketball on three different occasions.
Given where he was an assistant and the prep schools he coached, Sutton will be a strong presence for Pitt in the Baltimore-DC area.
The Trib weighs in with a couple of things – first is this short video of Narduzzi’s post practice interview:
The second is Jerry D’s article about the next star on offense Donte’ Ford (my opinion not his). Ford’s contributions far exceed the chalk boundaries of the football field:
There were days early this spring when Sto-Rox baseball and softball players were forced to share gloves to get through a practice When the sports returned to the school district after a two-year hiatus due to lack of funds, athletic director Ryan Kacsur thought the girls might have to wear mismatched uniforms.
An even sadder reality: Some players may not get enough to eat before and after games. “It breaks my heart seeing that,” Kacsur said.
Then, one day, Pitt wide receiver/Sto-Rox graduate Dontez Ford and classmates Jim Fanning and Craig Bittner showed up in his office. They wanted to help.
For a project in their Advertising and Social Media class, the seniors, with free-of-charge production from professional videographers Ben Petchel and Adam Kunes, decided to create a video and promote it with the aim of raising money and awareness for the baseball and softball teams.
Their initial goal was $4,000 to be split equally between the teams. Some thought they set their sights too high. “Even our professor was kind of wary,” Fanning said.
But less than week after the video was released Feb. 24 on Facebook, they reached their goal and money kept coming in from 92 donors. So far, they have raised $5,800, Ford said. Two donors gave $500. Donations are still being accepted on the GoFundMe page on Facebook.com/BringitbackPGH.
Reed has killed it for football coverage this spring. Much, much appreciation.
I’ll be making my first Blue-Gold game in far too long. Going as a fan/parent (bringing the boy with me) for this one. Hopefully I’ll be able to convince the kid to let me stop by for at least one drink before all the other activities.
Here are a couple of podcasts to listen to while working. First is Jerry DiPaola being interviewed by WTAE’s Junker and the other Guy about the Spring Game… and talks about the closed practices. He makes a good point (again!) about being able to watch only the calisthenics, then the kicker and the punter punting. He hates it, every media person hates it, I hate it and some at Pitt even dislike it.
He also talks about how the offense looks unbalanced at this point because of the dearth of receivers with any game experience at all. Challingsworth and Ford are the only two WRs on the roster who caught passes last season. He quotes Nate Peterman as saying “Wait and see which WRs we can count on.”
DiPaola reiterates that Stocker is slowly cementing the QB2 position. Stocker is a big QB and is also a good runner – DiPaola mentions “Wildcat” a few times. The subject of bringing in a FBS transfer QB in (Schneider) and how that signals that the staff isn’t happy with our current #3 and #4 QBs.
What is shaping up is a competition for the 2017 starting job between Schneider and MacVitte.
When he’s not hanging out at the E Town Bar and Grille in Etna (I hear the fish sandwich kills), former Pitt tight end J.P. Holtz is getting ready for the NFL. He has visited with several teams, including the Browns, Chargers, Bears, Bengals and Saints. Other than that, he’s working out almost every day – often with his former Pitt teammates at the South Side facility.
“All you do is work out all day. It’s kind of nice, actually.” Holtz is ranked the 23rd tight end available in the draft, according to NFLDraftScout.com, after catching 81 passes for 931 yards and 11 touchdowns in four years at Pitt where he never missed a game or practice.
In his freshman season, he caught three passes for 54 yards and a touchdown in Pitt’s near-upset at Notre Dame. At 6-foot-3, 238 pounds, he could morph into a run-blocking fullback with the ability to catch short flips.
“I’m a pretty decent blocker,” he said. “I’ll do whatever a team needs me to do. I can do both. I really doesn’t matter to me. I just want to play football.”
The local media and we here on the Blather have been in some serious discussions about our current QB corps. The reason for that is that coming out of spring practices there is some real trepidation about who will be the back-up QB in case starter Nate Peterman goes down with an injury.
The main questions seem to be “Can Pitt recruit good quarterbacks?” and the answer is… it depends.
That’s a loaded question and really has two ways to be answered; first is can we land highly rated QB recruits and second, can we get our recruited QBs to play at the expected level or even exceed that?
These discussions led me to want to review the last 15 years of our QBs, both those we recruited and those we placed on the roster via transferring in from another program. So, I did some digging and came up with the table below.
Before you get too deep into it here are some notes on it. The ‘Year” is the recruiting class. The numbers in parentheses are the highest national recruit ranking for the QB position the player received – I used the higher of two if the player was ranked by both Rivals and Scouts.
Before we get into this next video let’s review which numbers our five QBs are wearing:
#3 – Ben DiNucci; #4 – Nate Peterman; #7 – Adam Bertke; #8 – Manny Stocker; and #15- Ryan Adzima. That’s our Murder’s Row going coming out of spring practices in a week. I post those because Pitt has a nice 2+ minute video highlighting our new OC Matt Canada working with the QBs and WRs.
Well, it isn’t just The Pitt Blather talking about Manny Stocker rise through the ranks. The Post-Gazette’s Craig Myer has a nice article on him also. Check this part closely:
After an experiment at wide receiver in 2015, his first with the Panthers, Stocker once again is playing quarterback, the position he has played virtually his entire career. He also has been reunited with offensive coordinator Matt Canada, with whom he spent one season at North Carolina State in 2013.
It’s a strange return to normalcy in some ways, but there’s also a certain solace for Stocker as he works to make an impact in a quarterbacks group that, outside of starter Nate Peterman, largely lacks experience.
The reason I clipped that quote is that we have seen Pat Narduzzi not hesitate to look at his roster and make decisions based on the talent at hand. It is one thing when a phenom like Jordan Whitehead, a highly rated and sought after recruit, walks into camp and claims a starting job. Many other coaches do that in allowing true FR to start playing right away. But Narduzzi sat down an established starting QB in his first year in a HC position.
Showing of course that every position on the team is truly up for grabs.
Some movement on Kevin Stallings coaching staff. The only sure things were that Stallings was bringing his longtime assistant Tom Richardson with him. And that none of the old Pitt assistants would be on the staff. There is now some debate on the nature of what Brandin Knight was offered to be an assistant.
Stallings said discussions with longtime Panthers assistant and former player Brandin Knight included a “sizeable pay raise” and touched on changing his title to associate head coach, but Knight declined to pursue other options.
Prior to Stallings statement, it was assumed that Richardson was going to be associate head coach (top assistant) as he was at Vandy.
[Editor note: I drafted this before I even knew Reed was writing his own thing on Barnes. So, this isn’t a counterpoint. Just my own thoughts.]
One of the nice things about traveling is that it does give you time to think. Between the driving, the flights and motion there has been a bit of time for that. Can’t break out the laptop and there are only so many times you can bust out a pithy 140 character tweet that neatly encapsulates the rambling thoughts bouncing around the head. It gave me a rare chance to step back and actually think before blathering.
That has led me to think more and more about the hiring of Kevin Stallings. I’m not going to waste my energies venting about Stallings. I want him to prove that it really was Vandy, not him, that was the reasons for the underachieving.
That he is reinvigorated by the move and that it is going to turn out a lot better than it seems. Retaining the recruiting class and the fact that all seems calm with the returning players is encouraging. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I’d rather have a little hope for a while longer.
I think that what most of us are bothered by is not hiring Stallings, but why hire Stallings.
We have had a lot of discussions over the last week about our relatively new Athletic Director and his actions in the BB coach hiring process. Readers on here and other media outlets have discussed Barnes in detail and expressed opinions ranging from feeling he should have his work closely looked into to showing support for Barnes in what he has done.
One of our readers and our favorite senior citizen Old Pitt Grad pointed out in the comments section of yesterday’s article that Barnes had held the “Senior Assistant Athletic director” position at the University of Washington inferring that must have been an important post to have had.
I lived in Washington State for three year back in the early 1990’s and attended many Washington Huskies FB games. Back then what really jumped out at me was just how similar in almost every way the University of Washington was to the University of Pittsburgh.
It sits in a nice mid-sized city, is an “Urban School” (be careful with that phrase Reed!”), but interestingly enough has double the enrollment as Pitt yet has just about the same track record in D1 football as Pitt has had over the years.
Before I get to the meat of this article I would like to reiterate something I have passed along on here a few times since I started writing for the Blather all those many moons ago. After you read it, then get into the article itself, you’ll see the connection.
I’ve been asked many times on here, on the message boards, in person at tailgates, at special Pitt events and functions and at the games, something on these lines ‘Why do you think you are qualified to write a blog and why should we care about what you have to say’.
My response to that has always been pretty consistent in replying ‘Because I’m a fan like you, I have extensive historical ties to the university and actually there is no concrete reason why you should care about my stuff at all’ – or something to that effect.
Those ‘historical ties’ go back to 1908 when my grandfather on my Dad’s side helped the growing Western University of Pennsylvania Medical school become The University of Pittsburgh’s Medical school and stayed on as a staff instructor and professor.
