It’s a time to leave it all out there after last week.

Literally got to the press box just before kickoff. A 3:30 kickoff and a chance to be with friends for some real time. It was all the reasons why I have been coming to Pitt games for the last 20+ years. And I’ll be damned if I was going to cut it short.

Do I have unreasonable/irrational optimism? Yeah. Is it substance enhanced? I don’t think so, but I’m not voluntarily submitting to any tests.

Let me be honest here… I don’t think Penn State is as good a team as they were projected to be in the preseason.  That said Pitt played them straight up defensively holding them to 17 points.  Our offense was a different story though – Pitt fans look at Pickett’s gaudy numbers and say our offense is starting to click.  I look at them and see a whole bunch of passing yardage with nothing to show for it.  That is what happens when you can’t field even a semi-decent run game.  Then you must throw it all the time and Pickett did and we didn’t score even one passing TD. Again.

That yardage total looked great but save the last 28 yard pass and great catch to Mack at the now-National Historic Registered Penn State 1 yard line the Nits DBs kept everything in front of them – hence 0, zero, zilch, zip, nada TD passes thrown by our QB.  Right now he has two TDs in 12 quarters of play with none in any second half going back over the last six games.  We’ve accomplished just three field goals in the last 12 quarters of second half play – makes me sick thinking about it.  So I won’t.

How do you think that resonates going into a game against a University of Central Florida team who not only is scoring at will over the last three seasons but now is also among the national leaders in defense along with another great offense.  And in doing so have won there last 27 regular season games (28-1 overall in the last three seasons)

Take a look at what the Golden Knights have done so far as far as national standings and “Value”.

When I wonder how good a defense is I look directly at Passing Efficiency Defense first – theirs is an outstanding 4th nationally in keeping opposing QBs to a 77.79 rating. For comparison what is considered a ‘good’ QB rating is up in the 150s or higher.  Right now Pickett is sitting at 122.7 which is poor.  But get this – the 130th team in this is Wyoming and they have a QB rating of 79.5.  So UCF holds QBs to even worse that the worst team listed.

Who did UCF play ? Their only P5 opponent so far has been Stanford who they ass-kicked to the tune of 45-27 but that score is a bit misleading – UCF jumped out to a 38-7 lead at halftime then led 45-17 before they put in their 2nd string kids.  Stanford scored on a FG with 1:12 left in the game and then Stanford’s defense ran a fumble in for a TD from the 28 to get to 27 points.

What we need to look at is how many points did the Stanford team score offensively? That would be 20. With that they held Stanford’s passing game to 233 yards and no TDs and one INT on 24/49 (49%) gathering only 4.8 yards per attempt and a 88.7 QB rating which is fantastic defense overall.

Oh, BTW – they are also limiting the opponents to 85.7 yards per game on the ground. Stanford did a bit better at 23 for 116 yards and one TD. So may be can match that – it would be a hell of a lot better that our 0.9 yards per carry against PSU wouldn’t it?  Lets hope.

Now – what does UCF have on offense.  Well, one of the best QBs so far in Dillon Gabriel who stands like this against his peers:

3rd  nationally in yards per completion @ 18.9 per catch…read that again – 18.9 yards per catch.  (Pickett = 95th @ 10.7 yards per catch)

4th nationally in Passing Efficiency @ 206.6  ( Pickett = 91st @ 122.8)

7th nationally in TDs thrown with nine. (Pickett isn’t listed in the Top 85 with his two TDs)

This kid is a freshman and is damn good and he’ll tear up our defensive backs so badly in the 1st and 2nd quarters they will start tackling the UCF WRs as the ball is in the air to get Pass Interference calls to stop more deep receptions.  Here are Gabriel’s season numbers:

Now – Pitt has played pretty well in our Pass Efficiency defense holding opposing QBs to a 114.6 rating and 36th in Passing Yards Allowed at 193 per game…but we haven’t faced a pure passer like UFC’s kid yet.  If we can do that against Gabriel then we may win but I don’t think we can.

I think UCF carries all of this forward to tomorrow’s game playing against Pitt and Pickett.  I expect we may see some more Pitt yards on the ground this week but less passing yards in the air.  We’ll score some points but UCF will go up big time early and crusie to a win at Heinz – where I think there is zero home field advantage for the Panthers.  UCF is currently standing at 19th in Scoring Defense with 13.7 ppg.

Oh – before I go here is one stat we just can’t overlook now that we have Mark ‘The Wizard’ Whipple as our OC – we currently stand at 126th out of 130 in Scoring Offense putting up an average of  only 14.7 ppg. Yes, you read that correctly – 14.7 ppg against teams that really don’t have that great of defenses save VA which is doing pretty well this season.  But 20 against Ohio and only 10 against Penn State sucks and you can quote me on that.

We may win tomorrow – or at least bet the spread which seems to float Pitt fan’s boats and we may win some more games down the road – after all we aren’t going to be 1-11 are we?  No, we are not. At least I don’t think so.  No! We can’t!

But I truly don’t feel we have the type of talent that Narduzzi inherited when hired and who gave him two eight win seasons.  I truly believes that all this comes down to the talent level teams playing against us have and what we have. It’s no secret that I think Narduzzi has been very poor at identifying hidden talent and/or seeing that talent and getting them to commit to Pitt. I’m not just talking about star ratings – but that sucks also – but real honest to God talent.  It is indicative of this when we played FCS Ohio and only beat them by 10 points. Also the fact that we scored only 10 points against PSU.

…and don’t even get me going about 2nd half scoring – if that isn’t indicative of stubborness on PN and the staff’s part what is?  He thinks that whatever he has planned is good enough so why change at halftime?  Good God – at least three victorious opposing HC’s have said almost exactly that in post-win press conferences over the last two years.  Narduzzi is the only one who doesn’t see problems with his overall decision making – everyone else has gotten used to it by now.

Seriously – ask yourself this…were you really that surprised when he went for the FG instead of a TD last week with the game on the line…and then threw out snide remarks when asked about it?

What it comes down to is Narduzzi didn’t trust his Panthers to punch it in from the 1. He noted the anemic run totals for a program that was billing itself as RBU not so long ago: 24 yards on 25 carries. He failed to mention freshman running back Vincent Davis scored on a 3-yard run in the second quarter.

“We can look back at all the calls, guys,” Narduzzi said. “All the armchair quarterbacks, you guys all have those armchair desks, so it’s easy to make those decisions. We were throwing the ball — we threw for over 300 yards — and we felt like we had some plays open.”

No- you were not because we’ve seen this movie before.  OK – prediction time. I think UCF beats the spread scoring a bunch in the first half and doubles our point total – but we actually score a TD in either quarters three or four.

UCF – 42

Pitt – 21

Argh.

There’s an exquisite pain from a loss that was there to be grabbed as a win.

Head Coach Pat Narduzzi hasn’t shied away from making it an important game over the last few years. He makes it clear how important it is with his closed media access. And again, I’m not going into the weeds on that matter either. I’ve said before I think that’s  a stupid approach, but so be it. Narduzzi at least understood how much the game matters and does stuff to play up it’s importance. And in that, I agree with him.

It’s the 100th and last meeting of Pitt-Penn State. At least for another 10-20 years. I’m not going to go off into the weeds on that matter. It is a game that should be played with at least some regularity, but isn’t.

It’s just that if there is ever a game to go flat out for broke. To leave nothing behind by the players and coaches. This is the game.

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…then a surprisingly close loss will have to do.

I suppose some Pitt fans will have left wherever they watched the game feeling pretty darn happy overall. Not jumping up and down of course like an actual win would get us to do, but content having seen Pitt accomplish what looked like a well played ball game. After all holding Penn State to 17 points isn’t bad at all and I tip my hat to the defense specifically.

On the other hand Pitt scoring only seven points is bad and made worse because of the reasons we scored so few. We have such an unbalanced offense that quality play in the passing game just can’t do it alone hence we are 1-2 on the season.

What jumps out to the Pitt fan again was the yardage numbers Kenny Pickett put up passing in this his second good game. He had tons of yards with his doing this: 35/51 for 68% and 372 yards with 0 TDs and 0 INTs for a QB rating of 129.9.

If you can look past that 372 yards number what the story tells us again is that our offense was on the whole very ineffective. In nine possessions we scored only twice – a FG and a TD. Both in the 1st half of the game (Good God! More on that later).

We pretty much knew going in that our running game was going to do nothing at all and they didn’t disappoint by playing as horrid as they have all year. Against a decent PSU defense today we ran the ball 25 times for 24 yards and that my friends was good for .97 ypc. Not even a single yard per carry but round that up to 1.0 ypc if it makes you feel any better. Why did we figure they would suck? Because in the first two games we averaged only 3.4 ypc and this week we faced a better defense… so ipso facto we fought and clawed our way to 1.0 ypc. With all the fighting and clawing what we didn’t do was actually block for the RBs.

Of course that puts extreme pressure on the other offensive units mainly the QB and the WRs (Oh, don’t forget about the TE – they got two (!) passes today). When you can’t even threaten a defense with your ground game that allows the opponent to cover our passing better and keep the receptions in front of them. By that I mean not give up TDs through the air which the Nitters accomplished.

When I look at how well a QB did in a game I look primarily at four things: his QB Rating; Yards Per Attempt (ypa); Yards Per Completion (ypc) and the TDs to Completion ratio. Those are what makes the difference between fancy numbers up on a scoreboard and how truly effective a QB was.  We can look at that 372 yards and be happy and it is an accomplishment, don’t get me wrong. But when you break down what those 372 yards actually did for the offense today it’s another story altogether especially since he did that on 51 attempts.

That puts things in a different perspective; with his yards per attempt (YPA) at 7.3 and his yards per completion(ypc) at 10.6 which are mundane averages compounded by his not connecting for a TD. In truth Pickett’s numbers and how he played today was the only bright spot of the offense so the light shines stronger on him. But even with Pitt putting out a poor running game I feel he could have and should have been more effective with his passing.

Those are what the players did this afternoon.

What hurts us fans even more was that, yet again, we saw poor in-game decision making by HC Pat Narduzzi which I believe helped to cut our collective nuts off. Of course his one decision late in the last PSU game will be talked about forever and that was choosing to try a Field Goal instead of a TD when we were at the PSU 1 yard line on 4th down. Watching the game and listening to my friends and the announcers it was true that we’d have to get two scores to win the game, we did.

However, what the announcers, fans and all others didn’t seem to grasp about that 4th & goal at the 1 situation was that, yes – it was a two score game to win; but a TD and a successful two point conversion (an attempt from the PSU 2.5 yard line mind you) wins the game also! And if you do miss the conversion then at the very least it sets you up for  needing only a three point FG vice a full 7 point TD to win.

Instead his crap decision making there was going to force us to score another TD for the win – regardless of if a successful FG if made or not.  I know I’ve said this before but he’s not a very good game of football coach and if we ever forget that he reminds us over and over again.

I don’t know about you but I’d much rather have a chance for a 2 pt conversion (with no time running off the clock) then have to march lots of yards downfield with what turned out to be only 1:56 left on the clock for a try at a TD win and only one timeout. He’s really not a good game day coach at all – and that has been proven time and again.

So – moral victory? Or just another loss to our hated rival but only closer in score this time? We played well on defense and that’s a good thing because what this Whipple offense has given us so far is only 14 points per game and a 1-2 record. Our defense is allowing only 19 ppg and that should easily be good enough for a minimum of 2-1 record on the season at this point.

Don’t let this staff throw big numbers at you and bamboozle you into thinking it’s good football. It is not – the effectiveness of our passing game has been average at best and because we can’t run the ball that level of effectiveness isn’t cutting it for wins…and if this holds we’ll see more losses than wins from here on out. There are a lot of smoke and mirrors with this 2019 offense but we need to turn completions into points because no one else is – including the kicker.

I see a tough game down in Florida next week against UCF. Their freshman QB Dillion Gabriel just threw for 347 yards and four (4) TDs in a rout of Stanford – remember them? We didn’t score any 2nd half points against Stanford either. That work by the UCF QB my friends is true effectiveness in the passing game. We’ve seen the yardage but not the points thus far by Pitt’s QB. That has to change and quickly if we will hope to be over six wins when the dust settles on the season.

Note: Here is a look at the last six Pitt QBs that played for any length of time as a Panther. I charted them statistically so we can see comparisons. The bold blue is best and the bold red is worse.

One thing to remember is that even though Pickett has started 20 games he’s apparently taken a turn for the better as a passing QB so these numbers will certainly be different at the end of this season and at the end of his Pitt career – let’s hope they change for the better because to this point, even with the last two games, he’s been the least effective of all six guys.

What really pops out is Pickett’s only 1 TD per 18 completions – by far the worse and actually pretty horrendous as we saw again today and as we’ve seen so far this year with his 47 completions and only two TDs.

Well, hello again!

Chas has been gracious in his allowing me to get back to where it began as far as my writing about Pitt football and I’ll be posting some articles here on The Pitt Blather every so often.  So, here goes…

After a pretty dismal opening loss to ACC opponent Virginia Pitt hosted Mid-Atlantic Conference (MAC) Ohio at Heinz last Saturday. It wasn’t Ohio State mind you but Ohio…who actually isn’t all that bad of a team for a MAC school. Let’s set the stage a bit:

Against Virginia Pitt looked pretty shabby in just about every aspect of play. After VA moved out to a 13-0 lead Pitt had its only two decent drives, both in the 2nd quarter, to go ahead by one point, 14-13 at the half.  After that…nothing at all… while VA scored 17 unanswered points. Fans will have different opinions about how Pitt actually played in that game but regardless of how you break the game down it was a disappointment to those who thought we had a chance to start off the 2019 season on the right foot.

But that foot tripped over its other foot and we started 0-1 in ACC play.

Then last Saturday we seemed to play better. In many aspects we took a big leap ahead, especially in the passing game by our QB Kenny Pickett. What he did against VA was pretty horrid with 21/41 for 185 yards @ 4.5 yards per attempt & an 87.4 passer rating… and watching it unfold felt even worse. But he rebounded against Ohio in a big way by throwing for 26/37 for 321 yards @ 8.6 ypa and a 151.0 rating in a 20-10 victory.

Was that a big step in the direction of what our new OC Mark Whipple thinks we’ll see each week out of the passing game or was that a result of playing a MAC defense that was 99th in Passing Yards Allowed (3300 yards and 24 TDs) in 2018? Who knows, but it was better passing and receiving play and less sacks allowed by our Offensive Line then the week before so that bodes well. Our talented WRs didn’t drop as many passes in Week 2 as in Week 1 and that helped account for the big yardage jump also.

I don’t buy into the belief that we’ll see that same level of passing play we did last week as the norm for the rest of the season save for maybe against Delaware and a poorer ACC team. I certainly believe that our next opponent, Penn State, will put so much defensive pressure on Pickett we’ll see more of a reprise of the VA game then of what we saw in the Ohio match. I’m not taking Pickett’s accomplishment away from him, but hell folks, throwing for 321 yards and yet only one (1!) TD? He has to do better than that if we are to win Saturday and our conference games later in the season.

Regardless of if our passing game was effective or not we have kept up the poor work in the second half of our ball games scoring 0 points against VA and then only 3 points against Ohio.  This trend has been a killer for us – in our last five matches we have scored a total of nine points in the second half.  Nine points in 10 quarters of play.

Here’s how that broke down as far as points scored after the half going back and including the last three games (all losses) of 2018: Miami – 3 points; Clemson – 0; Stanford – 3; VA – 0 and Ohio – 3. Nice pattern but totally crap late and needed offensive play and a scoring difference of 49-9 2nd half points overall.

That is actually horrid and as a result we are 1-4 in those five games with the only win being against a lesser foe. That really bothers me for a variety of reasons but what jumps out most is the continued absence of effective halftime offensive adjustments by Narduzzi and his staff.

Our run game was a bit better against Ohio than it was against VA. In that first game the VA defense held us to 30 carries for 78 yards (2.6 ypc) and 1 TD. Ugh. We rebounded against the Bobcats with a better showing of 37 carries for 160 yards (4.3) and 1 TD also. Still not what we’d like to see against an FCS school, but better.

Looking at this season’s rushing so far at 67-238 @ 3.6 ypc and 2 TDs I very much doubt we’ll see anything like the rushing game we had last season this year – far from it maybe.

Penn State currently sits at 30th nationally in rushing defense giving up only 2.19 ypc and zero TDs. That said the Nitters haven’t played the schedule we have so far with their Idaho (79-7 win) and Buffalo (45-13 win) games.

What jumps out to me is that regardless of who PSU played they outscored their opponents 79-20 in averaging 62 ppg. I think they will score a bunch against us on Saturday also. The question therefore is ‘are we going to be able to keep pace with them?’ I don’t think we can enough to win the ballgame in Happy Valley with 106+ crazy fans screaming their lungs out. It will be our first away game and one that signifies which major PA team gets the last win in what may be a very long time before these two teams play again. Pitt dined out on our  2000 win until 2017 when we lost to the Bad Guys up in Blinders-on, PA.

Look at our record in the last three games against PSU; we are 1-2 and have been outscored 123-62 with a humiliating 51-6 loss last year. And we had a semi-decent team last season – better than the current 2019 version in my opinion, albeit with different approach offensively this go-round.

But Penn State is Penn State and when we won that last match against them we were fielding talent like QB Nate Peterman (3 TD passes), WR Q. Henderson (7 touches for 107 yards @ 15.0 ypt and 1 TD) and RB James Conner (146 yards total at 5.6 ypt and 2 TDs) on offense and an offensive line that was one of the best we have had in ages.

That OL gave us a 28th ranked rushing Offense along with a 3rd ranked Sacks Allowed at only 10 on the whole season. We have no offensives stars of that caliber on this squad – so far at least. Some kids shined against Ohio but we’ll see what they do against better competition.
This year’s version of the OL is a far cry from those of the past when we won 8 games and as such I feel Pickett will be running for his life on most of his drop backs on Saturday. That’s going to make a big difference in his passing stats and effectiveness.

I don’t have a crystal ball but I predicted a 1-3 start on the season by the Panthers and nothing I’ve seen has changed my mind on what will most probably happen in Happy Valley. I think PSU shuts down our run game, disrupts the passing game and scores on deep passes against us.

Penn State is now giving (-)17 points to Pitt according to the latest betting websites. I think that is just about correct but I’ll take even more PSU points so my prediction is:

PSU – 45
Pitt –  17

After the disappointment of UVa-Pitt, I briefly debated just getting in my car and driving the two-plus hours home at 11pm; rather then stay in Pittsburgh and even think or talk about the game. Rational thinking got the better of me, so I met up with some friends in a bar for a night cap before crashing in a friend’s guest room.

What to say about the game that hasn’t been said already? The O-line couldn’t block for the run or pass. Kenny Pickett had a good second quarter but that was about it. The wide receivers sure didn’t help. Still don’t know about the running game because the O-line was such a disaster. Have I mentioned that the O-line was bad?

The defense played rather well, all things considered. So, naturally defensive tackle Keyshon Camp — who looked really good — got hurt and is now out for the season. That’s two starting impact players on the defensive line that are out for the season.

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