…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.