Pitt is Still (Unfortunately) Pitt

One of the things I’d like to think I’m good at is fessing up to it when I get fooled by a team’s early-season performance, get high on hopium, and then have to watch in annoyance as that team spirals into the abyss.

Well, we are fully in that mode with Pitt football right now. And I must admit, I really did not think this was going to happen. Four straight losses, all of them pathetic and/or annoying in a uniquely Pitt way, and now a season that had people (me) dreaming of things like “The College Football Playoff” can’t end soon enough.

Getting blown out by SMU was somewhat forgivable. The Mustangs look like one of the ten best teams in the country. Losing to Virginia the following week? Not so much. Losing the way they did to Clemson, when they appeared to have the Tigers beat, and perhaps their season salvaged? Unacceptable. No-showing against Louisville Saturday afternoon was the cherry on top.

Any questions Pitt thought it had answered in starting 7-0 are now staring them in the face, in all caps. Here are just a few off the top of my head:

-Is Kade Bell’s offense functional at the FBS level? His go-go-go system worked well at Western Carolina, where the overall level of depth and talent isn’t close to what it is in the ACC; Pitt isn’t fooling teams or stressing them much anymore. So you can either say that the system isn’t very novel anymore, or…

-Are the quarterbacks running it the real problem? Eli Holstein has been banged up going back to the Syracuse game, when he was left in during a blowout and suffered a concussion. He was left in presumably because he hadn’t looked good against Cal two weeks prior, and Pat Narduzzi wanted to get him some reps in a game where Pitt’s offense was asked to do very little. His slide was already starting, and it only got worse.

Through five games, Holstein and Pitt were 5-0, and he had 15 touchdowns and 3 interceptions, while completing 66 percent of his passes. He’s played five games since, with a total of 2 touchdowns and 4 picks, with a 56 percent completion percentage. To make matters worse, he was carted off with a leg injury against Louisville. Nate Yarnell should have been good enough to beat Clemson, but as we have already noted, the defense let him down in spectacular fashion.

-Can Pat Narduzzi acquire (and keep) enough talent? This, if we’re being honest, is always going to be the biggest, most existential question, one that is even more relevant in the NIL era. If you wanted to boil Pitt’s problems down to one thing above all else, it’s that they simply don’t have enough talent, or enough depth. They’re always going to produce solid, sometimes spectacular NFL players. That has happened consistently enough that we can take it as an article of faith, at this point.

What we can also take as an article of faith is that Narduzzi is never going to out-recruit Penn State, is never going to stop Ohio State from swooping in to take the area’s absolute best talent, and in the event that he does actually land a four-star or five-star prospect, will struggle to keep that player from being poached by deeper-pocketed programs. That’s just the reality. I’m not sure how you combat it, either. I thought Bell’s system was a good start; Pitt should be a more “gimmicky” team, for lack of a better term, because they aren’t talented enough to just line up and win with Jimmies and Joes over Xs and Os. That strategy has crashed and burned this year. It’s hard to more than double the win total from a previous season, out-perform preseason expectations, and still have the whole operation feel like a stinging disappointment, but that’s what this year’s Pitt team has done.

They’ll run it back with Bell and Holstein next year, you’d imagine; the latter is still just a redshirt freshman, and Bell deserves a chance to punch back at some of the adjustments he’s had to face this season, but 2025 suddenly becomes a massive year for the direction of the program.

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