I’ll try to do a weekly spot where I answer some lingering questions raised in the comments section that weren’t subsequently answered by myself or other commenters.  One of those, for example, was regarding how many returning players the other teams have for this season.

Remember Pitt has only 6 Offensive, 4 Defensive and 1 ST players returning.  Here are the others’ returnees numbers.

So you can see that we are at the bottom numerically if we look at just our offense and defense where we have only 10 returnees.  What does this mean?  Well, we better see the fruits of our expectations for Narduzzi’s recruiting efforts pan out on the field because every other ACC team is reloading at their vacant starting positions also and they all have less spots to fill.  Here is who has more than us of our opponents in ’17:

NC State – 18;   Miami – 17;    GT – 16;    Duke & VT – 14;   SYR & NC – 13. 

I don’t know about you all but when I look at NC State, Miami and GT having so many more returning starters than us I think you have to factor that in when discussing those games in advance – the bookies sure do.  Especially when given the fact that Miami and NC State are replacing whoever they lost with much higher rated recruiting classes than ours.

As we discuss below though… the games are not played on paper or on a laptop (yet, I can’t speak for 50 years from now).

As mentioned, let’s look at how our 2017 opponents’ Rivals.com recruit rankings were during Narduzzi’s first two full recruiting years of 2015 and ’16.

FBS Schools	2015’s  Rank	2016’s  Rank	Average
PSU	15	21	18
Miami	26	23	24.5
NC	28	22	25
NC State	35	43	39
OK State	38	45	41
VT	24	49	42
Duke	62	31	46.5
Pitt	65	29	47
VA	44	61	52
GT	39	67	53

Interestingly enough all of these schools are in the top 41% of the whole 128 teams.

So – other schools reload just as Pitt will this season and as much as we want to think our recruits will do well, and some sure will do well for us, other school’s fans are hoping the exact same thing.

Again – it is the age-old question of is it the “Jimmys and Joes” or the “Xs and Os”.  In our case let’s hope our coaching staff is better that all our opponents because, apparently, our recruits weren’t better than them on paper.

Of course the games are played out on the field and not on paper thus our last season’s wins over PSU and Clemson refute this premise.  Clemson’s previous recruiting classes were ranked 15th in ’13 and 4th in ’14… yet we beat them, didn’t we? Continue reading “POV Readers Fill Out The Lineup” →