As all college fans do after LOI Day has come and gone we are parsing each bit of info we can to either praise a recruiting class or, on the other hand, wonder why it isn’t better. Obviously you can count me, and many other Pitt fans in that latter camp.  While I do not think this is a bad class… I have to say that I’m disappointed in it.

One of the reasons listed by Pitt fans over and over again for the drop in recruiting is that the lower quantity of high school talent in the local area has hindered getting quality recruits out of Pitt’s historical recruiting footprint of WPA.  That may well be true. What the fans don’t talk much about is that Penn State and other schools have been kicking our ass so heavily in getting WPA recruits it’s like we are looking at the caboose of a departing recruitment train.

As follows that we read comments all the time that say head coach Pat Narduzzi needs to expand his recruiting efforts southward, into SEC territory mostly, to maximize the talent pools available there.  I’ll agree with that also.

What most Pitt fans don’t realize though is that he’s been doing just that already and at a large pace – the problem is that he’s just not doing as well as we need him to at getting those southern recruits onto campus for their official visits and hence their verbal commitments.  Here is some very interesting info in regards to this subject that I crunched from the Pitt Offers Sheet we have been looking at over the last week.

In looking at offers to Southern states I included NC, SC, TN, MS, AL, GA, and FL in that listing and created a chart (below) to show how many 4* and 5* offers we had out in total and then to those southern states’ recruits… along with the total and southern 3* offer numbers also.

What came out is very interesting to me – Narduzzi has been recruiting the hell out of the South – it has been a large percentage (a total of 32%) of our scholarship offers over the last three years considering it is a relatively small area as opposed to the rest of our recruiting areas east of the Mississippi.

Continue reading “Pitt’s Recruiting & Geographical Targeting” →