Pitt Summary: Welp. That happened.

...yeah.

First of all I want to thank Eric Kumah and Ryan Willis, who both tried really hard and put in decent games. I want to thank Tre Turner in a lot of places, too. I want to thank Dax Hollifield who I think eventually will be really, really good. I want to thank TyJuan Garbutt for coming in and making a couple plays. Steven Peoples always goes out there and tries his hardest.

But right now I want to pretty much burn everything else to the ground, past and present. Some of it is due to former coaching staff failures and misreads on recruiting. The classes of 2014, 2015, and 2016 had some monumental hits (Ricky Walker, Isaiah Ford, Cam Phillips, Terrell and Tremaine Edmunds, Greg Stroman, Tim Settle) some solid players (Yosuah Nijman, Houshun Gaines, Eric Kumah), and some players that are in development still (Jarrod Hewitt, TJ Jackson, Emmanuel Belmar, Divine Deablo, Reggie Floyd, Deshawn McClease). But the vast majority of the classes aren’t even around as useful depth anymore. That’s three years of recruiting that means that these past two years are going to make up the vast majority of the roster. Which means they’re all young and inexperienced. End of discussion.

Currently? Bud Foster and his whole defensive staff have been put on skates with the lack of experienced depth compounded by the injuries and then the fact that, honestly, and we’ve harped on this for years, his defense is increasingly too small for modern football. The defensive line is young and tiny, which means that it’s getting manhandled right now. The linebackers aren’t reading keys properly and flowing to the ball and filling gaps. Cornerbacks are doing a terrible job of covering receivers and an even worse job of simple tackling. Deablo and Floyd are doing the best right now, and that’s still not great. The outside contain and the fill and the keying and the tackling are, all over, quite bad.

Offensively I want to bash my head against the wall. I don’t get it. Please someone explain to me why on drives you even pull out Willis to dive Patterson into the line when they know that’s what he’s going to do. Why keep running swing passes against a team that’s keeping the pressure at the line of scrimmage? Why keep running tanked dive plays into 2^nd and 12 situations? Why is it that the player choices and the play choices are almost always directly linked in a way that makes playcalling super obvious? How come our offensive line still can’t get a drive off the line of scrimmage? How come our best tailback option- at least according to who is actually playing- is a walk on that can’t be passed by recruited players? But then we’re losing experience and we’re looking at the same problem.

I don’t know what exactly to say when you get completely run over. That it’ll get better? It’ll take another year for that to happen. Right now we just need to buckle up. Because it’ll take time that right now the fans don’t have or want to spend.