Oh, sure it could be about the first verbal commit for Pitt since the end of March. But it is also about the first commit to Pitt from Central Catholic since Andrew Taglianetti and Tino Sunseri in the 2008 class. That seems crazy, but Pitt has only offered three kids from Central Catholic until this year (which also seems kind of crazy).
Pitt has already offered three players from Central Catholic. Bricen Garner, Rahsad Wheeler and Damar Hamlin.
Bricen Garner gave his verbal to Pitt last night.
“When you go to the facility and meet with the players, you can see the difference from last year to this year,” Garner told Panther-Lair.com. “They’re buying into the coaches and what they’re saying and what they’re preaching.”
And Garner has bought in, too, as he committed to Pitt on Thursday night. Garner picked Pitt over 16 other offers, including scholarships from Army, Ball State, Bowling Green, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Connecticut, Eastern Michigan, Fordham, Kent State, UMass, Miami (Oh.), Navy, Old Dominion, Temple, Toledo and Towson.
“It was a combination of the coaching staff and the football program,” Garner said. “The coaches are trying to urn everything around, and I like everything about the school.
“I think I decided last week. I went on a visit, took a tour of the campus and it felt like home.”
Garner announced his decision on KDKA-TV, Pittsburgh’s CBS affiliate, and the hometown angle was a key one for him.
“It’s important because your family can come out and you, and you’ll have support from your high school and your friends,” he said. “It will be nice to play for your hometown team.
“I believe this staff will be able to keep the local guys. They do a good job of recruiting in the WPIAL and the city, and they recruit the local guys hard, so I think they’ll keep a lot of the guys home. Of course, I’m going to try to get those guys to Pitt, too.”
Garner will come to Pitt to play safety. At Central Catholic, he plays both defensive back and wide receiver so he has decent hands.
Garner is rated as a 3-star recruit, per Scout.com, Rivals.com and 247. ESPN.com does not have him evaluated yet.
The final aspect of his verbal is the comment from his head coach Terry Totten on Garner being the first commit from Central Catholic in several years.
Garner is the first Central Catholic player to commit to Pitt since 2008 when quarterback Tino Sunseri and defensive back Andrew Taglianetti pledged to Pitt.
“We hope to change that,” Totten said.
I would like to pretend that he is referring specifically to Wheeler and Hamlin. But I think it has more to do with the amount of offers that Central Catholic players received from Pitt in recent years. There hasn’t been many. In no small part because the players haven’t been at the level of this group.
He’s speaking as much about Central Catholic as he is sending them to Pitt.
Johnny Petrishen S (PSU) 2015
JJ Constantino QB (FSU) 2013
A Nixon LB / P Hills QB (Maryland) — 2012 — I assume they were recruited by Gattuso
The above were all 3 stars; there were a handful of 2 stars that went to Toledo, Eastern Mich, Fordham, etc
Timmeh – what’s Joe D up to these days? Any more restraining orders?
Let’s be totally honest here, guys and gals. If you’re making your decision based on FOOTBALL prowess, Hamlin should go to Ohio State. If you’re making your decision based on EDUCATIONAL PRESTIGE, Hamlin should go to Notre Dame.
The only reason to pick PITT is if you wanna stay home. I welcome anyone who wants to debate this stuff, but it seems that FACTS are FACTS.
People oughta have to take a class to be eligible for a Twitter account.
If only it was so simple for an 18 year old. The biggest factor for these kids is how they feel on their visits and the relationships they have with the coaches. Coaches they see coaching them for the next 4 or 5 years.
…and unless you went to OSU and/or ND you don’t think those two schools are better than the rest.
Sorry, when I thing Educational Prestige, I don’t think ND. Ivy league maybe, certainly not ND.
How is that not appropriate to be on a local news broadcast?
Do any of you watch the local news? I swear… Can we not interrupt one more bank robbery, murder, assault, child sex offender, fatal accident, natural disaster… and on, and on.. for a piece of nice, local, relevant news?
Comment by notrocketscience 06.19.15 @ 8:38 am
Not to stick up for the Domers, because I really do enjoy sticking it to them…
But they are very well respected and ranked nationally among the Ivy Leagues..
Still won’t feel secure till some of the guys with offers from top twenty teams start to commit. Tough wait since most of them will take their visits and deliberate over offers. As with Chryst hope Narduzzi is a good judge of talent with the 2 and 3 star guys because that is what we will live with until we start winning.
Important to keep the local guys home to increase attendance and local support. That is why Boyd and Whitehead to Pitt was so huge, for years we have been losing the top stars.
Unlike the attitude of the PSU coach Gattlin with his stupid quote on ‘package deals’ directly specifically at Garner.
Lot of top talent at Pitt yesterday including Clairton kid and….. sanders… RB….
This kid flipp’n from ped state to Pitt is going to be part of the explosion early in fall when/if Pitt looks like the team Coach Duzz is talking about….
Whose House? love the attitude growing on the net about “412” and home turf… link to youtube.com
How is that not appropriate to be on a local news broadcast?”
I guess it’s not appropriate when they commit to PSU, WVU or OSU ….. right?
But because our turf is so small by comparison and because the big schools are always going to try to poach local players, Narduzzi has to do well regionally and nationally. His brand of relentless defense should help. I do agree with Dark Knight that a gunslinging QB is a must down the road. Hard to get in the national limelight without one.
Looking forward to finding out if Narduzzi can walk the talk.
If they want to spend 20 seconds, or 90 seconds, or whatever, talking about local kids earning scholarships.. I’m fine with that. PSU, IUP, Slippery Rock. Whatever… It’s the local broadcast. It’s not like it’s ESPN.
And it’s better than most of the garbage they relentlessly force feed viewers.
If he’s good enough, he can make it anywhere, so that’s a non factor really.
Tyler Boyd could have gone to Ohio St., USC or Alabama.
Ain’t effecting him a bit. Not effecting any of the tons of players Pitt has put into the NFL.
Notre Dame prestige, ehh?? You’re still gonna have to interview. Maybe it gets you in the door, maybe, but if someone has a 4.0 from another school, they’ll get in the door too.
They’ll make connections? So do kids at every school they graduate from.
Unless you’re from Yale, Harvard or M.I.T. and you’re a rocket scientist in a specialty field, it’s all relative.
I’ll throw this at you. What if he wants to be a doctor???
I don’t think Notre Dame even has a medical school do they??
Who’s resume’s gonna look better there???
Whoa, strongly, strongly disagree there!! Many, many solid NFL Players stayed steadfastly in-school to graduate, and had stellar post-football careers over the recent years — and many will continue to do so. Pitt is an amazing school (biased much? Yes, all-day-every-day haha) and yes, Notre Dame is a wonderful Academic School (and yes, PS “Who?” and OSU are great Academic Institutions also, regardless of being gargantuan).
“Actually, “football prowess” shouldn’t even come into it for a kid.
If he’s good enough, he can make it anywhere, so that’s a non factor really.”
Oh, man, could you hit the nail more on-the-head? (With a Sledgehammer no-less? haha). — If you can ball, you can ball, and nowadays you will get crazy attention. Only “In-Crowd” dudes just go with Big-Brand schools to try and “Ride-the-Wave”. Tyler Boyd forged his own path (including on the Road last Saturday Morning!…..sorry please don’t stone-me haha)
I wonder, if Robert Foster came to Pitt, just how good would he be?? Maybe Foster would have been an Adonis Jennings type player, at least at first (even though he was ranked a 5 star, top-Dawg type HS player vs 4 star).
That certainly may be true, but it’s much easier to get recognized when the rest of your team is elite. Committing to a school with a top QB will make a WR look better on film, an already great defense all make a LB look better on film, an already great RB will make an OL look better.
The idea that you’ll be recognized anywhere may be true, but if the rest of your team is sub-par there’s a good shot you look bad on tape, too. Boyd is one of those rare examples of shining through despite a mediocre team.
Don’t conflate the exception with the rule.
Bricen has the length the weight will
come later. Looking forward to additional
commits soon.
@Dan, Notre Dame’s alumni network is very good, especially in finance. I have two friends, both ND alums, one ran one of the world’s largest hedge funds until recently and the other one of the largest private equity firms. They are big backers, kids go to ND, many family friends went to ND, etc. Very supportive alumni network.
I write this as a proud Pitt alum. Pitt’s graduate programs are certainly better overall, but ND’s undergrad program has higher admissions standards and offers a better professional network. It doesn’t have to be an Ivy to be tangibly better than Pitt (there are many non-Ivies in that category, like Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Rice, Vanderbilt, etc.).
Haha just out of curiosity Mr. “GoldPanther” …. what do you think of Pitt’s current ‘QB Situation’??
Lol I’m the only one who ever seems to have brought it up in the last year.
Actually I have zero worries overall about Pitt Athletics (B-Ball included, c’mon Mr. Dixon) with Chancellor “Pat” Gallagher and Scott Barnes at the helm of Pitt —- take my money (err, Pennies, lol) — hopefully all of you “Big Alums” will “Hear The Call!” 🙂
ND gets all the calls in FB and is coached by the whore
Brian Kelly. We agree ND is an incredible school just
wondering how the players get in AND how they stay
eligible? Net ND works the system just like all other
schools. ND once admitted a top player from a trade
school in Chicago….wish i could remember the name.
Yeah DK, NFL players are a studious bunch.
Grade inflation and SAT score inflation is a scam, yet we graduates get lost in the final stats.Why do we see so many scandals in academia? A friend of mine has a son that graduated high school with a 4.6 on a 4.0 scale. This is almost as bad as giving 110%. There is no such thing! He had already accumulated 40 college credits and would be entering a big state school as a second semester sophomore. The dad knows it is a bunch of crap but is laughing his way through academic scholarships! How did our society turn into a bunch of drama mongers?
Recruits need to study the two deep and redshirts. Why would Sanders go to PSU when his best chance to see the field is 10 miles from his home and the oline is impressive. Conner will be gone and if he works hard and earns it, the playing time is his. At the Dairy school out east, he will have to beat out a stable of 4 stars, despite a bunch of promises from a slick head coach. His choice, but it seems obvious to me.
Hamlin, same deal. Pitt has one potential superstar in its defensive backfield. He can see immediate playing time if he earns it. He will have to beat out a bunch of 3 stars, but I think he can. At OSU, he will battle a bunch of 4 stars…and they are deep. Plus, Urban prefers Ohio kids. Part of his everyday speech is to represent the state of Ohio first. Buyer beware going to that school.
Wheeler, same deal. Why go to the Dairy school to sit behind 4 four stars and hope to get your chance? Makes no sense. You need to get on the field and you need a respected defensive coach to go to bat for you when it is time for the draft!
Foster got the biggest break this year. He was buried on the depth chart, but Alabama had three serious injuries to wr’s this spring. He was a benefactor. Hopefully he does well. Which brings me to my final point. Absent those injuries, a 5 star Foster would never have seen the field at Alabama. No field, equals no film, equals no draft. Foster was lucky. These kids get bad advice and need to start doing their homework outside of class.
Welcome aboard Bricen. I see you as an outside linebacker in 2 years. Keep up your speed and keep up your academics.
For all the fans who rely on the recruiting ‘star’ system:
I just looked up PITT’s 2016 offer list and on it we have this remaining; one 5* and 32 4* players.
Out of those 33 recruits 20 are from WPA, PA, OH, MD/DC, or NJ – places out of which I consider reasonable for us to pull commitments.
That looks pretty iffy to me considering that those are the same stomping grounds as MI, MSU, OSU, WVU, PSU, and PSU’s now-main rival Temple. Plus, that means that this staff has only offered 13 4* kids OUTSIDE of those areas (Florida, etc)
I suppose we could get that ‘Big Kill generated’ tsunami Dokish mentioned – but reading between the lines I think he’s referring to the three Central Catholic guys to fall like dominos but we need to strongly recruit outside of WPA also if we want to get the best recruits possible.
But, a lot of the higher-ranked recruits do wait until football season begins to commit so no panic here so far.
Now, all that said, I do believe that 3* recruits are great if they are what the staff wants to fill specific needs on the roster. It seems to me – national stats aside – that at PITT 3* & 2* kids become stars on the field as much as the 5* & 4* kids do.
First off I will say that I am a huge believer in the scrappy overachieving two-star player, and that a team of well-coached and hungry (key phrase) three stars will beat your team of moderately-to-poorly coached four stars any day of the week.
I may or may not be right, because the team I just described is the exception not the rule.
The rule, on the other hand, is that talent wins, and usually recruiting sites get it right.
Check out this article from all the way back in 2013.
It’s long read, but if you scroll down to the charts you’ll notice that they break teams down into star rankings based on average recruit. The most telling chart is the head to head winning% by recruiting rating. Turns out that the higher-star team wins 66% of the time.
From the article:
“On the final count, the higher-ranked team according to the recruiting rankings won almost exactly two-thirds of the time (66.4 percent of the time, to be exact), and every “class” as a whole had a winning record against every class ranked below it every single year. (The only exception, if it even qualifies, came last year, when “two-star” teams finished one game below .500 in head-to-head collisions with “one-star” teams. Elsewhere, the hierarchy held across every line.) The gap on the field also widened with the gap in the recruiting scores: At the extremes, “one-star” recruiting teams managed a grand total of six wins over “four-star” and “five-star” recruiters in 59 tries. Where a small handful of teams defied their rankings, none managed to do so as part of a larger group.
Which is, again, about as accurate as we can realistically expect from a system designed to predict an uncertain future.”
Also noteworthy in this analysis Pitt and Penn State were both three star teams. (It took the 2010 – 2013 classes into account. The prime Wannstadt years)
So…to put this all in perspective it validates what we already knew. Higher rated recruits are better.
But it shouldn’t necessarily reduce your hope for the Narduzzi regime. There are teams out there that punch higher then their weight. Yes, they have exceptional coaches, and probably pretty damn good recruiting staffs who can find diamonds-in-the-rough and lower star guys who are best-fits for the scheme.
Those coaches are few and far between. Time will if ours is one of them.
Hail to Pitt
This is how you get to 6-7.
The importance of this recruit is he may deliver the 412 crew to Pitt .
Also would rather get some 305’s over 412’s, need some speed.
At any school it takes about a full year for a regime change to become a comfortable issue with recruits and their parents. On top of that add PITT’s inglorious past five years and you can see Narduzzi is rolling the boulder uphill at this point.
As an aside – I think it is funny that some PITT fans who are so excited about the AD and HC changes and are flipping out over having Narduzzi as HC think their excitement is going to be match by any recruits. It just don’t work that way.
Recruits and their parents (and grandparents & HS coaches) are way more practical when approaching the decision that is going to impact the player’s next 4-5 years and life afterward.
We can jump up and down and be as excited as we want but that doesn’t lessen the draw of the other big and more stable football programs we are recruiting against.
I don’t understand how you can comment on the excitement being generated over the program by recruits and their families when you refuse to follow this stuff on social media. There is a buzz that hasn’t been around the program in years. HS coaches have commented on it as have the recruits and their parents. Social media is the pulse of this generation. You may not like it and not use it, but I don’t think you can speak intelligently on it if you’re not watching it unfold there. You write form the “same old Pitt” perspective. This isn’t the same old Pitt. If they fail, it’s not going to be for lack of effort.
This new buzz probably is not going to have much influence with the kids in this class b/c they don’t have several years of relationships built but it will start coming to fruition in 2017 and beyond. Any WPIAL kid that wants to stay home but wasn’t considering it b/c of Pitt previously will be in play though … thus the 412 crew hype.
Besides Ohio State and PSU there aren’t many big time programs competing for the kids. WVU is being boxed out – which I have a feeling is part of the reason why Pitt doesn’t want to renew that rivalry. Keeps WVU out of PGH recruiting. PSU has their fans and will get their share of kids – that’s just to be accepted. PSU has a large alumni following in PGH. Can’t get around it.
Historically, even during Pitt’s best years, they’ve only had 6 or 7 WPIAL kids anyways. Plenty of talent to go around.
I just don’t understand why you continue to be so condescending towards the new staff. I still think you’re holding a grudge for the media black out in the spring. So far the staff is doing all the right things yet you continue to try to temper expectations and excitement over the program. We’re not children. We don’t need to be protected from watching a football team not perform on Saturdays.
Part of fixing the culture that Pitt is so desperately trying to fix is getting the fan base excited in addition to the players. Let Pitt fans enjoy the newfound optimism. Being a Pitt football fan is fun right now.
Well said . The 412 Crew is a buzz through the social media and will stick together on the recruiting front. These new Pitt coaches are tapped into this recruiting avenue. Garner is the tip of the 412 crew with fewer recruiting options which could sway the other 412 guys to Pitt.
But I also think some is generated in the off season because the football doldrums have set it.
My point is that all the public buzz and excitement won’t mean a whole lot to the actual kids who have multiple strong offers from good (better) football schools and especially not their parents. Don’t underestimate how much sway the parents have, and you don’t see them on twitter much if at all.
When it comes to crunch time for a committment decision social media will have had a small part to play. Good old fashioned camps, home visits, official and unofficial vists, etc will be the difference maker as always.
Of course the first season of any new head coach has a certain buzz to it, we also saw that with “high octane” and the highly ranked OC we hired three years ago.
To say that wasn’t this case back then is selective memory.
This major buzz will last until we see exactly what sort of team Narduzzi puts on the field. If it is a good team, and it may well be, then all this will turn into genuine excitement… if not this will be short lived and tied oonly to the coaching change itself.
Again, I like the new staff but until I see concrete evidence that things are so much better at PITT I’ll have some lingering skepticism. Let’s hope that happens and soon starting with some blue chip recruits
No kidding… maybe because Central is on PITT’s campus.