The day before the game is a good time to sit back in your chair and take a long look at all your scribbled notes you have been jotting down, when you should have been working, about what you have read, seen and heard about the upcoming Pitt vs. Akron game.   It’s time to look at what you know and feel and start thinking hard about what you believe we’ll see come out of Zips hometown of Akron, Ohio on Saturday night.

To recap: Justin did a great piece on Thursday with his “Know Your Enemy: Akron Zips” article.  It succinctly covered Zips offense and their defense and then he adds his thoughts about the game in closing.  Justin’s prediction is this

“Pitt wins an ugly one 24-13 thanks to a few turnovers from the defense and a smart yet boring day from the offense which avoids any big mistakes. Tyler Boyd turns something into nothing once or twice to open it up for the running game to be just good enough to control the game.”

Here is a little something to help you in recapping the YSU win but remember that this shows only Pitt’s highlight and none of the lowlights as they say.

Leading up to the game and digesting what we saw on last Saturday it is evident that a few things jumped out as negatives which we may not all have expected. I did not think Voytik was going to come out of those 60 minutes having played the worst game of his career. I truly didn’t expect that and do not think he’ll replicate it this Saturday.

Narduzzi attributed our QB’s poor showing to some opening day jitters theory to which I was pretty astounded he actually had the bad sense to use.  That to me was disappointing as much as anything that happened on the field.  But then I had to remember that it was Narduzzi’s own opening day jitters that led him to say that.  Voytik will improve but the question is whether it be a gradual, small increment improvement or will it be ‘put that loss in the rear view mirror and play much better’ type of improvement.

We can cherry pick some of the bright spots of last week’s games and feel good about what happened and we should do that as fans.  Hope springs eternal and all that.  But the real way to look at a future match, at least to me, is to look at what we did wrong and try to figure out if those problems are fixable in five days of practice.

I mentioned Voytik’s play above and my jury is out on that.  It isn’t like that type of play is an aberration for him, we have seen it before.  I think he’ll do a bit better but I also honestly we won’t see him start to really progress until the staff sits him down and says the season-long starting QB job is his.  It could well be that he’s not thriving with competition as one would expect.

I don’t know about his HS career but the reality is that this situation between him and Peterman is the first actual competitions he’s faced at Pitt.  He wasn’t going to play as a FR; Chryst got Savage the next year and last season Anderson wasn’t really in the mix as much as we were led to believe.  Maybe that’s put a crimp in his play so far.

Our running game was top of the line against YSU and you’d think we’d be able to replicate that with no problem.  However, I don’t think we are going to see Ollison or James ripping off those 50+ yard runs with consistent frequency. What we really need to see more than anything else is a constant movement of the sticks after two consecutive running plays.  When we start doing that I’ll feel much better about our OL run blocking and will let go of the thought that the big rushing yardage against YSU might have been an aberration.

Saturday we had 43 rushes for 325 yards and a 7.6 ypc average.  Will we be able to do that again?  Not without those big runs and maybe not because we are without Conner.  Ollison and James are very good talents but you never know how an offense is going to react to the loss of not only a superstar player but a true leader who guides the unit by example, support and hard work.

We need to be able to get the ball in deep our territory and take it downfield on a long series to march off time and to score. I don’t think we saw a drive like that once last game did we?  Here is the scoring drive summary for your perusal, but no we didn’t.

One thing jumped out at me while watching the game; our failures on 3^rd down conversions.  Pitt converted 5 of 14 attempts on 3^rd down and every one of those was on the ground. Voytik had six 3^rd down passes and threw a Pick Six, one pass for (-)9 yards and four completed passes which were thrown to players behind the sticks and the receivers tackled short of the 1^st down.  We need to do a lot better than that if we want to win ACC games.

On most of the 3^rd down passing attempts we had someone open past the 1^st down marker but Voytik passed to the closer receiver.  That has to get fixed and quickly by Voytik especially because Peterman had two 3^rd down attempts and completed a 19 yard pass and then a 41 yarder to convert both.  Not just fixed for 3rd downs either, this has been a problem since he took his first snap at Pitt.

After the game Artie Rowell addressed a problem the offense had when he said this about the running game and the communication errors between the staff, the QB and the offense:

Although Pitt ran for 325 yards behind various line combinations, Rowell said some communication issues might have prevented an even better performance.

“First-game stuff,” he said. “Just some communication things from the sideline to Chad (quarterback Voytik) to (the offensive line). We have to be on the same page, not nine out of 10 times; we need to be on it 100 percent of the time. If there is one play that gets signaled in incorrectly or Chad interprets it incorrectly, that could mess things up.

“That and the communication during the play, line calls, and I take that responsibility. More studying needs to take place. Everything has to get amped up one more notch.”

If that continues and we aren’t getting the benefit of big runs for TDs then we need to get yardage and points some other way. That would be where the passing game and special teams come in, especially on 3^rd down and if that fails, which it did miserably against YSU, then on 4^th downs.

As shown above, five 1^st downs in 14 3^rd down conversion attempts isn’t good football at all.  Neither is having seven punts for 247 yards with an average per punt of 36.5 yards and a net yardage of 31.5, which sucks.  Here are the field positions we left YSU with after our punts and what YSU did on the next drives:

1^st Half: Punt to the Pitt 37 (FG) and YSU 46 (FG)

2^nd Half: Punt to the Pitt 46 (Downs); YSU 20 (TD); YSU 35 (downs) and YSU 17 (End of Game)

So we pinned them back deep in their own ground only twice all game and one of those didn’t really affect the game.  We have to get better punting and resultant field position than that.

Finally, some fans are looking at this as a sort of “Redemption Game” where the fact that we were utterly humiliated by the Zips last season is somehow going to make our players bigger, faster and wanting to win the game more than a regular game.  They feel it is a They beat us damn it! Now we get revenge! scenario.

Really though?  That’s supposed to happen?  You could have fooled me by the way we played against YSU and that was a supposedly a redemption game also. Is that what we saw last week when the Pitt players came out of the tunnel at Heinz then promptly gave up a FG then were forced to punt in a 4 and out series?  Then later deflated again and gave up 24 points to the Zips in the second half?

Yesterday I said all this in a comment and got this answer from a fan in return:

The fact that we have nearly the same roster as last year is why we’ll zap the Zips. The kids know it was a historically bad loss for Pitt, and they’ll be fired up.

When I asked why then the squad wasn’t ‘fired up’ against YSU I got this reply:

The YSU loss was a few seasons previous, very few of the players in that game are still with the squad. The Akron game was less than a year ago.

Now, I didn’t quote that to embarrass any reader, the author is very knowledgeable about football and is perceptive, I did it as an example of how fan’s wants and desires get clouded with emotions sometimes.

The truth of the matter that in last week’s game we had 25 players on the roster that had been on the team back in 2012 when YSU beat us.  That is almost a quarter of the roster. Every rsSR, SR and rsJR who suited up last Saturday had been there and had experienced that loss. Those players made up a lot of our 22 starters and of our two-deep.  That just didn’t seem to make a difference at all once the opening whistle blew.

So a legit question is how we know that the Pitt players facing Akron this tomorrow will respond in a positive way at all.  Granted Narduzzi was in his 1^st game as a HC but he didn’t get our players’ emotions up by using that ’12 loss as fuel on the fire as proven by our flat start and crap game. That is if Narduzzi even mentioned that previous YSU game at all.  He may not have and may not talk about last year’s Akron game either.  Perhaps for he and his staff everything is forward looking and starting with, as he says, “a blank slate”.

OK, enough of the past.  What about this Saturday?

On paper Akron has less talent on its roster than either YSU or Pitt and that would lead one to think that alone would give us a big edge going into the game. We had that same edge, though maybe not so big a difference, last week also but our player’s efforts and average at best play on the field erased any benefit our higher talent level may have given us pretty quickly.

I’m worried the same thing could happen this week with Akron.  I again think we’ll be outcoached by the opponent’s staff and their HC who is more experienced than ours. In a sense Akron has nothing to lose in this match unlike our new staff does.  If our staff can’t get Pitt to win this game, and make no mistake, there isn’t a game on our schedule we can’t lose, it’s a big step backward and something we really can’t afford after spinning our wheels in last game.

So that means that this game may be the one that puts the most pressure on the staff to win as it is the last ‘lesser’ opponent on the schedule.  We may be in a high pressure situation later on if we win a bunch of ACC games and are close to a conference championship but unless that happens this is the must win game. It will be interesting to see how the staff responds to that.

I think we won’t see as much scoring as last week and that instead of having a win produce the usual carry-over positive effect on the next week’s game the YSU experience will have sown some seeds of doubt in the clubhouse.

I may be wrong about that but adversity is something that Pitt teams have had a hard time handling in the past and as we know at Pitt history repeats itself on a regular basis. If you remember last season we lost to Virginia the week after that Akron defeat. Virginia completely manhandled Pitt in the first half of that game because we had a loss hangover.  We may see a version of that tomorrow.

So factoring all the above in, I see a close game with a winning margin of a TD or less.

24-20 Akron.  I hope I’m wrong.