ex-Panther and our 2104 starting QB Chad Voytik is Eastern Kentucky bound. The Football Championship Series (FCS) “Colonels” play in the Ohio Valley Conference  and, if you care to, you can follow Mr. Voytik’s progress on the internet via their “Live Audio” links at this website.

He’s not going to have an easy time of it there if he wants to grab that starting position right off the bat but it appears to be a better situation for him to get playing time than had he stayed at Pitt.

I wrote two weeks ago about the Colonels (Colonel = Eagle; get it?) and their returning starting QB Bennie Coney who has played well there.  However, it wasn’t such great play that he can’t be sat down (we heard that before on here) , but also isn’t a situation where Voytik is going to waltz in and automatically get the starting job handed to him as if there was no incumbent in that position at all.

Coney had decent stats at E. Kentucky with 225 completions in 367 attempts (61.3%) for 2471 yards.  He also had a very good 23 TDs to 8 INTs ratio that showed he didn’t turn the ball over a lot.  That’s about a 10:1 Completion to TD ratio and is very good.  His overall QB rating was 134 and that’s OK too.

I look at that and think he will probably go into the Colonels fall camp as the starter but again, those stats aren’t so overwhelming that he can’t get beaten out (remember that phrase).  I know nothing about his leadership abilities, football intelligence, etc… and that could weigh heavily in the staff’s final decision also.  There is a new HC there and that may help open the door for Voytik to get playing time also.

As we remember Chad Voytik was in the recruiting class of 2012 and was targeted to be the future centerpiece in Todd Graham’s “Pedal to the Metal” offense that showcased a mobile QB who could also pass.

In his senior year in HS he played in 11 games completing 119 passes out of 207 attempts for 1593 yards (58%).  That averaged out to a good 13.4 yards per completion and 145 yards per game along with 10 TDs against 6 INTs.  He was selected to play in the prestigious Army All-American bowl and did well in that highly visible game.

Pitt fans were excited as hell when he committed to play for us.  Here is Cardiac Hill’s Anson Whaley describing Voytik’s commitment.  Read the article and either laugh or cry depending on your sense of humor.

“I’ll admit, I (Whaley) was starting to get there myself. Todd Graham hadn’t yet landed a big-time recruit and while there was plenty of time left, it was definitely something to think about. That all changed with the pickup of four-star recruit Chad Voytik. So now that he’s a Panther (at least verbally), what do we know about the kid?

For starters, Voytik’s not just good – he’s real good. At the recent Elite 11 camp for the top quarterbacks in the nation, he rated No. 1 on the initial leader board after several days of a solid showing:”

Wow, wouldn’t that have been nice if he had met those lofty expectations put on his shoulders by the fans and some of the media?

But he truly was highly rated with 4*s across all four recruiting sites; was ranked between  #4 -#7 on the ‘best QBs’ board and was also rated in the Top 10 Tennessee players in all positions that year.  We liked him even more when, after Todd Beelzebub Graham slithered out under the cover of night, Voytik burned up the phone lines talking to other recruits asking them to stick with Pitt.

That showed us that not only was he a man of his word but that he cared enough about his future university to be proactive helping out the football program with a tough situation found itself in.

So here was a highly rated and highly valued QB who had offers from the likes of PSU, Mississippi State and Clemson and he choose Pitt.  There was a lot of fan chatter back then for him to come in as a true FR and usurp Sunseri as the starter mainly because he could run the ball well also.

Throw in the fact that Pitt fans hated anything to do with Sunseri and that ballooned Pitt fan’s expectation of Voytik also.  Don’t deny it either fans, I remember quite clearly that ridiculously high bar of expectations you felt he would meet and meet it early in his Pitt career.

Back in those good old days during his first years at Pitt we had open practices and scrimmages.  Because of the feel good story of Voytik’s involvement in minimizing the damage to the ’12 recruiting class the media and fans were intently interested to see how Voytik would perform.

The reality was that he performed like an ex-HS QB trying hard to be a productive new college QB. That was about it – he showed quickness with his legs and could complete the shorter and easier passes but nothing he did really jumped out at anyone and made them say “This is a star quarterback in the making”.

In other words he played in camp according to what his talent level allowed him to. But he also had some flaws that shone through and that he had to really concentrate on eliminating.

Because he could run the ball well Voytik had the tendency to do so at the first hint of defensive pressure… or just because he saw a quick opening and he’d take it. That served him well in his HS’s offense and he scored 8 rushing TDs that same senior year.

It was also that strength of Voytik’s game that Graham wanted in his starting QB. Had Graham stayed at Pitt Voytik may well have been the starting QB as soon as his rsFR year and I think would have fit perfectly and flourished in that offensive system.  I was told back then that Graham had promised Voytik the starting job by the ’13 season when recruiting him and that sounds exactly like something Graham would do.

But Fate sometimes throws the Innocent an unhittable curveball and Voytik, instead of finding himself in the 2012 fall camp prepping to learn college ball and compete for the 2013 starting job under Graham, was on the sideline watching tall, big armed and immobile Tom Savage taking snaps as the starter-in-waiting for 2013.

At that time after watching Voytik in camp I thought that he might see where the Paul Chryst offenses were heading and start thinking about transferring to a school where his skill set would match up to an offense that better suited him.  Obviously he didn’t do that and good for him.

But it was back then when we here on the Blather, well… me actually, started trying to tamper the fans expectations about just how good a D1 QB Voytik was going to be in the future.  I wrote on more than one occasion that he’d be able to play at the D1 level but not to expect stardom from him down the road.  Somehow that translated to me being biased against the kid from the start when that really wasn’t the case at all.

Because of my position as a writer about Pitt football and then reading and listening to everything about Pitt I could, in both the public stuff and private conversations, I realized there was a wide gulf in what the fans wanted and expected out of Voytik and what the staff and ‘insiders’ to the program saw and felt.

It wasn’t 180 degrees different opinions – not anything as dramatic as that.  It was more like ‘we have a QB who is just like other QBs’ and that nothing was etched in stone regarding him getting the starting job nor becoming a star at Pitt.  So that’s what we tried to get across on here.

Voytik redshirted as a freshman under returning starter Tino (The Great) Sunseri.  The following season HC Paul Chryst realized the Voytik wasn’t yet ready for prime time and the pressure that brings and kept Voytik seated as the nominal QB2 under transfer Tom Savage.  Voytik did get some work running the scout teams in game week practices and got in some snaps in regular familiarization duty HCs give the understudy to be ready if needed.

What followed in the spring game of 2013 just helped ratchet up those expectations.  Savage made a cursory showing then was pulled for Voytik.  Voytik then put on a passing show by completing 27 of 33 passes for 358 yards, 3 TDs and zero INTs.  Ahhh… were regular season games like spring scrimmages then Voytik really would have been that star QB the fans wanted.  But they aren’t.

So Tom Savage started in ’13 and played OK for us leading the team to a 7-6 record (after a 6-7 season the year before) and looked pretty good doing it.  His numbers weren’t gaudy and truth be told we wanted more out of him, just as college football fans always want more out of their school’s QB.

Voytik played sparingly in ’13 regular season then had a nice showing when taking over for an injured Savage in the 2nd half of the Bowl Game against Bowling Green. For the first real chance he had at showing us his stuff he pulled it off well in leading us to a bowl win.  Again, expectations stayed high.

Fast forward to the 2014 spring game and we … wait! There was no spring game that season.  Instead Paul Chryst worked out his last spring practice with the team doing this.

Going into the 2014 fall camp these are the kids we had on roster as QBs: rsJR Chad Voytik, rsJR Trey Anderson, FR Adam Bertke and walk-on FR Joe Repischak.  You can see that there wasn’t competition for that starting job but also, in a situation much like we have today, no competent back up QBs if Voytik went down by injury or with poor play.

Voytik was the presumptive heir apparent and so kept that starting job going into the opener against Delaware. But it wasn’t a smooth start for him and the coaching staff kept having to drum into him at every opportunity that their offense needed a ‘think pass first, run only if needed second’ QB.

In the first part of the season they purposefully held him back in the pocket to get him acclimated to trusting his OL and stepping up into the pocket to make his throws under real-time pressure.  Doing so paid off when Voytik became more comfortable in that style and so his passing game progressed to match his running game – a better balance as it were.

You can see his final 2014 passing stats below but what that doesn’t show was how the game by game season progressed for him.

In his first three games against Delaware (89 yards passing), BC (111 yards) and then FIU (89) he had a rather shaky start and was reverting to tucking the ball and taking off before it was necessary to do so.  Against FIU he ran 12 times for 114 yards which was nice but at the same time he missed some good downfield passing opportunities.

The staff really put the leg shackles on for the away game against a good Big Ten opponent Iowa and Voytik showed what he could do passing when he forced himself to step into the pocket instead of bolting when the DL started come up along the sides of the OL. He trusted them to do their job against Iowa and he responded with a 250 yards game.

If you remember Voytik had good command of that offense that day and led some extended (by his passing) scoring drives to get us into the 4^th quarter carrying a 17-7 lead into the 2^nd half.  It was Pitt’s defense that gave the game away there and even though Voytik threw an INT on our last chance drive he shouldn’t have been put in the position to try to win that game.

From that game onward Chad Voytik played solid QB for us.  He didn’t win any games on the strength of his play but his play didn’t lead us to defeats either.  I supposed you could look at his two passing TD game in a 20-14 win against Syracuse as ‘winning’ that game though.

In essence he played average, maybe a stitch above average, football for us overall.  With any QB in his first season starting he looked confused at times, threw some bad passes along with the good and missed some wide open receivers.  But what really helped Voytik was being able to throw the ball to a very consistent and good Tyler Boyd.

In being able to do that, as another QB could do later, he was able to cover mistakes and just fling the ball in Boyd’s general direction.  Boyd’s circus catches helped the offense and that passing combination – Voytik to Boyd – helped us win six games.

But we fans accepted what he could and couldn’t do and I believe all of us were very much looking forward to seeing Voytik build on that full year of starting experience and then playing at a higher level the second time around.

At the very least I can reasonably say that no one though he wouldn’t be the starting QB for Pitt during the 2105 season; he was the incumbent starter, had played pretty well the year before and was, again, with zero competition from those below him on the depth chart.

But Fate was warming up in the bullpen then walked in and threw a nasty slider past Voytik in the form of another transfer QB who had, and bad luck here, played for the Offensive Coordinator a few years before.

Nate Peterman, who was also a 4* recruit in the same class as Voytik’s, decided to leave the University of Tennessee and finish out his two years of eligibility at a school where he had a better chance of starting games.  When Chaney heard that Peterman was contemplating leaving Tennessee he called and discussed the possibility of him coming to Pitt.

Peterman declined to say what schools other than Pitt he was considering, but surely there were some that had a clearer path to a starting job. Chad Voytik started all 13 games for the Panthers in 2014 and, particularly with his late-season improvement, seemed poised for a step forward in 2015.

But those other schools didn’t have Pitt’s secret weapon: incoming offensive coordinator Jim Chaney, who two years earlier, as Tennessee’s offensive coordinator, helped recruit Peterman.  Peterman enrolled at Pitt in May, and said he has been “pleasantly surprised” with how well he has started to bond with his new teammates.

“Being around college football so long makes you a little bit cynical sometimes maybe,” he said. “That’s why I say it’s been pleasantly surprising just how welcoming the players have been.”

None has been more welcoming than Voytik. Narduzzi set up Voytik as Peterman’s host when he made his official visit in January, just to ensure that there wouldn’t be any chemistry issues if Peterman chose the Panthers.

At first this news was greeted with a rather ho-hum attitude by the media and the fans.  I wrote extensively on here that a staff does not get an upperclassman into the QB corps just to sit on the bench.  Schools have younger QBs to do that.  But the main feeling from the readers of this blog was that Peterman was brought in to be a backup and that it wasn’t possible that Voytik could lose his starting job.

Again, the phrase “didn’t play so well he couldn’t be sat down” applies to the situation as it stood then and into the offseason and through the summer voluntary workouts that Peterman also attended.

It was when fall camp began that things started to go tilt sideways for Chad Voytik. It began in early August and after a week or two it was evident that Voytik wasn’t prepared to have actual and solid competition for his starting job.  Contrary to what the mainstream media reporters were parroting from the staff, the play between the two kids was not on an equal footing, as Peterman was showing a better arm and more consistent play in his passing.

By the time the end of the fall camp was approaching you could hear the frustration in Jim Chaney’s voice after being asked hundreds of times if there was going to be a new starting QB.  At one point in the last week of camp he turned to the guy asking and snapped :

“Guys, here’s the deal: Chad [Voytik] is the incumbent starting quarterback and remains the starting quarterback at Pitt,” Chaney said. “Right now there are three other people in my room that are fighting their butts off to take his job.

The key indicator there is that Chaney specifically said “incumbent starter” when describing the situation. A hint of things to come.

But by then they guys who had been actually following the camp (as much as possible as the camp was closed by Narduzzi)… and remember there are really no secrets when it comes to college football teams…knew that Voytik was slipping and Peterman was playing his way up.

The bottom line is that Voytik certainly didn’t perform well enough in camp to shut the door on the possibility of Peterman taking his place.  It was crunch time to show progress from the previous reason, play his best and cement the starting job and that didn’t happen.

That trend kept playing out over the first three games of the season when Voytik took almost all the game snaps against YSU but didn’t really impress with 72 yards passing and 1 TD with 1 INT.  Peterman got his new Pitt shoes dirty in that game with a series or two.

Then Voytik and Peterman split the next game against Akron, Voytik started that game but in limited action threw 6 of 8 for 32 yards (5.3 ypc)  and no TDs while Nate Peterman – taking the yeoman’s share of the series now – passed for 12/18 for 148 yards (12.3 ypc) and a TD.

That showing by both QBs led Pat Narduzzi to say, out of the corner of his mouth apparently:

“I think we’ve got two really good quarterbacks, so why wouldn’t use both of them to help us,” Narduzzi said. “Last week (in a 45-37 win over Youngstown State), we went with Chad More. Today, we just felt like Nathan was a little hotter.”

But here is what Narduzzi didn’t tell the reporters or let out; Peterman had been taking all the game week practices QB1 snaps since soon after the YSU game.  It was Voytik’s poor yards per completion and missing the receivers open downfield to take the shorter dump off passes in the Akron game that cinched the change.  That was the game it became obvious Voytik was playing kind of scared out there and wasn’t coping well with having first to split time with Peterman and then to lose the majority of the series to him.

So the decision that had been fomenting in the last week of camp was finalized prior to the third game and the staff started Peterman over Voytik against Pitt’s first challenging opponent, the Iowa Hawkeyes.  Even though we lost that game on a last second field goal by Iowa to give them a 27-24 win, Peterman showed well under pressure in rebounding after two early INTs to finish with 218 yards and two TDs passes… and thus elbowed Voytik, who had only one pass for 8 yards in the game, to the bench.

After that Peterman played better each week and led to team to four more consecutive wins and that  kept Voytik on the bench.

That was the progression of Voytik’s decline at Pitt. He did well enough in 2014 to be assumed to be a returning starter the next season but the staff knew that he hadn’t played so well that he wasn’t in danger of losing his job if a better player came onboard.

Contrary to the common belief that ‘the fix was in’ with the QB switch I’ll say this – had Voytik risen to the challenge and played better than Peterman it wouldn’t have mattered if there was a ‘fix in’ or not. But he didn’t.  Not one Pitt fan can look me in the eye and tell me he thinks Pat Narduzzi would play favorites if it might cost him wins down the line.  So knowing how things went in camp I highly doubt it was personalities that bumped Voytik off the field after three games.

Why didn’t the staff play Voytik later in the season when Peterman probably should have been sat down? I really don’t know.  I do know that once Narduzzi makes a decision he sticks with it and that may have been the case.  It might not have been based on only football playing issues.

And let’s don’t kid ourselves – Cheney might have gotten Peterman to Pitt and Chaney called the offensive plays but if Narduzzi wanted something done differently he’d make sure it was done that way.

I’ve an inkling that Voytik might have let it slip earlier that he was contemplating transferring and I’m quite sure if Narduzzi knew that a player on his roster was thinking that way he sure as hell wouldn’t bend over backwards to keep the player. Which, by the way, Narduzzi didn’t do in the least when Voytik publicly announced his intent to quit the team and transfer.

But let me be clear about something – I never got the feeling or heard anything about Voytik backing down from any challenge put forth to him.  His situation, again as I understand it, was that his play slipped when a new face showed up and didn’t recover enough to keep the job.  We all saw him in action and I believe we all feel that he’s a go-getter with a strong drive to win.  He sure demonstrated that quality on the field in 2014.

Looking back over Voytik’s three years at Pitt shows me a few things.  First is that overly high expectations for a recruit, and then the recruit as a young player, isn’t a good thing to do especially if fans haven’t seen the kid throw a pass even in practice.  It helps no one to give the player unrealistic standards for a future he’s not talented enough to meet.

Second is that not everything that happens in football is cut and dried. Voytik committed to Pitt and then stayed committed when others didn’t.  He worked hard, kept his nose clean and did what was expected of him on the field and in the classroom. Then eventually was he named the starting QB. He went full charge into games with his teammates and played to the best of his abilities… yet it still wasn’t enough for him to keep that starting position in the long run.

And third; that human nature is what it is and sometimes it isn’t as kind as we’d like it to be. Chad Voytik could function well when there was no one breathing down his neck. When that strong position competition did come to Pitt Voytik had a tough time handling it and it showed up in his play both in the camp and in the games. And because of that it opened the door for Peterman.

All that isn’t a criticism of the young man on my part, at least I hope it isn’t read that way. What went down with Voytik is a human reaction that is unfortunately found among some athletes and… surprise, surprise, in us regular folk too. No one is perfect and when you are discussing college football you have to look at all the things that can both affect these players – both positive and negative.

Factor in that for two seasons Voytik was excited and ready to be the starting QB then abruptly had the rug pulled out from under him.  Savage being brought it specifically to start in ’13 (the year promised to him by Graham) and then Peterman being brought in to compete in  ’15 must have sent a message that disappointed Voytik and, I’ll assume, helped him to make that decision to transfer.

But he’s going to land on his feet. Yesterday he announced his post-grad destination and his intent to meet his new football challenges and competition head on. He’s a straight shooter, I saw that right away in my conversations with him, and I believe that he’ll work his ass off to try to get a starter’s job back.

At the very least he’s at a place that doesn’t carry any emotional baggage for him and so can start off with a clean slate.  I dare say it will be more fun playing in that conference and at that lower level also. He sure didn’t have much fun at Pitt in 2015 so let’s hope he regains that sense of joy at being a football player who is actually out there playing now that he’s at Eastern Kentucky.

So – to steal a phrase from Bob Hope… “Thanks for the memories“;

Here are Voytik’s stats when he was at Pitt: