There was a good article from my friend Chris Logue over at Pitt Nation Sports that centered on Narduzzi’s recruiting philosophies, where our recruiting efforts have been targeted and where we will (should?) be getting the bulk of our recruits from. It is titled “Narduzzi active in forging recruiting identity outside of the Pitt norm”
It is a good read and thought provoking but I wonder if Chris took a detailed look at what our geographical recruiting ‘gets’ have been over the last five years. After reading his article I started to wonder if indeed it was more important to spread out Pitt’s recruiting targets or to concentrate on landing more of the higher quality local (meaning Tri-State area) high school players.
Here is our “Out Of Area” (OOA) recruiting over the last six years. I used the years 2011 until 2016 to survey because that was when we had Steve Pederson as our athletic director for most of the years and had lower limits on our recruiting budget.
| Year | In Class | OOA / % | Where From | Key OOA Recruits |
| 2011 | 21 | 13 / 62% | FL (3), TX (3), MD, DC, TN, OK, NY, AL | Mosley-Smith, Jones, Steve Williams |
| 2012 | 15 | 6 / 40% | WI, NY, MD, WA (2), TN | Roberts, Lewis, Voytik |
| 2013 | 27 | 9 / 33% | NY (2), WI (2), HI, MI, NJ, MD | Ibrahim, Blewitt, Officer, Taleni, Weah |
| 2014 | 23 | 10 / 43% | MI (2), NY (2), FL, IL, DE, CT, VA, NJ | Ollison, Folston, O’Neill, Maddox, Hayes |
| 2015 | 15 | 5 / 33% | CA, TX, NJ, DE, FL | Brightwell, Edwards, M. Henderson, Q. Henderson |
| 2016 | 24 | 12 / 50% | FL (4), NJ (2), NY (2), VA,(2), IL, NC, | Watts, Pine, Ffrench, Campbell, Miller, Camp |
However, getting distant players isn’t the end all be all to success at Pitt as we have seen the results of those recruits actually play out on the field, but sometimes it does help. If you look at the 2011 recruiting class of Todd Graham’s and then look at where they are now there are few still with the team. Out of the 13 players from far away 10 of those didn’t last at least four years in the program.
There were a few reasons for this and on was that because Graham was stuck with a decimated class after Wannstedt was fired he went after marginal players who he was recruiting during his latter years at Tulsa. Regardless – a 77% attrition rate is horrendous. Granted many of them were purged when Graham left, then Chryst was hired with the mandate from the administration to get rid of those dead weight and marginal players.
