(This is a weekly series of articles entitled “Monday Morning Quarterback”.   I will try to post them two days after the football games are played so as to have our wilder emotions under control by then.  It will be my take on the positives and the negatives we saw happen and a chance for commenters to agree or disagree and to add their own thoughts.)

Coming down off a loss after three straight wins sucks of course and we have at least eight more games to play, but the feeling after the Iowa loss two days ago ain’t a happy one.  We can point to a 3-1 record as decent and it is, but we also know that there are certain issues in this loss that will continue reverberate unless quickly corrected by the staff and individual players.

POSITIVES

1.  I’ll come right out and say that I really should start this section off as the “Negatives” because that’s what I tend to remember most.  However, we had some real positive play out there and while it wasn’t enough to win it should be recognized.

I need to acknowledge Chad Voytik’s play on Saturday.  The ironic thing is that I’ll do that in both sections of this post.  But the positives outweighed the negatives and there were some things we saw that (hopefully) portend other positives down the road.  Let’s look at the stats first: 19-30-1 for 250 yards (65%) with an average of 8.6 ypa and zero TDs.  That looks very efficient and heads and shoulders above his previous three games.  Aside from his zero TDs that is acceptable.

He also tended to use more receivers than he has in the past when during the 1^st half he hit Jones, Garner, Weatherspoon and Garner in that order with four passes in a row.  In this game he had four receivers with more than one catch, Boyd leading with 10 which is an improvement also.  He played a better game Saturday than he had in the first three for sure, except for his rushing as that was non-existent and we really could have used it in the 2nd half.  The staff needs to dial that up in apparent passing situations like a QB draw every so often.  Voytik has shown he can break long runs off so let him do so without scrambling.

2.  James Conner’s running continued to excel with another 150+ yards rushing game coming in with 155 on 29 carries.  That ypc average of 5.3, while excellent, was a far cry from his season’s previous average of 6.7 ypc which is outstanding.  His one TD gave him nine on the season and all that is a good day at the office.  His production jumped him up to #1 nationally in rushing yards with 699 and #1 in rushing TDs with nine.  By the way he also shattered Tony Dorsett’s “first four games of the season” rushing record by 135 yards.  He’s on pace for 2270+ yards and 29 TDs if we play in a bowl game (fingers crossed).

That’s all well and good but the meat of the matter with Conner’s play on Saturday was his answering the bell in the 1^st half when relied on to get us downfield and into the end zone. In our first scoring drive Conner carried four times for 44 yards and set Chris James up for James’ great speed driven 14 yard TD run.  On our next scoring drive Conner was asked to move us by grinding out positive yardage to get us into position for 3^rd down conversions.

We staged a 17 play 75 yard scoring drive where he carried 12 times for only 42 yards but two of those carries were 3^rd down conversions and one was a 4^th down success.   Then he bull rushed in a one yard TD to make it 14-7 PITT (great block by Parrish there also).  It was a very productive day for Conner.

3.  I went back and forth between the Offensive Line’s good play and the Special Teams unit for my last ‘Positive’.  Even though Chris Blewitt was perfect on the day with 2/2 in FGs and 2/2 on extra points and Ryan Winslow played well ( he’s 6 for 6 in FGs and 18 of 18 in PATs) I’ll have to go with the OL.

This was one game where we finally saw Chad Voytik understand that if he trusts his OL to give him a pocket he’ll benefit from it.  We saw less “too early” movement by the QB and he stayed in and tracked his receivers a lot better than in the past. The OL gave up one sack this game which is great in itself but they also have a total of only four sacks allowed in the season, which is a far cry from our 3.3 sacks allowed per game of last season.

Voytik wasn’t hurried as much as in the past games and that allowed him to calm down a bit and finally step up into the pocket for his throws. He is still rolling out a lot as he feels comfortable with that but the progress he made Saturday, with the OL’s help of giving him strong pockets to stay in, is a real bright spot for future games.  If the OL can keep giving him this type of protection and Voytik can keep using it to replicate the passing production he had against Iowa then we can have a much needed more balanced offense for future games.

The staff stuck (basically) with the starting five OLs throughout the game and you could see that they were working off each other very well.  Our Center, Alex Officer, played very well in his second start and we’ll probably see him for the rest of the season there.

NEGATIVES

1.  Pitt wasn’t the same team who played so well and dominated the 1^st half after they came out of the locker room in the 2^nd half and that lost us the game.

“Everyone has to own their part of it,” Chryst said.  Offensive left tackle Adam Bisnowaty said Pitt wasn’t the same team in the second half. “We didn’t come out as hard as the first half,” he said. “I think we eased into it. When you are up on a big team like that, you feel good about yourself. “We have to learn from it and keep playing as hard as we can each week.”

 We heard the same thing from the staff and kids when they were talking about how the team started against FIU when we were overconfident and mistaken.  This is a real problem when it comes right on the heels of the same thing happening just one week before and is a staff issue as much as anything.  We just aren’t that fully talented of a team to let any lapses happen as we may not, obviously, be able to recover like we did against FIU.  We certainly didn’t make it happen in the 2^nd half of Saturday’s game and allowed Iowa to slowly come from behind for a victory.  When a team gets just two FGs in a full 30 minutes of play, after basically  owning the 1st half, you know something is wrong with the 2nd half effort.

2.  The glaring errors in our secondary continue to rear its ugly head. If you look only at the 178 yards Iowa got in their passing game you’d think all was fine on that front especially since they had been averaging 246 in their previous games. But we know stats can be deceiving and in this case they certainly are.

Sam Werner of the P-G hits the nail on the head when he writes in his Red Shirt Diaries “

“…if you had to single out Pitt’s biggest weakness right now, it’s in the back end of the defense.  Safety Ray Vinopal said after the game today that they knew Iowa was going to try to hit them deep after the Panthers showed how susceptible they were to double moves against FIU and Boston College.  So Pitt knew they were going to be tested deep, and still gave up pass plays of 44 and 62 (along with a pass interference on another long pass)…

There really isn’t much more we can say about our secondary play right now.  I’ll grant that there was an excellent one-handed grab by the Iowa WR on that 62 yard pass play late in the 3^rd quarter that set up an Iowa TD, but the receiver still had Avonte’ Maddox beaten by two steps.  We are thin in the secondary and it shows.

I still content that we are dealing with so youth and inexperience in both Maddox and Reggie Mitchell, transfer from UW who only played in one game in 2012, who will get better as the season, and learning experiences, go on. Everyone wants to sit down Layfaette Pitts but the bald truth is we have no one to replace him.  Maybe we shuffle Ryan Lewis into the DB unit or something by that staff has to get creative with this problem ASAP.

3.  Now, let’s circle back to Chad Voytik. I wrote above that the positives outweigh his negatives on Saturday and they did but we want to be realistic on this blog so we have to address the bad with the good also.  Voytik still has to see those free receivers who are deeper than his choice of receivers to throw to were.  Some of those free receivers, a lot actually, were TEs roaming around picking their noses until they had to block for other receivers short receptions.

Speaking of the TEs, it is starting to look like Chryst is getting a bit perturbed at the ‘lock-in’ tendencies Voytik has been having since day one.  The Trib’s Jerry DiPaola has this in his post game reports about the lack of use of the TEs by our QB:

…Tight end Scott Orndoff is the only Pitt player — other than Boyd — to catch a touchdown pass this season.  But it’s his only catch. Tight ends largely have been ignored in the execution of Coach Paul Chryst’s game plan. Junior J.P. Holtz has four catches for 30 yards and has been shut out in two games, including Iowa when Pitt managed only a field goal after halftime. “The ball didn’t go there,” Chryst said. “We want them to have touches.”

But it wasn’t just the TEs who are being missed, some WRs were out there and available also.  All of that said, it isn’t a bad thing to have Tyler Boyd as a safety blanket (10 catches Saturday for 153 yards) while you are getting real game experience under your belt.  But he has to start learning, like the secondary, ASAP that his role is to get the ball to the ‘best’ open receiver on any passing play, not just the ‘best’ receiver on the roster, unless the play call is set for one guy or one receiving position.

Don’t get me started on his lack of deep passing, I’m getting resigned we won’t see it on a regular basis maybe for the whole season.

That’s it – three thumbs up and three thumbs down.  How did you see it?