(This is one of 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.) 

One thing I dislike is that I write these MMQB articles immediately after the game and then hold it off until Monday morning to post it for work-time reading. So – if it sounds like these MMQB articles parrot the media coverage after the game that doesn’t happen. I never read anything but stats and watch videos as I write these… unless I see something Monday morning I want to quote before posting.

Anyway, Yea Us!!! again this week.

As we started MMQB off last week;  Watch this before you do anything else.

Now, since you are sitting down anyway… Here is another reprise of the celebrations we have come to get used to.

Mass  celebration in the visitors locker Room.  (Never gets old, does it?)

Here is the presser Narduzzi held after our dramatic come from behind 23-20 win over the Orangemen of Syracuse.

Then here are the technical and stats details.
Photo Gallery
Postgame Notes
Box Score
Season Statistics

Now to the game itself:

In all honesty it is kind of hard to get a real feel for how the team played or how the game went if you don’t watch it unfold in real time, or at least don’t know anything about the game until you watch it later on video. That was the case with me on Saturday. I was at the Navy-Tulane game in Annapolis and was trying my best to not hear or see the score of the Pitt game and was doing well until later in the afternoon when a guy two rows behind me yelled “Pitt won 23-20!!” (By the way he is a Blather reader also.)

Then of course I had to rush home to after the Navy win to check our game info on the computer and there you are – I got it all second hand. So with that it is hard for me to pick out three positives and three negatives. Instead I’ll just jot down some of my observations after watching it stone cold.

Narduzzi is quickly showing his true meddle as a head coach in a variety of ways. It was pretty obvious early on in the season that he had the kids ready to play and he got great efforts out of them.  That is what a coach is supposed to do and he’s doing it in spades.  But what is really jumping out at me is the complete trust and confidence he is showing in his players out on the field, both the starters and the relief kids.

Four games ago Narduzzi was faced with fourth quarter 4th & 1 call at the Iowa 42 when we were trailing by 7 points and he tried get the offense to draw the Iowa defense offside. As we all remember we got a delay of game penalty, had to punt and Iowa took the ball for a go-ahead TD drive.

Since then he has rolled the dice every chance he has and it has come out well almost every time. We saw that writ large today with the fake punt call that converted a crucial 4th & 7 and led directly to the game winning drive’s final push for us. It is a hell of a nice thing for a defensive minded head coach to show that kind of trust in his offense… and that offense he’s putting his trust into isn’t a yard gobbling point scoring machine either like we saw last season.  We got nice yardage Saturday but it isn’t almost a given that it would happen like it was with Conner carrying the ball.

There is a reason he’s willing to roll the dice.  In the past when things got tight for the Panthers and we really needed a bit of success to give us the edge in games it was no sure thing we’d get it.  But this season we are making things count in a big, but hidden, way. A case in point is those 4th down conversion tries mentioned above. This season we have converted 7 out of 9 attempts for a 78% success rate which is excellent.  In all of last season we were 10/15 for a 67% rate.

And speaking of last season with that stronger offense, and with the uber-productive James Conner as the lead ball carrier, when we were in the opponent’s Red Zone we scored 53 out of 59 times for a nice 90% success rate… and we also scored 44 TDs out of 59 plays for 75%.  Those are great numbers made mostly because we had our 26-TD machine Conner getting the ball almost every short yardage play to the goal line.

Jump to this year, without Conner and with our offense not as strong as last season, and we have still done well in scoring 22/26 times in the Red Zone for 85% and scored 16 TDs in those 26 plays for a 62%.  Not a bad showing in crunch time for this season’s unit.

Chaney’s playcalling is starting to tick people off… which is interesting because all we are doing is scoring more points than our opponents. But hey, I also want to see Boyd get more deep passes thrown his way and want to see Peterman air out the ball because he does that well also, but in the long run I really can’t complain too much about how our offense is doing.

It is very obvious that aside from a trickeration play here and there Chaney is playing nervously and conservative football for the majority of the times we have the ball.  It is almost like he’s afraid we’ll have a turnover on every play if we open up the passing game or something. Given the fact that Peterman has throw three INTs in his six games I say take that chance.

I’m going to do a bit of an advertisement now for my favorite Pitt football website, Rivals.com with Chris Peak and Pat Bostick. I read them (via subscription and well worth it) all the time and most definitely when they post “Bostick’s Breakdown” before each game.  Bostick’s personal insights are a fantastic window into what happens for a QB out on the football field.  His post-game analyses are spot on also.

Here is how he predicted on Friday how Chaney’s offensive playcalling should unfold:

Bostick’s Attack: Offense
You don’t want to abandon the run, but I think it will be important to get the ball on the perimeter, get Syracuse conscious of the entire width of the field and try to get them to play on their heels. Screens, perimeter runs, quick-hitters out there where you can get the ball on the edge and make their secondary tackle. And those screens and draws will slow their pass rush down, along with moving the pocket and changing the launch point. So I think that those are all important parts of the game plan that will help them deal with one of the better pass rushes in the league.

That is exactly what we saw happen and it answers a ton of questions for me on why we saw the side-to-side passing game that frustrates us Pitt fans so much.  The problem is that to my eye it seems we ain’t picking up much yardage with that short horizontal passing game… but then again it opened up the field for some of Peterman’s intermediate completions, which included some very accurate longer passes.  We saw this with his pass to set up the FG at the end of the 1st half, with a perfect sideline bullet to  Boyd’s leaning catch… and then late in the game his two great passes to start that last drive. (More on that below).

Hey Jim, throw us a bone and go deep twice a half anyway and see what happens.

One note; I went back and read all of the pre-game Bostick’s Breakdown articles and swear that if an opposing coach wants to figure out what Pitt will probably do in the game the next day they should read them also.

Our defense, while keeping their score lower than ours, was pretty sloppy in some places on Saturday. There were a lot of missed tackles during the game and it seems as if the Pitt defenders were hesitant to leave their feet to make a tackle. When you grab a guy and try to stop him while you’re still vertical you get dragged a few yards and that seemed to me to happen pretty often this game.

Either that happened or their RBs just kept running away from our guys who seemed to be playing slower than in recent games.

We saw the giving up of Big Plays again this game. We know there are going to be opponent’s plays where they rack up sudden yardage but it still hurts to watch it happen. Syracuse ripped off a 55 yard run, a 40 yard pass and then later a sneaky 26 yard run for a crucial 1st down by their QB. Here is a good case in point.  Their first TD was a 75 yard drive on three plays; a 18 yard run followed by a 58 yard TD run. We had the lead and then lost the lead in 0:46 seconds.

Two series later Syracuse rips off 51 yards on the ground on the first play and they end up scoring a TD to take a 14-7 lead.  We gave up the lead than dropped a TD behind in only three Syracuse series due on big plays by them.

Also, toward the end of the first half when the game was tied 10-10 we gave up a 40 yard pass to allow the Orange to get from the 50 yard line to our 10 in one play. A few plays later and they have a 17-10 lead.

On their first play of two straight series they kicked out a 45 yard run and then a 51 yard run.  It really demoralizes a defense when as soon as they get back on the field they are running for their lives the wrong way to stop a TD .

We know this happens in college ball, more so than the NFL,  but this is something that we had a good idea Narduzzi & Conklin’s defense would be susceptible to given the amount of front seven pressure we are throwing at the opponent’s QB and backfield on almost every play… and it has come true much too well.

Qadree Ollison is establishing himself as the Pitt workhorse on offense.  Saturday he had this production on the ground: 23 carries for 103 yards (4.5 ypc) and 2 TDs with along long run of 20 yards. All very nice numbers and he was the scorer who most helped us win the game (points-wise that is).

But it was what he did when he ran that was the best part of his game.  Of his 23 carries eight were for first downs and two were for TDs which meant that 43% of his runs moved the sticks or scored points. That is an excellent showing and given his slew of positive yard carries on that winning drive makes me give him the game ball.

Ollison’s production this season is a bit misleading as to what his true talent level is.  A case in point is that Saturday four other players ran the ball a total of 23 times also taking away what may have been better yardage showing for him.

Last season James Conner ran for 51% of our rushing totals (less QB sacks) = 589 team attempts / 298 Conner rushes = 51% at a 5.9 ypc clip.  This season Ollison is getting only 44% of our attempts (again less sacks) = 270 team attempts  / 118 Ollison rushes = 44%  at a 5.6 ypc rate.

With Ollison having that excellent ypc average of 5.6 yards I’d like to Chaney use him as the bell-ringer running back and drop the RB by committee approach with James and Hall.  James and Hall currently have 74 carries between them, compared to 118 for Ollison, and for me that is too many runs being taken from Ollison if it continues going forward.

Ollision has also scored 7 TDs in 118 rushes which is a TD every 16 carries (Conner last year was every 11 carries).  That is far above the other two RBs.  Look, Ollison isn’t a small back that is fragile.  He’s every bit of 6’2″ and 230 lbs and can take the work load.  Let’s ratchet it up and give him the ball a la James Conner circa 2014 and see what happens.

Here are some post-game videos:

We love the fact that the  fake punt was called  almost as much as the result it had, didn’t we?  Here is what the key person on that play, Ryan “He can really spin it” Winslow says about it:

Kicker Blewitt the kicker who kicked the kick heard ’round the Panther Nation:

Not-real-disappointed yet Tyler Boyd

…and here is what Narduzzi said about Boyd from Rivals.com

Interview with Ollison’s legs:

Final Note:

Here is why I have been saying that our QB play is more effective and producing better results this season. This week’s game’s outcome hinged on a singular late-game drive that had to accomplish multiple things to be successful:

First we had to get out of being trapped in the deep end of our territory. This drive started at our five yard line and left long yards to get us in a scoring position.  Second we had to grab as much yardage as quickly as possible to allow us the luxury of switching over to a ball-control grind out the clock rushing offense in their territory… and  third we had to use every second of the snap clock we could in between plays so that when we did get within FG range we could use our time outs to have the scoring attempt be the last snap of the game.

Peterman led that drive to perfection hitting all three of those needs above and giving the offense a best chance at the last second win.  Here is how his key passing plays unfolded.

3rd and 5 at PITT 10

(8:00 – 4th) Nathan Peterman pass complete to Dontez Ford for 17 yds to the Pitt 27 for a 1ST down. This was the most crucial 3rd down conversion of the game as it got us into safer ground with a new set of downs.

Then we had a 1 yard run by Chris James and…

2nd and 9 at PITT 28
(6:50 – 4th) Nathan Peterman pass complete to Scott Orndoff for 17 yds to the Pitt 45 for a 1ST down.  Now we are at midfield almost, have a new set of downs and are in no rush or need to hurry up the offense.  He arm has us poised to give Ollison the ball on almost every down and eat up yardage and then the clock.

That is why Nate Peterman is playing this season. On the last drive of the game, with us behind by three points, he started us out from our five yard line and threw two 17 yard passes for 1st downs to moved us from our 10 to midfield in the blink of an eye.  It isn’t only completing TDs passes that QBs are supposed to do … their true main job is to get the team in a position to score when needed and to handle the game clock as a field general of the offense.

Remember a few times last year the offense looked lost out there when we were in crunch time, needing fast results…and the clock ran out on us. That isn’t happening this season.  There is no confusion between the sideline and the QB when clarity is called for.

But this is what winning QBs do – they are vitally important because they are effective in the clutch to make comebacks from behind or execute late game wins… which Peterman has done twice in the five games he has played as a starter. On top of that both of those were winning drives at game’s end in back to back away games.

We went three years in a row under Sunseri without a QB making a come from behind drive to win a game.  Savage had one 4th quarter winning drive in 2013 (ND) and Voytik did it once in the 2013 bowl game (Bowling Green).  We had none last season. If my numbers are correct then that is only three 4th quarter game winning drives in the previous five seasons.

So in comparison to that, Peterman’s doing it twice in five games, with two in a row, is pretty damn well impressive.  Here is what he had to say after the game:

Night game at Heinz Field on Thursday evening against the North Carolina Tarheels.  They are 6-1 on the season and 3-0 in conference so we are butting heads with just about the same record. Here is some pre-game info for you to think about….