There's no question that the Pitt football 2018 class has been really slow up to this point. That's not much different the other class Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi has had, but entering May, the Panthers had alone commit under their belts for 2018.
That changed on Wednesday with quarterback Nick Patti joining the team.
Currently, Patti is only a two-star recruit. He had a ton of offers, per Rivals, but many were from smaller schools. His biggest offers outside of Pitt were Rutgers, Cincinnati, Boston College, and Temple. At 6'3" and still another year of high school, he has decent size.
Patti will join what is becoming a pretty deep group of quarterbacks at Pitt. That's a pretty far cry from years past where Pitt was a major injury away from potential disaster under center.
One of the reasons he chose Pitt was because of the ability of Narduzzi and Watson to develop quarterbacks.
“Well, Pitt has a great coaching staff that is there to stay, in my opinion. Coach Watson and coach Narduzzi were the two guys in this whole process where I just hit it off with them from the start,” Patti said. “They’re two guys that I definitely want to play for and they develop quarterbacks really well.”
He's also interested to get going on the recruiting trail himself:
“I’m going to talk to coach Watson over the phone and ask him about who some targets are that I should really want to pursue in recruiting,” Patti said.
This will be Watson's first season with the Panthers but there's no question that Nathan Peterman had success here. He came to Pitt as an underachieving question mark and left as an NFL Draft pick. Obviously, it's not Narduzzi in there doing most of the heavy lifting with the quarterbacks. But Peterman's development came during his time here and with the coordinators he hired.
As that Rivals article notes, he's faced good competition in high school at Montvale in New Jersey. Not only that, but he helped his team win a state championship. Last season, he threw for 1,737 yards and 15 touchdowns to only five interceptions.
Pitt still has a long way to go to fill out its 2018 recruiting class but they took a step forward today with the commitment of Patti. The job is pretty closed this season with Max Browne expected to be the guy under center but after that, all bets are off.
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