After each of his first two Offensive Coordinators left the Panthers after 1-year stints, Pat Narduzzi came into this season with some constancy at the post for the first time in his Pitt tenure. Jim Chaney and Matt Canada, his first and second guys to hold the position respectively, each left to take the same position at an SEC school. Already faced with making his third hire in three years at the position, Narduzzi was almost certainly hoping that his next hire would give him some stability at the vital position and it looks like he has some with Shawn Watson now in his second year. Despite this, steadiness hasn’t brought very positive results yet for the Panthers on offense. Coming into this season there was hope that Year 2 of the Watson Offense would yield better results due to more experience with the system and a much-hyped Quarterback in Kenny Pickett. However, last week’s debacle against Penn State shows that Shawn Watson may be ill-suited for his position and that he should be on the hot seat.

Watson Through 14 Games

To be fair, there are several caveats for Pitt’s lackluster offensive play since the beginning of last season that could serve as valid excuses. Personnel-wise, Max Browne and Ben DiNucci were simply not as talented as Nathan Peterman and the loss of two NFL-caliber Linemen not unexpectedly proved detrimental to that position group. Additionally, Watson made the decision to attempt a hybrid scheme that utilized many of Matt Canada’s concepts. In hindsight, he likely wouldn’t have implemented this type of attack that looked to be a mess at times, likely due to his inexperience running many of these concepts and the aforementioned personnel issues. Finally, he was seemingly working with a subpar Offensive Line coach that Pat Narduzzi seemed to think wasn’t developing his players to an adequate degree. With the addition of Dave Borbely to this position, who Watson had worked with before, there was hope that a more talented and cohesive unit would develop.

While Watson undoubtedly made some mistakes, it would be ridiculous to attribute Pitt’s entire drop-off in offensive production from 2016 to Watson’s performance due to these reasons. After all, that was a historic offense that featured many vital upper-classmen, including 4 players that were selected in the next year’s NFL draft. However, the decline was incredibly swift and steep. Pitt went from scoring nearly 5 Touchdowns on offense per game to less than 3 and the average yards per play went down over a yard and a half.

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