Can Ryan McCants carry the load?

I think his stats against Stanford and Oregon are misleading.

I agree with VD here. Stanford was the first game of the season, on the road, with a questionable offensive line. Even though McCants was named the starter as a redshirt freshman, you have to figure there were jitters at that game for a lot of folks related to the running game. For Oregon? I think you have to give the devil his due. Oregon’s run defense was out of sight this year. McCants was essentially riding the pine the entire year while the Quiz show was going on. To expect him to come in and perform, at the same level as Quiz without the reps is tough.

There were a couple of times where McCants showed that he was a freshman. He would try to make fancy moves to juke people and it just wasn’t his style. That’s experience and reps. I have a lot of faith in McCants to turn it on. He reminds me a lot of how Blount was at the beginning of the year….raw, not seeing things all the time, the game being a little too fast. Reps will help and being the #1 guy for the Sun Bowl should help him a lot.

I think VD makes several good points. First being that those Stanford and Oregon games are not good games to go on. The coaching staff basically abandoned the running game against Stanford. I mean how can you judge anyone off 4 rushes? He never even got a chance in that game and throwing too much is what cost us that game… but thats a whole different topic. As for the Oregon game, I think you can argue that because of bad defense and Moevao making some bad throws early that we were down 2 or 3 scores before we knew it. I think that this forced us to throw the ball more to try and catch up. Had OSU gone up early in that game or even just kept it close early then we would have ran the ball more and maybe we could have seen what McCants really has. And also we have to remember that the kid is just a RS freshman. You are talking about a kid with some much god given talent that he was probably able to simply run over kids in HS so he needs a chance to get his feet wet. Not everyone can do what Quizz did this year and its not fair to judge McCants on that. With that being said, I believe that Pitt’s D is weaker in the secondary anyways so a good 15 carries may get it done in this game for McCants. Also, I tend to believe McCants future 2 or 3 years down the road maybe lining up on the opposite side of the ball as a freakish DE/OLB hybrid….

GO BEAVS!!!

In our case, we have three walk-on freshmen behind McCants, potentially.

And I think most of the people that have seen McCants play agree… But so much of this year was the Quizz show, and his little deeks and dips were what got everyone excited. McCants probably thought he had to be like that. He will, in time, learn to use his “God given talent” and will begin to run over people. And when he does, it will be exciting for everyone. I’m telling you, that first time that he lowers his shoulder and pancakes a LB is going to do so much for his confidence that he won’t be able to fail. Remember: HE IS A FRESHMAN