Jeff George Jr. supplants Town as backup quarterback
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Jeff George Jr. just became the most popular guy in town, right?
Or at least that’s how the old saying goes about backup quarterbacks, and that’s now George’s role on the Pitt football team. It seemed Pitt’s situation under center was trending that way the past few weeks of practice, when George was operating the second-team offense during the weekly open-viewing window for reporters, within the first half hour on Tuesdays.
Granted, George had one chance to endear himself to Pitt fans last time the Panthers took the field, but his fourth-down pass on a fake punt in the final minutes against Notre Dame was a throwaway out of bounds with no one open. Nonetheless, should something happen to sophomore starter Kenny Pickett — or should the coaching staff choose to kick the tires on another option — George would be the next man in line, not juniorcollege transfer Ricky Town, who was brought here in January for precisely this.
“Right now, Jeff would be the guy,” Narduzzi said Monday afternoon at his weekly news conference. “We’ve got confidence in Ricky, as well.”
Just not enough to keep him as the No. 2 apparently. That appeared to be the case as far back as late August, when George enrolled at Pitt and slipped in just under the gun before the fall semester started. That followed a change of heart for George since last season, which he spent at Illinois before graduating and transferring to Michigan, only to switch gears and leave the Wolverines for the Panthers.
It’s not often you see a player spend training camp at one program, then the subsequent season at another, but obviously it hasn’t held back George — a parttime starter the past two seasons at Illinois — from getting up to speed in offensive coordinator Shawn Watson’s system since being ruled eligible early in the season.
“Jeff’s come in and really picked stuff up well,” Narduzzi said.
The coach didn’t make it sound as if George is pushing Pickett for playing time, but Narduzzi was quick to switch his signal-caller at times last season, between Max Browne — another graduate transfer — Ben DiNucci and, later, Pickett.
Speaking of that trick punt play, though — a postscript nine days in the making — Narduzzi made it clear that George had the option to really lean into his fake No. 96 and punt the ball away if nothing was there. Indeed, nothing was there, but a turnover on downs was the result.
“The part that really disappoints you is it was a runpass option. He should’ve just punted the ball down the field,” Narduzzi said. “Whatever. That’s our fault as coaches. We didn’t coach that good enough. If he’s not doing it, it’s because we didn’t make him do it. But it should’ve been a punt anyway, based on, if nothing’s open, punt it.”
The other side of the coin for this shift in the quarterback hierarchy is that Pitt is shaping up as another missed opportunity for Town. A one-time Southern California signee who left that school during his first training camp, then spent two seasons on the sideline at Arkansas, Town enrolled early at Pitt following his semester at Ventura College. He’s still listed as Pickett’s backup on Pitt’s official depth chart, but he has been passed by George, who also has two years of eligibility remaining.
None of this is to say that George is an emphatically better option on paper than Town, let alone Pickett. The 6-foot-3, 220-pound son of the first pick in the 1990 NFL draft completed just 48 percent of his passes (132 of 275) in his two years at Illinois, with 1,743 yards and more interceptions (15) than touchdowns (11) in nine career starts.