Opinion
Vukovcan: Fearbry’s PSU Commitment A Big Loss for Pitt But They’ll Move On

There’s no way other way to put it other than today was a disappointing day for Pitt football recruiting.
Tyreese Fearbry is someone that Pat Narduzzi and his staff recruited hard and wanted to add to their collection of elite talent Pitt’s been able to add to their defensive line over the last few years.
The fact that Pitt lost him to Penn State is irrelevant. The reason this hurts is because the Panthers lost a recruiting battle for a very talented local player, something that hasn’t happened many times over the last few recruiting seasons.
The fact is that when Narduzzi has zeroed in on a local player lately, chances were pretty good that come commitment day, a Pat Signal would appear. But that didn’t happen on this Fourth of July.
While Panther fans are no doubt disappointed, as they should be, but in no way should anyone criticize the Pitt staff for coming up short with this effort. In the business of recruiting, you learn quickly that you’ll win some and you’ll lose some. Over the last couple of recruiting years, the Pitt program won some impressive local recruiting battles to keep players like Elliot Donald, Dayon Hayes, Nahki Johnson and Dorien Ford home but came up short with Fearbry.
I can tell you that Pitt recruited Fearbry as hard and as well as possible. The bottom line was that no matter how well Pitt recruited him, Fearbry was someone that wanted to leave the 412 area code to try and make a name for himself. There’s nothing wrong with that and when that’s the case, Pitt wasn’t going to change his mind.
While it’s hard to try and make this positive, the only good thing for Pitt is that Fearbry plays a position that the Panthers are extremely deep at with a bunch of young and also experienced talent. While they no doubt were hoping to land this rising talent, the future Pitt defensive line is in good hands with Donald, Johnson, Hayes, Ford, Sean FitzSimmons, John Morgan, Bam Brima, Calijah Kancey, Emmanuel Belgrave and others.
What’s next for Pitt?
The answer is they’ll keep recruiting top talent and move onto the next recruit.
While they still have work to do with their Class of 2022, the staff with also work hard on two big names in order to get back in the winners circle with elite local talent. Brashear’s Ta’Mere Robinson and Laurel Highlands Rodney Gallagher are two players in the Class of 2023 that are getting recruited by some of the biggest names in college football and are on course to be Western PA’s biggest local recruits since Jeannette’s Terrell Pryor.
Emotions in recruiting are ever changing and as Narduzzi tweeted this morning, “Never get too high, never good too low, just saw that wood.”
I can promise you that the Panthers staff won’t get too low after today, they’ve moved on and are looking forward to that next local recruiting battle starting with Robinson and Gallagher.
