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He was a superstar when he hit the field as a freshman at New Canaan.

A lot of big name teams gave him an offer based on his performance as a freshman and sophomore. He allegedly ran a 4.7 time in the 40 yard dash as a sophomore, was listed at 6' 0", and 190 lbs. Sounds great, doesn't it?

I generally don't have objections to giving a young player like that an offer, provided that we do our homework on him, especially when it comes to seeing how much more they can develop physically.

In Pyne's case, he was about 5' 10" as a true freshman, with everyone thinking that he'd grow a few more inches and add some lean muscle mass in his next few years.

He didn't. When he got on ND's campus as a freshman, he was still 5' 10" and didn't exactly show decent footspeed (4.70 would be more than good enough as a QB). If anything, he was only a step faster than his QB coach, Tommy Rees...

There was a picture of his standing next to Kenny Minchey (6' 1.5"). Pyne was in long cleats, Minchey was wearing ordinary sneakers, and Minchey looked at least 3" taller than Pyne.

While his abilities were good enough to win at a Connecticut high school, they certainly weren't going to make him a commanding QB who could take over a game.

I'm not going to sugar coat it at all. He did have some decent numbers in 2022, but given the excellent talent around him (excellent offensive line, best tight end in all of college football, great running backs, and yes, even decent receiver talent), he should have had an outstanding year.

He never did learn how to look over the middle or to the left. He would lock onto Mike Mayer, and then toss the ball into double or even triple coverage. He got away with that because Mayer was that good.

The Stanford game that year showed how limited he was. That was a putrid Stanford team, and their defense simply squatted into a short zone, not even bothering to put a safety in medium or long range coverage. All he had to do was throw a ball over the middle 20 yards downfield, and he would have easily had two or three passing touchdowns to Lorenzo Styles or Braden Lenzy. Instead, he kept locking onto Mayer, and ignored most of his receivers running their routes.

I appreciate the fact that he did step in and restore some stability to the QB position, but the offense was essentially crippled with his being at the helm. If we would have had a decent transfer portal QB that year, I think we would have been looking at a spot in the playoffs.