Not too long ago, Taysir Mack was the feature receiver of Pitt's offense for Kenny Pickett. But as time wore on, he faced several struggles that set his college career back.
After catching the game-winning touchdown in the final minute of the Quick Lane Bowl at the end of the 2019-2020 season, Mack struggled with several drops throughout 2020 and a nagging injury that required surgery in the offseason. But if you ask him, he's not looking to try to get back to where he was in 2019, he's focused on being the best version of himself for 2021.
"I want to be better than where I was in 2019," Mack said Wednesday after practice. "That's like saying the sky's the limit when you know people walked on the moon."
Mack is a player with a lot of confidence that he can be a gamechanger for the Panthers in 2021. His season started with a rough first game, dropping a touchdown and only recording three catches for 34 yards against UMass. But he quickly bounced back catching all four of the passes he was targeted on for 100 yards, each of which going for important first downs during Pitt's 41-34 win over Tennessee.
"First game's always rough," Mack said. "I put so much pressure on myself to try an impact the game and I wasn't letting the game come to me. In the second game, I bounced back by coming in and accepting my role."
Part of Mack's 'bounce back' was a process he undertook to make sure he corrected any mistake he made. He's a bit of a perfectionist in that sense, literally walking through every step of his route until he feels comfortable he's nailed it. That's something he helped figure out how to do under Pitt's new receivers coach Brennan Marion.
"Coach Marion made me fall in love with the process again," Mack said. "Sometimes we all worry too much about the outcome, but there's a lot of things we can't control. He always tells me, 'control the controllables.' I struggled in the first game to get back into my flow. I take a lot of notes so I went back and walked through my routes at least 25 times and then made catches. Catching from JUGS helps but when I do it with walking through routes, it also drills the repetition from me."
For Marion, the challenge he faced as a coach after UMass was honing Mack's knack to be a perfectionist to make sure he's focusing on the right elements of his game.
"Biggest thing we talked about after the first game was the box score doesn't say how you catch the ball, it just says 'catch,'" Marion said of his comments to Mack after the UMass game. "He corrected the mistakes he made in the first game by trying to make things perfect. It's about catching the ball when the game's on the line and he did that during the first game."
Coaching isn't a simple job for anyone, let alone Marion. He prides himself not only on setting a standard for his players to reach, but figuring out how to get through to each of his players. That's not something that's a blanket effort, as it takes him understanding how each of his players tick, and how to get through to them in different ways.
"You have to be a psychologist as a coach," Marion said. "You have to know what makes every guy tick. I've spent a lot of time with these guys during the offseason to get to know them. I'm able to push them hard on the field and love them off the field to help make a cohesive group."
Part of how Marion's pushed his guys is to find ways for them to keep working on their crafts even outside of normal practice and meeting hours. Pat Narduzzi noted after Pitt's win over Tennessee that the receivers had been taking Pitt's JUGS machines out in the dark as late as 10 p.m. and working on catching footballs to make sure their hands are game-ready. Part of how Marion's helped push his receivers to take on these tasks has been through teaching them his own experiences as a receiver.
"When I was a receiver, I wasn't a highly-rated recruit," Marion said. "These guys were a lot better than I was coming out of high school. I give them what I did to become an elite receiver. They used to call me "50-50" when I was a freshman because I couldn't catch. I started catching the ball 300-500 times a day and became obsessed about it, and that's how I took off. Those things that I used, I told them and they've made it their own. Even if it's late at night, you find some car light or something. When you want to be great, you'll find a way to get it done."
Marion got good enough at Tulsa to become a starter by his junior season, recording 2,356 receiving yards and 19 touchdowns across 2007 and 2008. But an ACL tear at the end of 2008 kept him from participating in the NFL Scouting Combine, and after being signed as an undrafted free agent by the Packers, he would suffer another ACL tear that would end his NFL career before he got his chance to shine.
But those hard lessons that Marion learned to make himself a player NFL teams would even consider are rubbing on his receivers.
"Coach Marion, even though he says it's not something we need to do, he calls it 'optional-mandatory' things to do," Mack said. "We do different things he provided for us to do to find the growth in the game we want. Some people focus on more areas than others. Tre (Tipton) stays in the weight room working on wrist curls, Shocky (Jacques-Louise) likes catching with a medicine ball before, Jaylen (Bardon), Jordan (Addison) and Melquise (Stovall) all go to the JUGS machine before practice."
Marion is meticulous with how he works each of his receivers to improve. That's especially the case with Mack, who turns 23 years old on Friday, as Marion made sure to have plenty of notes on even before he met him.
"Me and his high school coach, K.J. (Stroud), we went through his maturation process and where he's been as a kid," Marion said of Mack. "I kind of had a good file on him when I got here because of that and that helped me build a relationship with him. The biggest thing about Taysir after being healthy is to keep his mind right. You saw against Tennessee we went against defensive backs with 2-3 years of starting experience and he went out there making quality plays for us against them."
One of the challenges Mack has always faced was the fact that he's dyslexic, a diagnosis he's known since the second grade, and it did make him struggle to learn.
"It was a struggle and I had to find different ways to learn how to play receiver," Mack said. "But if you ask me any route or concept, I can tell you off the back of my hand. I'm the X receiver, so I know if the call is to the right, the X receiver is to the left. I got that from programs I was in as a kid to help me when I started learning the playbook."
Mack's not just about learning his playbook, but all about taking meticulous notes on all the details of his assignments. Part of what Marion had to do to help Mack improve was to use those notes not to just work on his game, but to help his teammates with theirs.
"Definitely his leadership," Marion said of what's changed the most about Mack. "When I first got here he was always by himself. But now I see him bring younger guys along with him to work. If you look at his notebook, he takes quarterback-like notes that are extremely detailed and organized. He's very professional in that and I told him to share that with the young guys. Now he can't mope around and worry about himself, it helps him be about the group and that's helped him really take off."
"Being a good teacher actually makes you understand your work ethic and what you do better," Mack said. "When I started to teach the younger players why we run different routes, why our splits are important and what we're basing off the defense and what type of catch we want to make, it made me reinstall it in my brain. When you lend a hand, you reap benefits. Knowing those guys trust me makes me feel better."
You can see the improvements Mack made from week one to week two easily on tape. Here's two of his better plays where he gained first downs for Pitt against tight man coverage from Tennessee. Watch how he sold this comeback route against Tennessee, because you can see his sharp cut back to the sideline that only takes three steps before he's facing Pickett and looking for the ball:
By the time the cornerback could stop and recover from Mack's move, he had already made his catch and was cutting inside of his man off his pivot foot.
Mack's most impressive catch was a contested back shoulder pass from Pickett, where you could see him get just enough behind his man that he forced Tennessee's cornerback to chase him, and not notice when Mack's eyes were looking for the jump ball:
By the time the cornerback realizes what's happening, Mack has won the high-point battle and gotten Pitt into great scoring position.
Mack overcoming his challenges
"I try to meet them where they're at," Marion said. "I don't try to just be the authority figure all the time who's over the top of them. I listen to their concerns, let them voice those, then we put them to bed. We do a lot of things that lets them feel ownership of our work instead of telling them to shut up and do what we say. Because of that, they're doing the work harder than they have, and running harder then they've shown. Give them that time to be themselves, meet them where they're at and then bring them higher, that's what helps."
Mack's inconsistencies with catching the ball were a problem that hindered Pitt in recent years, most notably when he dropped a two-point conversion against N.C. State late in a 2020 game that ended as a one-point loss for the Panthers.
But if Mack can follow Marion's lead of not being a '50-50 guy,' maybe he becomes a major asset for Pitt in his final year with the program. For Marion, it could be a good omen for his impact on the program as he works with other young talented receivers in the room, like Addison, Bardon, Wayne and Jacques-Louise.
Those improvements could re-define Pitt's receiver room for years to come it Marion sticks around long enough.
Even under Marion, there are players working to help each other through their tough times. Tipton, who's said he wanted to be a 'superhero' for mental health and his teammates, has been just that for Mack as he fought through the struggles of recovering from his surgery, and then the passing of his grandfather, Derick Keith Mack, in the spring.
"When it comes to Tre Tipton, that's a really close friend," Mack said. "We both understand different struggles of losing family members and going through injuries. This game is more mental than it is physical. People say, 'I'm here if you want to speak to me,' but having that person that checks on you even when they're struggling, that means a lot."
It meant a lot to Mack for Tipton to keep checking on him, as Tipton was tending to his mother as her health faded before her passing away in the summer.
"I've seen Tre struggling with how his mom was doing and nobody knew about it," Mack continued. "But everyday when he knew I was working back from surgery, he would say, '11, how's your mentals?' He did that knowing he had stuff of his own that he was going through. That just shows how much your brother cares for you."
When it came time for Mack to reciprocate that brotherly care, he made sure to be there for Tipton.
"When his mom passed away, everybody blew up his phone but he wouldn't respond to anyone," Mack said of Tipton. "I was the only person he responded to and I told him to give me his location and I didn't care where he was at, I was coming. It ended up he was an hour and a half away, and I drove there to be there for him."
"That's the trust we've built together to trust each other mentally. The more we have structured confidence, the better we'll play. We have to mentally stay strong because football is a humbling game. One day I can drop a touchdown and the next I could get 100 yards. Failure isn't finite, but failure to change can be, so keep working to improve."
That's a strong culture for Marion to build on in his first year with Pitt, and if he keeps making strides with this group, it could become Pitt's most special units of the program.
