Former WPIAL football stars return home to accept new challenges at Pitt
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Donovan McMillon remembers the first time he was on the same football field with Phil Jurkovec.
From McMillon’s perspective, it wasn’t a pretty sight.
Jurkovec’s Pine-Richland team beat McMillon and Peters Township, 56-7, on the way to the Rams winning WPIAL and PIAA 6A championships in 2017.
“I was a freshman who didn’t play, and I was in by the third quarter,” said McMillon on Wednesday when Pitt introduced him, Jurkovec and former Gateway running back Derrick Davis as three of their 2023 transfers.
Phil Jurkovec, happy to be home. pic.twitter.com/ghbzEer6AU
— Jerry DiPaola (@JDiPaola_Trib) January 25, 2023
“We came out and stopped him first drive,” said McMillon, a safety. “We poked the wrong bear. Next thing I know, I looked up and there were no fans.”
Jurkovec’s impact was so profound that McMillon’s father nicknamed the 6-foot-5, 214-pound future Pitt quarterback “The Galloping Giraffe.”
There are no secrets among teammates — even new ones — so McMillon told the story with Jurkovec in the room.
“I don’t know if I should take that as a compliment or an insult,” Jurkovec said, smiling, when it was his turn at the podium. “I’ll take it as a compliment.”
Pitt football started winter workouts this month in preparation for what appears to be a season of transition.
Six starters are gone from the defense, and quarterback Kedon Slovis transferred to BYU. Meanwhile, running back Izzy Abanikanda, who led the ACC in rushing, and 1,000-yard wide receiver Jared Wayne are off with their defensive brethren chasing NFL dreams.
That left coach Pat Narduzzi to pay close attention to the NCAA transfer portal, where he found Jurkovec (Boston College), Davis (LSU) and McMillon (Florida). How those three assimilate with their new teammates will go a long way in determining if Narduzzi can keep a program that won 20 games in two seasons on an upward trajectory.
Securing commitments from three former WPIAL stars is an important step for Pitt. Those three were some of the biggest prep stars in Western Pennsylvania. Fans who follow recruiting would have been giddy if Pitt signed them directly out of high school.
Now, Pitt gets them after multiple seasons of development and maturity at other schools. Jurkovec, for example, is entering his sixth college season — one more than Kenny Pickett famously enjoyed — after he transferred from Notre Dame to Boston College to Pitt.
They become three of at least 14 WPIAL and City League players ticketed for significant playing time this season.
“It goes to show we have talent in this city. A lot of people look past it,” Davis said.
More important than their original roots are what they learned at their previous universities.
“Being down in the SEC allowed me to mature in a different way, grow as a man,” Davis said. “I was able to actually pick up things from those teams that I couldn’t pick up from anywhere else, honestly.”
McMillon said one of the reasons he originally chose Florida was to learn to be on his own.
“I felt like I had to get away. Go mature,” he said. “Being able to pay my own bills, do my laundry, when it comes down to it, clean the toilets in the house. Having that other side of maturing definitely is going to help me transition well at Pitt.”
Davis shifted from safety to running back at LSU last season when the Tigers needed help in the backfield. He had only six carries for 29 yards. But when he scored on a 12-yard run in LSU’s 63-7 romp against Purdue in the Citrus Bowl, he decided running back was his best position.
“I knew Pitt was losing its main running back,” Davis said. “I made the decision to commit here and, hopefully, do big things here at running back. Why not play in the city where I have a lot of support?”
Watching from afar, Davis said he saw the Pitt program grow over the past two seasons.
“Narduzzi was able to turn this program around in a tremendous way,” he said. “For me to actually see that first-hand, I (said), ‘Pitt has something.’ Now, they’re going to have something, for real.”
Davis and McMillon have met as opponents four times, two each in high school and college.
In high school, each player’s team scored one-point postseason victories against the other, Gateway’s in the 2019 WPIAL title game. Then, they met twice in the SEC after LSU defeated Florida in 2021 and 2022.
“We asked each other, ‘Would you ever return home?’ ” Davis said. “He said, ‘Yeah,’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and we’re returning home.”
McMillon called Davis “one of the hardest backs I had to play defense against, for sure.”
They’ll resume their competition in practice this spring.
“He’s going to break some loose. I’m going to come down and hit him sometimes,” McMillon said. “But it’s all love. We’re going to be great together.”
While Pitt was recruiting him after last season, McMillon said assistant coaches Cory Sanders and Archie Collins reminded him of the former Pitt defensive backs in the NFL.
“I’m just trying to be the next one to do that,” he said.
Jurkovec said it was hard to leave home for Notre Dame, but he was familiar with Pittsburgh and wanted a new perspective. Then, Boston College offered an opportunity to start, and he did that for three seasons.
After Boston College finished 3-9 last season, he checked on his chances to get drafted.
“The NFL got back to me and told me I didn’t have a good shot of getting drafted, and I needed to come back to school,” he said.
Transferring to Pitt may be more seamless for him than it was for Slovis. Jurkovec spent two seasons at BC under Pitt offensive coordinator Frank Cignetti Jr.
“I owe a lot of my success at Boston College to coach Cignetti,” said Jurkovec, who threw and ran for 5,612 yards and 44 touchdowns at BC. “He really knows how to coach quarterbacks.”
He also said his experience at Pine-Richland taught him how to be part of a winning team.
“I’ve been on some good teams and some bad teams, and I know the differences,” he said.
“At Pine-Richland, we had some talent, but we largely won because of our culture. Because we had players who bought in. We had a lot of little guys, guys that couldn’t really go on to play at the next level, but we were a very, very tight team.
“The same thing’s going to happen (at Pitt). We just have to come together as a team. We have to be fully invested. If the culture’s strong enough, we’re going to win.”