Pitt's Baldwin is going pro, despite Pitt's conspiracy against him

Jonathan Baldwin began the season as a consensus preseason All-American on the heels of an electric junior campaign in which he racked up 1,111 yards and eight touchdowns on nearly 20 yards per catch for a 10-game winner. He ends it with fewer catches for fewer yards, fewer touchdowns and a smaller per-catch average for a team that decided to fire its head coach after a disappointing slide to 7-5. Like teammate Dion Lewis, Baldwin was a curiously forgotten man. Llook up "Jonathan Baldwin" on YouTube, and the offerings from this fall are few and far between. Even my standard photo search, which turns up dozens of pictures of Baldwin in 2009, returns zero from 2010 on three different wire services.

The mediocre campaign may have cost Baldwin a few bucks in the draft, but it's not going to stop him from leaving school early – in fact, as he told NFLDraftScout.com this week, it only hastened his exit, because everyone around here's just trying to keep him down, man:

Reached through text message Tuesday evening and asked if it was safe to say he would forego his senior year with Wannstedt stepping down, Baldwin responded, "No, it's not safe to say that."

At first, it sounded as if Baldwin was non-committal on his future, but when asked, "Why would you stay [for your senior season] when you have no chemistry with QB Tino Sunseri, a new coach/system taking over next season and possibly hurt your draft stock for the 2012 draft, Baldwin clarified, "Oh, I misunderstood you ... Heck yeah I'm leaving. It can only get worse. They had me running a lot of deep routes [this year] and yards were hard to come by. I barely ran intermediate routes; it felt like they were purposely trying to disrupt my draft stock."

I didn't see enough of Pitt to faithfully report the distribution of Baldwin's routes, but if he was going long, Sunseri wasn't hitting him: Less than a third of his catches this year (17 of 52) went for at least 15 yards, compared to well over 50 percent in 2009. On the other hand, only one of Baldwin's five touchdowns didn't involve Sunseri hanging a prayer downfield in an attempt to bring the Panthers from a fourth quarter deficit.

Still, it's impressive to hear a receiver take that extra step beyond "I got no quarterback" to "It's a conspiracy." Yes, Dave Wannstedt and offensive coordinator Frank Cignetti's brilliant plan to purposefully ignore their best player in order to suppress his draft stock worked out just perfectly for them, didn't it? Somehow, I see the Cincinnati Bengals in Baldwin's future.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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