What Did Pitt HC Pat Narduzzi Say Monday About the WVU Loss, Louisville?
PITTSBURGH — Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi spoke Monday for the first time since the Panthers’ loss at West Virginia.
Here’s everything Narduzzi had to say about the WVU loss and Pitt’s next opponent versus Louisville.
PAT NARDUZZI: Just start off, tough team loss that we put to bed a long time ago. Got some good practices in a week ago, and I think for the future, we’re going to try to find some way of zooming. I know I’m on the road recruiting like last Monday, but try to find a way to get you guys more information in the open week as opposed to waiting over a week just to get any information on the game. So I think we’ll change it up for the next open week.
But tough team loss. We had our opportunities. We didn’t coach good enough and did not execute good enough and it comes down to that. We had our opportunities, which makes you sick when you watch it. I think we had 9 of 14 penalties run a money down, which is third or fourth down.
We beat ourselves. We shot ourselves in the foot. Nobody beat us. And I say it all the time to our kids and after the game, it’s about what we do. It’s not about what somebody else.
We can talk about all the Xs and Os and all the people playing on either side of the ball, but it comes down to doing what you’re supposed to do. We didn’t do a great job of that.
You live and learn, you get stronger from it. We build off it. The ACC is ahead of us. Non-conference game is a non-conference game. The goal at the end of the day is to win an ACC Championship. Our guys realize that, and I think they learned a lot from last week’s game, our first really big game on the road, which are never easy to go on the road and win a football game.
Again, we had our opportunities, and even down to the end. But it shouldn’t have even gotten to the end. Shouldn’t have got to overtime. We had a chance to knock them out.
Going into Louisville. Obviously an undefeated Louisville team is coming here at noon on Saturday. Jeff Brohm is an excellent football coach, one of the best in the business offensively. Him and his brother kind of run that offense, Miller Moss, Isaac Brown at tailback. He’s explosive. He’ll be freshened up because he only took two snaps Saturday. So Isaac Brown will be ready to roll, and Miller Moss, transfer from USC.
We’ve got a big wideout in Bell out there that does a great job. And Lacy, No. 5, is a another special player that they try to get a bunch of touches to.
So they’re explosive on offense, really explosive on offense. We’ll have our hands full like we had the last two years defending Jeff Brohm.
Defensively they do great job. Ron English, veteran defensive coordinator, as well as Mark Hagen, who is their co-defensive coordinator as well.
Mark Hagen, the defensive line coach. I think it all starts up front. He does a great job with that defensive line. He’ll get them motivated. I’m surprised he’s not a coordinator somewhere else on a higher level. I think he’s an excellent coach and does a phenomenal job coaching that front four.
So we’ve got to keep them away from our quarterback with their O-line. Lubin is a big athletic guy that’s got a great speed rush. Him and Bailey on the other end are excellent players. They’ve got Quinn at middle linebacker, who’s probably the most productive player on defense, at least when it comes to tackles, and they’re experienced in the back end.
They’re talented. Our job is not to really worry about who they are. It’s worry about Pitt. That’s kind of where we are.
Q. On Pitt veterans committing penalties:
PAT NARDUZZI: Not letting it happen again. We can’t have captains, we can’t have our older guys, our seniors, our leadership guys making those type of critical errors.
And we’ve got to be better. We’ve got to be better on the road. We’ve got to be better with the noise, and we’ve got to be better across the board. And that doesn’t matter whether it’s offense or defense. Our seniors got to play their best football.
Q. How do you instill that? Is it a discipline issue? Is it focus?
PAT NARDUZZI: You got to say it’s a discipline issue, but it’s not like when you think disciplining your children, but it’s just being smart. And we’ve got to be smart.
You guys watched the videotape. You saw some of the penalties that were either there or not there. But we’ve just got to be smart. And I think it’s just being aggressive. We talk about aggressive penalties and unforced penalties and selfish penalties, but we’ve got to be smarter. We’re better football players. We’re smarter now.
If they’re going to call it that close, then we’ve got to do a better job as coaches making sure that we give them no reason to call a roughing the passer or trying to go push a pile and all of a sudden the pile goes down and you go over the top. We’ve just got to be smarter.
Q. Eli had a little bit of a sluggish start down there. What do you do to fix those problems?
PAT NARDUZZI: The first thing we do is make sure we protect the quarterback. We know any contact on a quarterback affects a quarterback. It doesn’t help when you go out there the first play of the game and you have a max protection called and we don’t protect the quarterback. That’s where it starts.
Again, quarterback is always going to get all the praise when you’re 2-0, and when he doesn’t throw it good enough — but pressure affects people, and we’ve got to do a better job making sure it doesn’t affect him and move on from it like we have.
But we’ve got to protect the quarterback. We didn’t do a good enough job protecting the quarterback on just fundamentals and execution. Then there’s a couple times where he’s got to get rid of the ball where he runs into sacks as opposed to moving his feet in the pocket and letting the ball rip.
Q. As you watched it, as Kade watched it, where do you see some of those issues [Holstein’s missed throws]? Is it accuracy? Is he not comfortable?
PAT NARDUZZI: I think, again, he’s got Des that’s on a scramble, and it’s a tough throw when you run it to the right and try to lay it up there to Des, and then the one that you thought was going to be there all week — he’s just got to make the throws. I mean, you watch football on Saturday, they don’t always make all those.
And we’d like him to be perfect. He’s not going to be. But big-time players make those plays in big-time games. And we’ve got to make those plays. That goes down to execution. We’ve got to make the play when we have somebody open.
Q. How have you seen that relationship play out on the field (Holstein and Kenny Johnson)?
PAT NARDUZZI: We’ll find out this weekend. I think it’s been okay. Kenny has had his catches, and there’s times where we got to get it to him more. So expect to get him the ball more. And there’s times when he’s open and we’ve got to get it to him, whether it’s when you take a sack or run into a sack, whatever it may be.
But I’ve been happy with the way Kenny has played and gotten open. We’ve got to get him the ball.
Q. Shawn Lee is listed as a co-starter; what have you seen from Lee that has really put him in that position?
PAT NARDUZZI: He’s a football player. He had 93 plays on defense. I think he had eight on special teams. As a true freshman to come in and play over 100 snaps in a football game and be on it the whole time, talk about executing, he played at a high level.
I see him as a starter right now. That’s probably why I put that O on there. Shawn Lee is a football player, we said it through camp, and he’s just going to continue to get more reps because you put him out there and you trust him. The game doesn’t get too big for him. In a big atmosphere, in a power forward game, he didn’t play like a freshman.
Q. On listing three starting tight ends for Pitt:
PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, I think we are. We had a holding penalty on a nice run by Deuce, but all three of those guys are football players. I feel good with all three of them as starters really. Malachi has done a great job when he’s in there in there. Holmes has done great. And we hope and hope and hope that Overman is ready to go.
Q. You guys, any team suffers a tough loss, it’s about how the players respond, how the players bounce back. How about the staff? They pour a lot into this, too. How have they all bounced back?
PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, the players bounced back. The players were great last week. And the coaches are the same way. We’re older. We’d better be able to bounce back. We know how critical it is. It’s a one-game season every week. You put everything into it first week, second week, third week, you put it all into the fourth week. Coaches are the last ones you worry about.
Q. From your standpoint as the head coach, is there any sort of reinforcement you’ve got to give to coaches and coordinators about sticking with the plan and not wavering going into the conference season?
PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, that never happens. We talk about that all the time. The plan doesn’t change. Some of the Xs and Os on the field change, what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, who’s doing what, who you’re getting the ball to, who’s blocking, all those things, but the plan never changes. If you start changing the plans, you’ve got problems.
Q. We saw a lot of Deuce Spann against West Virginia. What have you seen from him over the past couple weeks that have earned him a co-starter spot?
PAT NARDUZZI: Deuce has done a nice job. Again, I think maybe someone asked that question after the game the other day. Blue was cramping up a little bit; I think that’s why you saw him — it was a hot day when we played a lot of plays. But Blue — I think whoever asked that question about why Deuce was in there, but we’ve got trust in Deuce. Deuce is a starter as well in my opinion. He does a nice job of executing and doing things right. Both those guys will get the even share out there, and we’ll see who makes more plays.
Q. How much trust do you have in Goff to take an increased number of snaps?
PAT NARDUZZI: I’ve got a lot of trust in him. He plays big. He plays big. He had a nice run, I think, in the fourth quarter, bouncing out and breaking a few tackles and getting around the edge for a big important gain on that play. But he had some obviously protection issues as well that we’ve got to get cleaned up with him, and we’ll get that straightened out this week.
But the more plays he’s getting, the more confidence he has, I think he could be a really good back in this conference.
Q. For both you guys and Louisville, this will mark the debut of the ACC availability reports midway through the week or so. Curious your thoughts on that, just being something that’s required now, and do you think it’ll have the desired effect as far as curbing the nefarious gambling activity?
PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, I don’t know, I’m not a gambler so I don’t pay attention to those. I don’t know what kind of effect there will be. We haven’t done this for a while. We did this my first probably three or four years, the availability report. This one is a little bit different from what I gather.
We’ll give it a test run here on Thursday and Friday. This is not just a Friday or Saturday morning report; this is a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and a lot of things can happen in three days as far as the health of your players.
Q. Do you find these guys (transfer QBs) fit seamlessly into what Brohm does?
PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, like I said, Jeff Brohm is one of the best. He’s one of the best. He takes these quarterbacks and he develops them. He’s a quarterback guru, so he’s done a nice job with Miller, the Moss kid, and did a good job with the kid last year who I think is with the Saints. So he finds a guy he likes, something he likes about him, and he goes after him.
Q. On the run game, what are you guys seeing that’s holding you back from establishing consistently picking up four, five, six yards on a regular basis?
PAT NARDUZZI: They ran the ball, we didn’t run the ball, and again, it all comes down to execution across the board.
But we had some good runs in there, I think. But they changed some things. At halftime I think we went and adjusted some things as well on the sidelines just with some of the things they did differently than they had done in the previous game.
That will all come, and it hurts — again, we start off, Des is breaking off some good runs, some eight-, nine-, ten-yard gains, so just got to keep it rolling, and we should be fine.
When the young guys came in, some of the places we were running the ball, it wasn’t exactly like you’d like it to be. But again, whether it was Bussey or Goff, those are thing we’ll get cleaned up the more experience they have.
Q. As you approach conference play, have you been able to get a sense of anything really positive like we can lean into this, this is where it should be for conference play? Or the converse of that, is there one or two elements that you’re looking at saying we’ve got to tighten this up?
PAT NARDUZZI: We have to tighten up a lot of things. First we have thing we have to do is tighten up our execution on both sides of the ball. I thought special teams were solid. We haven’t talked much about them.
But both sides of the ball, it comes down to execution. Without execution, it doesn’t matter and you can’t even evaluate the play. It’s like, what if we would have got that block or did this. What if we would have read our keys. So it all comes down to execution, so there’s nothing that you’re saying after three games, ugh, this is terrible, we can’t do that or, hey, this is what we are and this is what we have to do and that’s it. It comes down to execution. You’ve got to mix it up enough offensively and defensively to get that.
But I don’t know if our guys were just too fired up or what, but we didn’t execute.
Q. The depth chart seems to change every week, but do you feel that making changes to that depth chart, is that so guys can expect more —
PAT NARDUZZI: I hope they’re not looking at the depth chart. They see a depth chart every day in here when they get on the field in practice, so I don’t know if they’re really looking at the depth chart. I hope not. I don’t know when he releases it or whatever, but I’m not reading what the depth chart looks like out there. I’m focused on Louisville.
So I don’t know if the depth chart matters. You’re going to get your opportunity, you’ve got to go make plays and execute.
Q. You talk a lot about execution, but when you’re looking back at the film and looking at the play calling offensively at least with Kade, do you ever meet with him or talking about tweaking some things or things that you see?
PAT NARDUZZI: I meet with him all the time, number one, and I think he called a hell of a game to be honest with you. We’ve got to execute and we’ve got to make plays. There’s plays you’d like to have back here and there, and communication can always be better. But I thought when you go back and watch the tape with him and see what’s there and what’s open and if we get the block there, if we get this, I thought we put ourselves in some good positions, and we’ve got to finish.
Q. When you have a situation like that, where the plays are there but you just miss a block or you just miss a throw, is the answer then personnel? Do you have to then look for personnel solutions?
PAT NARDUZZI: Eventually, personnel is at every position. If you’re not making a tackle, you’re not reading your keys, and you’re not making those plays, you’re not in the right spot, you’ve always got to look at personnel, period. Personnel is always it.
But you don’t look at it after one game and say, “You’re out,” at any position. I think it’s a gradual thing that you want to get fixed. That’s our job as coaches is to fix it. That’s our job as coaches. It starts with us as coaches. We’ve got to get the execution better in all phases.
Q. Still feeling good about the offensive line? We asked you two weeks ago.
PAT NARDUZZI: I do, I do. I feel good. We’ve got to execute. We’ve got to protect what we’re supposed to protect. When you look overall, besides a couple issues with the running back protection, we did a good job protecting the quarterback. We ran into some sacks, and we’ve got to move our feet in the pocket and find the open receiver and hit him.
Q. Desmond Reid is your No. 1 running back. Your returning rusher from last season left the game after the first quarter, watched from the sidelines. Was he able to practice last week? Is he practicing this week?
PAT NARDUZZI: He was out there last week.
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