Old-school Panthers
Pat Narduzzi likes his team’s run-first identity — it is working, after all.
As we near the end of his fourth year, Pat Narduzzi was asked if his team’s calling card these days — run first, pass questions later — can be a viable identity for as long as he’s in charge. In case you forgot, Pitt’s football coach is signed up for six more seasons of this.
“It is the identity,” Narduzzi said. “It is, and it always has been.”
In other words, in a world where seemingly all of college football’s high-profile contenders stay in step with their sport’s latest trends, the Panthers are content to be old school. They’re content to be smash-mouth. They’re content to be, well, every trite description of this town’s favorite sport that you could muster up on a Monday afternoon.
Narduzzi did just that at his weekly news conference, stopping short of calling his offense “gritty” or “blue-collared” but putting together a soliloquy that might as well be his mission statement, or perhaps the opening scene for any montage made of the three-game ACC winning streak that has the Panthers on the doorstep of the conference championship.
“It goes down to the toughness part of the game, so if you’re going to be a tough football team, you better stop the run and run the football,” Narduzzi said. “That’s why we live in Pittsburgh. That’s why we’re here. That’s what the Steelers are, that’s what we are, that’s what the Penguins are: Tough. To me, if you’re going to be great and you’re going to win a championship, you’re going to do it running the football and stopping the run. If they want to play basketball and soccer and all that stuff and throw the ball out, those are great sports, but … “
“They” is referring to all the other offensive systems out there trying to score points — which is to say all of them, some of which beat Pitt and some of which get beaten by Pitt. The rest of Narduzzi’s monologue lamented the nerve of those teams to use run-pass options that move their offensive linemen too far downfield for his liking. The implication is that they’re too far downfield to be legal (3 yards past the neutral zone); that’s where Narduzzi’s comparisons to more finesse sports comes in. For one, Syracuse coach Dino Babers has called his concept “basketball on grass,” but to Narduzzi, football is a game played and won in the trenches, where the stronger team wins and the weaker one loses.
That might be a laughable summation of the sport in its current form, but for Pitt, it’s becoming a mantra. Sure, the Panthers use their share of shotgun formations, employ plenty of pre-snap motions and don’t mind hitting a big pass play from time to time. But lately, opposing defenses have been in no shape to reciprocate Pitt’s physicality, and it’s just as laughable how easily this running game has chewed up yards and spit them out, often times half a field later.
By just about any rushing metric, Pitt now ranks in the top 10 in Football Bowl Subdivision. In yards per carry, the Panthers (6.49) rank fourth, behind only Oklahoma (6.83), Clemson (6.73) and Memphis (6.51). Those are two College Football Playoff hopefuls and a team that plays in the American Athletic Conference. Narduzzi suggested it won’t be easy this week for another “spread” team, Wake Forest, to prepare for Pitt’s grounded onslaught.
“Our offense will be about as foreign to most teams in this conference as Georgia Tech’s, really, because they don’t get to see it every week,” he said of an ACC rival’s distinctive triple-option attack. “You line up with George Aston back there in the backfield, they don’t even — ‘What position is that?’ They have to have a lesson in Football 101 to say, ‘That is the ‘F’ and he’s a fullback.’ So there’s all kinds of new stuff they have to worry about.”
Granted, Aston is something to worry about in and of himself, but Narduzzi’s point is that he wants to make a defense one-dimensional — gearing up to keep Darrin Hall or Qadree Ollison from taking off between the tackles. At least in the ACC, it’s not being stopped, and the Panthers will ride it as long and as far as they can.
But even Narduzzi — who can’t heap enough praise on first-year offensive line coach Dave Borbely — admitted he didn’t see this level of dominance (yardage total against Virginia Tech: 492) coming down the pike. Ollison and center Jimmy Morrissey were named the ACC’s players of the week at their positions Monday, but the best honor for them and anyone else who shares their jobs might be as abstractly simple as this: Their head coach keeps talking like it’s 1960, and it’s working.
“If you can run the football,” Narduzzi said, “it’s just, like, the best thing in the world. Period.”