Pitt coach Narduzzi knows how to beat the elite teams
University of Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi calls football “a game of inches.” He wasn’t the first to say such a thing. Narduzzi was referring to a variety of small things that cost Pitt in a 33-14 loss at Penn State on Saturday.
But inches go both ways. Pitt is awfully close to being 0-2. The Panthers opened the season with a 28-21 overtime victory over Youngstown State of NCAA Division I-AA.
So what kind of team awaits Oklahoma State on Saturday at Heinz Field?
“Obviously, (the Penn State game) didn’t end the way we’d like it to, but that’s how things fall sometimes,” said Narduzzi, whose team beat Penn State a year ago. “I think we’ve got a darn good football team. As I told our kids last night (Sunday), you watch the tape from the game and it’s a game of inches.
“Our motto this year is to ‘take it,’ and we didn’t go out and take it. That’s the thing that really bothers you the most as a coach. It starts with the coaches and finishes and ends with the players. We just didn’t take it like you’d like to. It is a game of inches and there’s times where we can, whether it’s a linebacker fit on a quarterback run, and if we just (move) a little bit over here and you fit it right, you know, whether it’s a catch, make the catch, get the first down, make the explosive play, it changes the game.
“Whether it’s stuttering in your route too much without getting out of your break, it’s just a game of inches, and you look at the tape, and you pop on that game tape at the end when we kind of had an incomplete pass on the shovel near the end on about the 10-yard line. If he catches that, he’s looking up the field, if he catches it there’s a hole as wide as this row here to go. So it’s those game of inches that we’ve got to go take, and that’s kind of what that motto was, and we certainly haven’t taken it yet, but we’ve made strides from Week 1 to Week 2, which is all you can ask for.
“Good football team, like I said after the (postgame) press conference, and pretty much felt the same way after watching it. As a matter of fact, I probably felt better after watching the tape than I did after, but I felt pretty good about what we did and how we did some things against a good football team.”
The verdict is out on this Pitt team. But Pitt last season indeed had a good team. The Panthers lost 45-38 at Stillwater and eventually finished 8-5. Pitt also lost 37-36 at North Carolina, 39-36 at home to Virginia Tech, 51-28 at Miami and 31-24 to Northwestern in the Pinstripe Bowl.
But Pitt won 43-42 at eventual national champion Clemson. The Panthers beat the Big Ten champ (Penn State) and the ACC champ (Clemson). That’s not easy to do.
“And we’ve got another one coming in this weekend,” Narduzzi said. “It doesn’t get any easier. No. 8, No. 9-ranked team in Oklahoma State that we went out and battled a year ago that we know has talent across the board from the D-line back and O-line to James Washington and Mason Rudolph. I mean, they’re very, very talented and our focus has to go to them. We finished meetings, which we usually don’t, on Sunday night just really splitting up individually and going to watch Oklahoma State tape just for a little bit, not an extended meeting, but just to get their minds on that.”