Pitt’s Pat Narduzzi embraces status as underdog against Tennessee
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Let’s check the facts surrounding Pitt’s next game, a Saturday visit by Tennessee to Acrisure Stadium, representing the first time an SEC team has played in Pittsburgh.
Pitt won the ACC championship last season, finished 13th in the final Associated Press poll, opened 2022 at No. 17, and followed up with a dramatic 38-31 victory against West Virginia of the Big 12.
Tennessee was unranked at the end of last season and remained so in the preseason poll, although that could change when fresh rankings are released Tuesday. The Volunteers enjoyed a dominant 59-10 victory last Saturday against Ball State, a team picked to finish last in the Mid-American Conference West Division.
So who’s favored between the Panthers and the visiting Volunteers? Tennessee, by between 5 and 6½ points, depending upon your oddsmaker of choice.
Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi claims the slight — and the perception from which it apparently evolves — doesn’t bother him.
“You know what, you’d like to be the underdog every week,” he said Monday during his weekly news conference.
Narduzzi said he’s not a gambler, and he proved it when he said Pitt was “probably” the underdog against WVU. (Pitt was a touchdown favorite.)
But Narduzzi pointed out that Pitt fans were the actual underdogs, considering the way-off ESPN prediction that Mountaineers fans would constitute 75% of the crowd.
It’s all about reputation and perception.
“It’s a good football team coming here,” he said of Tennessee. “You’ve heard all summer about the SEC, and there’s only really two Power Five conferences in the country, the SEC and the Big Ten. So we’re in the pee-wee league, and we’re going to line up and see if we can play.”
Now there’s the type of feistiness that will serve Pitt’s players well when they meet the Volunteers.
Narduzzi said he hasn’t mentioned the point spread to his players.
“Not yet,” he said, “Didn’t know until I found out about it a minute ago. Again, it doesn’t matter. Whoever sets these odds … Who knows?”
Narduzzi will share with his players what others are saying, but you can bet he won’t waste much time talking about who’s favored. There are bigger problems confronting the Panthers.
“Obviously, we did not play a perfect game (against West Virginia),” Narduzzi said. “We never will, but it was just an average football game for us.
“A lot of things we left out on the field. Explosive plays on offense, giving up explosives on defense. Letting someone run the ball like they did is not our MO, and stuff that we’ve got to clean up, that we will clean up.
“I think it starts with coaches. It starts with me. Anytime we’re (crappy), it starts right here. (Crappy) head coach. It trickles down to not making plays.”
Narduzzi suggested coaches might have given players too much to handle, more than what was actually called in the game.
“I think sometimes, for openers, you can have too much in because you’re not sure what you’re going to get,” he said.
“What if they do this? What if they do that? We’d better have that in. We’d better have this in. We’d better have some of this, too. You’ve got to have a flavor of everything in, and sometimes (when) you put too many flavors in, you’re going to have a problem.”
Narduzzi admitted he probably would have preferred to rotate linebackers more often. Failure to do so might have led to WVU rushing for 190 yards and building a touchdown lead until Pitt rallied in the final six minutes.
“For whatever reason, we just didn’t get to (rotate linebackers) enough. We need to. We just need to keep them fresh.”
Part of the problem might have been the absence of backup middle linebacker Brandon George. When George plays the middle, SirVocea Dennis can move outside.
On the other side of the football, quarterback Kedon Slovis was sacked five times in his Pitt debut, but Narduzzi spread around the blame.
“I thought Kedon played a really good game, really good, better than I thought when I watched it live,” the coach said. “We thought he was late with the ball, but there were other issues with some of the routes, and I won’t get into the weeds with that.
“He was waiting on his receivers to get where they needed to be and they weren’t there for whatever reason that we won’t discuss.”
Also, Slovis didn’t have much of a running game to balance the offense. Counting sacks, Pitt averaged only 2 yards per attempt. Narduzzi said he was “disappointed” in the offensive line, and he wasn’t shy about mentioning it.
“Maybe they had fat heads. Maybe they were thinking about how good they were, and ‘we’re all coming back and we’re going to be great.’ But they weren’t. That’s flat what it is. They should have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder this week to come back and show who they really are.”
Bottom line, according to the coach: “Everything is fixable.”