Pitt’s Pat Narduzzi spreads blame to everyone, but he emphasizes it starts with him
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Win or lose the day before, Sundays are pretty much the same at Pitt’s training facility. Truth be told, they’re probably the same at most schools across the nation at every level of college football.
Coaches start early, sometimes mere hours after the end of the game. In some cases, not too early. Pat Narduzzi likes to go to church with his family.
The intensity ratchets up during the early parts of the day when coaches review video of the game — if they hadn’t already done so before going home Saturday night. The details of figuring out what went right — or wrong — and how to best attack the next opponent take up a good part of the day.
No time for the Steelers game on TV, unless it’s a quick glance at the screen if a former Pitt guy is playing. Narduzzi has his own set of problems.
Pitt’s head coach always meets with his players, and several issues and problems are discussed.
After the unexpected 27-21 loss to Cincinnati, Narduzzi asked his players Sunday night, “Hey, were you locked in?”
“Oh, yeah, coach, we were locked in,” Narduzzi said his players told him.
Said the coach: “Why did you start slow?”
For that, “They didn’t have any answers,” Narduzzi said Monday at his weekly news conference. “Whatever that locked in was, it wasn’t locked in enough. We didn’t get what we wanted out of our team.”
But throughout his chat with reporters, Narduzzi spread blame throughout the building to both sides of the football. He said, however, it starts with him.
“You guys can just all point the finger right here at me because I didn’t get them ready to go,” he said. “I’ll take full responsibility, and we’ll move on.”
Fixing the run defense is high on his to-do list this week, if not at the top. Cincinnati ran for 216 yards and won time of possession, holding the ball for nearly 35 of the 60 minutes on Pitt’s home field. Not horrible, unless you’re a coach who prides himself on his team stopping the run.
“We had a couple runs defensively where we had one guy going the wrong way,” he said. “Do your 1 of 11. If you have 10 of 11 (players) doing the right thing, you have a problem. That appeared on the tape. It appeared on the offensive tape, as well. There are a lot of issues, a lot of uncharacteristic issues you get exposed with when you’re playing a really good football team.”
As for the offense, Narduzzi said coordinator Frank Cignetti Jr. counted 25 plays with pass protection issues.
“We didn’t do a good job pass protecting up front at all,” Narduzzi said. “You’re trying to play hard. You’re trying to be aggressive. You want to punch that (pass rusher) and you move too hard, and, all of sudden, someone loops you and you can’t react.”
Protecting the quarterback is never easy, but Pitt must find a way to do it Saturday night against a West Virginia team backed by a loud, hostile crowd of about 60,000 at Milan Puskar Stadium. The most recent time Pitt ventured into Morgantown, W.Va., late in the 2011 season, quarterback Tino Sunseri was sacked 10 times, four in the final drive of a 21-20 WVU victory.
Pitt quarterback Phil Jurkovec was sacked five times against Cincinnati. That game started with three pass plays, two of them deep shots, and all three fell incomplete. Narduzzi said he had a conversation about that series with Cignetti.
“It was something being seen on defense,” the head coach said. “He said, ‘I wish I could do it over again.’ But that’s part of it. You have your plan about what you want to go in there. We have to have a better plan. That’s why I say, it’s coaches. It starts with me, and it trickles down.
“We can do a better job of putting our kids in better position to make plays.”
Later, he said, “I was kind of (saying), ‘Three passes? I want to run the ball.’ ”
Narduzzi said the game plan is worked out in the days leading up to the game, and no call from a coordinator catches him unaware.
“If you were sitting up in the (coaches’) box, I wouldn’t disrespect you and say, ‘That was a terrible call.’ These calls, these plays, these coaches’ decisions, all these things are flip a coin sometimes. Even the first play of the game, with the defense we ran, ‘I don’t know if I like this call,’ and it ended up being a really good call (Cincinnati gained 1 yard on a pass play).
“You hope everything you have on the game plan has a chance to be successful or you wouldn’t put it on the game plan.
“It’s never one thing. That’s not how a team works. That’s just not in our DNA. It (isn’t just) the quarterback. It (isn’t) just the O-Line. It’s the receivers. It’s the tight ends. Why didn’t the receiver peek back? They have to peek back when we’re throwing hot (under pass-rush pressure). The quarterback wants to throw it to you and he gets hit because you didn’t look back.
“All those things play into it, but it’s never just one thing.”