This is a guest column by way of @imrealangry, a long-suffering Pitt fan and co-host of the Semple Fi Podcast.
Rooting for Pitt is a different existence than rooting for a flagship school like those most represented at Meet at Midfield. It’s not a blue blood program. Pitt fans don’t pack over 100,000 people into a storied stadium’s bleacher seats. Most fans you ask on the street wouldn’t be able to truthfully tell you that the Panthers have serious expectations or chances to win the team’s first national title since 1976.
Now, that’s not to say the expectations of winning aren’t there. Athletic Director Heather Lyke has clearly demanded winning from all programs in Western Pennsylvania, seeing results with women’s volleyball, men’s and women’s soccer and (finally) men’s basketball. She’s recently fired the women’s basketball and gymnastics coaches for severe underperformance. She’s also shown plenty of confidence in the football program, signing Pat Narduzzi to a contract extension running through 2030 after his ACC championship season in 2021.
In that circumstance, I can’t confidently say she made the right choice. Honestly, I don’t know what call I would make. It’s my personal trolley problem.
Narduzzi is the trolley hurtling down the tracks, and I must choose whether to keep him as the coach of a possibly middling team, or flip the switch and fire him to roll the dice on another coach to elevate Pitt football. He’s had his highs and lows, but has been consistent with either extreme. There are cases to be made in either direction, and today I’m going to put myself in Lyke’s shoes and decide whether or not to pull the lever.
Raising the Bar
The first item on the docket is an undeniable truth in favor of Narduzzi: He’s the best coach Pitt has had in the 21st century, and arguably the best since Jackie Sherrill left for Texas A&M in 1981. He owns the second-most wins as a head coach at Pitt trailing only Jock Sutherland, and owns the sixth-best winning percentage of all coaches who have coached at least 45 games for Pitt. To put his performance into perspective, none of those other six coaches were coaching at Pitt after 1989. His 11-win 2021 season is the best Pitt has had since 1981; he’s had just one losing season in eight seasons; and his 20 wins over the last two seasons are the most Pitt has had in a two-year span since the combined 1981-82 seasons.
Narduzzi’s wins become downright absurd in the context of Pitt football between 1990 and 2013. Pitt’s winning percentage over those 23 years is an absolutely awful 48.2 percent, and he’s had as many eight-win seasons (five) as Pitt did overall in that timespan. Spanning more than half of my existence on this planet, Pitt has been a miserable program. Narduzzi has changed that. Raising the floor on a program from six wins to eight is no small feat, and to bet another coach can either raise the floor again or maintain that level is a losing proposition well over half of the time in college football.
The other side of this coin is that he’s completely hit or miss in big games, and will 100 percent drop a game every year that he shouldn’t. Beating Penn State in 2016 is still a statement win for him, but going winless in the final three games of that series is awful, especially considering his baffling coaching decisions in the 17-10 loss in 2019.
The 2021 season saw him notch three more big wins, beating Tennessee on the road, Clemson at home and No. 16 Wake Forest in the ACC Championship Game. Certainly his best season, it was still marred by an embarrassing 44-41 home loss to Western Michigan and a 38-31 loss to Miami (Fla.) immediately following up that huge win over Clemson.
This past season might be Narduzzi’s most confounding, with Pitt claiming a win over West Virginia to open the year, followed up by two inexcusable losses to Georgia Tech and Louisville, before eventually salvaging the season despite an overwhelmed quarterback. I don’t know if my expectations have risen too high following the ACC Championship, but the bar being raised without consistency in big games doesn’t mean anything to me at this point.
The ACC is opening up for teams not named Clemson, and Pitt should be among the suitors for that vacancy. Florida State, while certainly poised to be a contender, needs to prove that they can carry momentum, and North Carolina under Mack Brown shouldn’t scare you. Narduzzi had plenty of chances to prove me wrong about his performance in big games, with four FBS games in September this fall (Cincinnati, WVU, UNC, VT) and two huge matchups against Notre Dame and FSU later this fall. But, you can’t win the big games without…
Big Time Recruits
“I’m very impressed by it all, it’s the people around here. The facilities are top-notch. I love Pittsburgh. It has everything to offer recruits. I think all the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL) kids should stay home and come to Pitt. That’s something that hasn’t happened for a while.”
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this since I saw it come across my Twitter feed. Phil Jurkovec, the new transfer quarterback at Pitt, gave Pittsburgh media this quote during his introductory press conference on Jan. 25, 2023.
If you’re not familiar with Pitt football, one of the biggest year-in, year-out storylines under Narduzzi is the continued struggles of Pitt’s staff to recruit in their own backyard, the WPIAL. They’ve had some success getting players to transfer back home, bringing MJ Devonshire back in 2021 and now Jurkovec, Donovan McMillon and Derrick Davis in 2022, however, the problem still lies with high school recruiting.
The top-level recruits in the WPIAL routinely choose to go out of the city for their college careers, whether that be to Ohio State, Notre Dame, Penn State, or even worse, West Virginia. Jurkovec was one of those kids, choosing to go to South Bend as a four-star quarterback over staying home and playing for the team he grew up rooting for. Even though Pitt has kept some four-star recruits home during Narduzzi’s tenure like Paris Ford, Damar Hamlin, Elliot Donald (nephew of Aaron) and Dayon Hayes, the situation hasn’t really changed moving into 2023 and beyond. Top player in the state Quinton Martin and Central Catholic four-star LB Anthony Speca have both chosen to commit to Penn State, even though the latter grew up in a household with Pitt season tickets. A lot of 6-6 seasons will do that to you.
That’s not to say the recruiting is bad, per se, just that Pitt’s star players are largely from out of the state. In the most recent class, the Panthers landed four-star linebacker and top-250 player Jordan Bass. The 2021 class saw Ohio four-star OT Ryan Baer sign with Pittsburgh over many schools from the SEC, Big Ten and Notre Dame. And, last but not least, Pitt’s 2020 class included future Biletnikoff Award winner Jordan Addison signing with Pitt out of Maryland. But, one four-star isn’t enough to keep eight wins as the floor for your program.
Now, if there’s one position group where I can’t question the recruiting, no matter the stars, it’s on the defensive line with coach Charlie Partridge leading the charge. He’s the best in the business. The 2021 draft saw three of his players find NFL homes – Patrick Jones, Rashad Weaver and Jalen Twyman – and there’s more coming. This year’s draft saw DT Calijah Kancey drafted in the first round, one of six Pitt players selected this year, which is tied for most in the ACC, and fifth-most in the nation.
That being said, you can’t really rely on that for the whole team moving forward while trying to keep this winning momentum going. Partridge only coaches one position group. Pitt needs to up its recruiting game, among both four-star talents and writ large within the state to compete at the level it wants to claim. Pitt must start using its recent accolades at the NFL draft to help themselves in recruiting: their 14 draft selections over the last three years is the most in the ACC over that time period, and the 26 over Narduzzi’s tenure ranks only behind Clemson and Florida State in the conference.
There is some positive momentum on both of those fronts here. Pitt’s 2024 recruiting class includes five players from within the borders of our nation’s finest state, but more importantly, two from the eastern side of the state. I’m super excited about DT Jahsear Whittington, who might be next in the Aaron Donald-Calijah Kancey line of dominant undersized DTs.
One position I can’t say much of anything positive about, on recruiting or otherwise, is quarterback. Why? Well,
Pitt Cannot Develop A Quarterback (or Run A Good Offense)
I’m going to give you a list of Pitt’s quarterbacks under Narduzzi, and I want you to tell me how many you remember:
- Nathan Peterman
- Ben Dinucci
- Thomas MacVittie
- Max Browne
- Kenny Pickett
- Nick Patti
- Ricky Town
- Joey Yellen
Stop me if I’m crazy, but Nathan Peterman is the second-best quarterback on this list behind Kenny Pickett and his absurd fifth-year emergence. (Ben DiNucci had much more career success at James Madison, at the FCS level).
The main culprit for these woes is easily identified: Pitt’s offense sucks out loud. Don’t get me wrong, I trust Narduzzi’s defense, but his offensive coordinator hires have been almost exclusively misses. Matt Canada was a perfectly fine hire in Narduzzi’s second year and he managed to get the Peterman an NFL payday. But, Pitt followed Canada with Shawn Watson, who ran the worst offense of all time. Just look at Pickett’s stat line from the ACC championship in his second year at OC:
To give Narduzzi some credit, he knew the run-heavy offense was no longer working and made a smart pivot to a passing-friendly coordinator in Mark Whipple after Watson’s departure. Whipple’s tenure was nowhere near as positive as it has been remembered – his offense seemed extremely uncreative, bubble-screen heavy, could not run the ball consistently at all and failed to score points in the red zone when it mattered – but that’s all been paved over in the history books by Pickett and Addison’s amazing 2021 campaign.
It bears mentioning that, by all accounts I’ve heard, the relationship had already soured between him and Narduzzi, and he only came back to the program in 2021 because Pickett announced his return for a fifth year early into the offseason. Let’s just stay together until the kids go off to college, honey. Whipple was gone a year later, his recording-setting pass-heavy offense replaced by Frank Cignetti Jr. from Boston College, who runs a heavy zone-running offense. I can’t say the hire didn’t make sense. Narduzzi knew he was going to regress in the passing game regardless of the coordinator, and he had a great running back returning to the program in Israel Abanikanda.
But, there are two issues I had with the hire – which have borne out immediately. First and foremost, Brennan Marion was on staff, and departed for Texas for an expanded role after Narduzzi passed him up in replacing Whipple. Marion was the key cog in Pitt’s run game working in 2021, thanks to his pistol formation runs that helped the offense pick up short third downs and drain down the clock at the end of games when they were sitting on a lead. There was a young, creative offensive mind in-house, who is from Pennsylvania and who helped turn Addison into a superstar. He was allowed to just… walk out the door. Inexcusable.
Secondly, Narduzzi and Cignetti whiffed on their transfer QB of choice in 2022. I’m not sure if the style of offense influenced who they could get out of the portal, but Kedon Slovis was an awful quarterback in 2022. Slovis limited the team’s ceiling, and I wouldn’t be shocked if his poor play was one of the reasons that Addison ended up leaving the program at the very end of the transfer window last spring.
Slovis’ poor play is, also, why I believe the book is still out on Cignetti. I’m not exactly convinced that Jurkovec is going to have the return to form from his sophomore season that many fans are hoping for, but I’ll bite to keep myself from being too negative about my favorite team.
The real questions that need answers are in development. Pitt now has Nate Yarnell (R-Jr.) and Penn State transfer Christian Veilleux, and their development as passers is the ultimate question as far as Narduzzi’s offensive evolution goes. If they fail to produce in the coming years, it doesn’t bode well for Narduzzi’s long-term outlook.
So… Am I Pulling The Lever?
I’ve written 2,000 words on the subject, and I’m still uncertain about my answer. Narduzzi has unquestionably raised the floor of Pitt football, but I don’t know if he can replicate his 2021 success without serious changes to his philosophies in offensive hires and improvements on the recruiting trail.
I can’t fire him just on that, though. His success at Pitt is a complete outlier in the modern era, and that might just be enough for me. His defenses have been as good as promised every year since 2015, and the program seems to be still trending upwards.
Of course, this season is another data point – and a pretty crucial one. If Pitt can maintain that eight-win floor or even surpass it, Narduzzi is succeeding. Objectively. I don’t want Pitt to fall back into that 6-6 quagmire they had been stuck in since 1990, and can’t justify a firing if Narduzzi is fully past those days.