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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCE

November 7, 2018

Pat Narduzzi

Greensboro, North Carolina

PAT NARDUZZI: We're just kind of moving on to the next hereafter a nice Friday night in Virginia, in Charlottesville. We get another great opportunity to have a really well-coached, talented football team in Virginia Tech coming to our place, a team that we haven't beat the last two years since Coach Fuente got there. It's always been a battle. They've ended up on the top end.

They're talented from the back end of their secondary to their backfield. Ryan Willis runs the show on offense. He's talented. I'm really impressed, Steven Peoples seems like a Pittsburgh type of back, 225-, 230-pound tailback that runs physical. The receivers are loaded. Ricky Walker on defense is a game changer at D-tackle, and Gaines at defensive end is a special guy. We have to protect him. They do a great job at shutting down the run game and making you pick up all the pressure. It's going to be a big challenge for us at 3:30 on Saturday afternoon.

Q. You guys were so effective containing Bryce Perkins on Friday. What about your pressures made you guys so effective there, and can you replicate it Saturday?
PAT NARDUZZI: Well, we're going to have to. I mean, obviously different style quarterbacks, and you've got Bryce Perkins being a runner. This guy Ryan Willis this week is a guy that can beat you with his feet, but also I think is a really good passer, as well.

But I guess maybe talk to Perkins and ask him what was different or what -- our guys just -- didn't matter if it was four-man pressure or five-man pressure, our guys executed and got after him in the pocket. Any time you finish a game with five sacks, you've got a chance to win the football game, and that was certainly critical. DeWayne Hendrix had a big-time game, and a lot of those were four-man pressure where our guys just sacked him in the pocket. It wasn't easy, either, because you've got to hang on to that guy, because he's a big guy that can break tackles easily.

But we've got to have the same type of performance this Saturday. We talk about consistency, and can you put a back-to-back game together on either side of the ball, and that's what we've got to do defensively. We didn't play well against a talented Daniel Jones at Duke the week before, and our guys came back. Now can you do it two weeks in a row, or you had one week, you can be on and off. That's something I think our guys have got to learn to be consistent.

Q. You mentioned Steven Peoples being a Pitt-type back. He was very effective last week in the screen game. Is that something that you all have to be aware of and scheme against?
PAT NARDUZZI: No question about it. We've practiced the screens all week. They're an excellent screen team, and they've got tons of them. They've got T-screens, they've got what we call jailbreak screens, now screens, bubble screens. But we've practiced all week, and probably the hardest ones to really scheme against are those tailback screens because they do a nice job in their screens of -- it's almost like a 1,000-one, 1,000-two, 1,000-three, and then the back will get out, and the line does a great job of protecting it and then getting down and getting on people. We've practiced it. We've got the details down, now we've got to go out and execute.

Q. You guys are now the favorite to win the Coastal Division among some of the ESPN projections. I just wonder if you have to keep your players away from social media to avoid seeing that, if that's something that you like being the favorite now as the season closes in to maybe use as extra motivation, or how you kind of use the fact that you guys are now favored to maybe get to the ACC Championship game?
PAT NARDUZZI: Well, appreciate you letting me -- making me aware of that. EJ hasn't let me know that, even though we were favored. Really don't care about what ESPN says. They've been wrong before, and they'll be wrong again.

Favorites, I want to be the favorite at the end of the season. I think anything mid-season is a pre-declared declaration of success is a bad thing for anybody, and we haven't -- as I've told our kids, they haven't done anything. Now, are they listening to me or are they listening to social media. I think it's awful hard to tell the kids don't look at social media, so I wish you guys would be quiet on social media and let our guys do our job. But it's my job as a head coach to get them locked in and focused for this next game because it doesn't matter. I mean, the standings in the middle of a year don't matter.

Our guys have talked about it; nobody respected us early in the year, and we were a forgotten team, and now don't forget how you got where you are, and it's hard work. It's the blue-collar way. It's the Pittsburgh way, and hopefully our guys continue to understand why they're where they are, and it's toughness and it's hard work, and it's going to guarantee you last week in Virginia they weren't going to have Pittsburgh come in there and they weren't going to lay down for us, and Virginia Tech certainly isn't going to come into Pittsburgh Saturday at 3:30 maybe we shouldn't play so good today. They're going to come after us, and it's going to be a battle.

I hope our guys aren't reading the standings, because if they are, they're wrong.

Q. One other question. You've talked about the fact that you play one of the toughest non-conference schedules in the country. That's a fact. How much did the difficulty of those games maybe prepare you guys as you got into ACC play to be able to make this little run that you're on right now?
PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, if you look at the combined record of some of our losses, I don't think there's anybody in Division I football that's played five top-25 teams. We've only played nine games, so we've played nine games, and five of them have been top-25 games, and it's not easy. But I think that's prepared us for where we are. I always go back to Tom Izzo, you watch him play in Kansas last night, and his philosophy has always been to play the best, and it's going to make you better in the end. Michigan State is always in the Sweet 16 because of the grueling schedule that they had. They played the No. 1 team last night, and to me I learned from Tom Izzo just who you're playing and what it does for you, win or loss. It's making you stronger, it's making you better, and it's really prepared us for where we are today.

Like I said, our kids can't forget where they were and where they are now and how they got where they are.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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