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UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH FOOTBALL MEDIA CONFERENCEOctober 21, 2019Pat NarduzziPittsburgh, Pennsylvania PAT NARDUZZI: All right. Nice win for our guys last Friday night. Seems like it was a month ago because you're so engulfed in the next game already. Our guys did some nice things last week really on all three phases. You take probably 10 plays out of that game and it's probably an easier win than it appeared at the end when we're sitting in a four-minute offense. A.J. Davis runs a three-yard run on a third down and two to ice the game, get into victory formation. Syracuse is good football team. When you go back, they never quit. We knew that the week before against North Carolina State, came storming back. Prevented ourselves from really knocking them out earlier than we'd like, which you could look at it two different ways. We obviously as coaches and players are always going to make mistakes, nobody's perfect. Looking back, the last 10 home games in the Dome, not an easy place to play, period. In the last 10 games only two teams that have walked into that Dome and won games, us and Clemson, going back 10 home games there. It's not an easy place to play. Nice to get out of there with a win and move on to the next. We obviously face an explosive football team in Miami that will be coming in here probably pretty angry from maybe not playing as well as they would like to. Manny Diaz will get them cranked up. We know they're talented as any football team in the country, talent all over the place. Manny is getting more involved in the defense. That shows. Dan Enos is their offensive coordinator that I have a lot of relationships with. Worked together at Cincinnati, worked together at Michigan State together before he took the job at Central Michigan, moved on from there. Was at Arkansas, Alabama, then Miami. He's got a great pedigree. Again, an outstanding offensive coordinator and play-caller. In a new offense for them down there as well. That's all things that go with the territory there. Talented football team across the board. Questions. Q. Shocky, what does he bring into your offense? PAT NARDUZZI: Shocky can take the top off of coverage, I think. He's a tough kid. I'm glad he's finally 100% healthy. But he can run. He made some nice catches. Caught a crossing route, got whacked, held onto it. Great to see. He's explosive on some of the outside runs we've done with him when we've handed off to him all season. He's had opportunities to make plays. It's good for his confidence. We need him here on this final stretch of the season. Q. What did you learn from playing Miami last year, any carryover? PAT NARDUZZI: Obviously the defense, there's a lot of carryover. Manny is heavily involved in the defense. I don't want to say he's calling it, because I don't know that. I don't get to look at the sideline. We'll find out Saturday. Offensively they're different obviously. They're different. N'Kosi Perry is a guy that played us last year. Jarren Williams the other quarterback that has been banged up, got in the game the other night. Expect him to be healthy. Not sure which one we'll see. They do different things with both of them. Almost two different game plans depending on who is in there. DeeJay Dallas, their runningbacks are talented, run physical, run hard. Something we'll have to prepare for. Q. What did you learn about protecting the quarterback? PAT NARDUZZI: Against them? Q. Yes. PAT NARDUZZI: Protect the quarterback. Learned you better protect the quarterback. Didn't protect him early in the Syracuse game at all. Not really happy on the sideline letting our quarterback get hit. We have to protect Kenny. We didn't do it early. We did it later on, which was good. Our guys got their feet wet, kind of got a feel for it. I thought we kept him pretty clean for as many times as we threw the ball. Q. Do you think you deserve to be ranked? PAT NARDUZZI: I don't vote. I don't really care. There's a lot of pre-season people that were in the top 25, and they're not there any more. Our goal is to be there at the end of the season. That's when you want to be ranked. Middle of the season doesn't matter. Pre-season rankings don't matter. It's post-season. We're ranked 1-0 last week. This week we'd like to be 1-0. Preparing our kids weekly for the challenges ahead. Q. Does the Miami name with your kids carry that marquee name? Because it's been so long since they've been at the top, for this group it's not quite a Clemson? PAT NARDUZZI: I think they were No. 2 in the country a couple years ago coming to Heinz Field. When you say such a long time ago... They're still a really good football team that has a ton of talent. Bunch of four- and five-star football players on their team. We don't have many. If that tells you anything, we don't have a chance because they're talented. We'll have to come out and play our best. Manny will have them prepared, ready to go. Like I said, I don't care about what they're ranked, doesn't matter. I don't care what we're ranked. It's a good football team. Miami historically, traditionally is great football team. That's who you're playing. You're playing that team right there. That's recognized all over the world. Q. Whenever you have a big halftime lead, how do you find a way to put a team away? PAT NARDUZZI: You got to execute. Got to execute. There's three third-down drops. Aaron has one, Nakia has one. You knock people out when you convert, when you don't you don't. It's a game of momentum changes. We give up a big play on defense, we're in cover three, corner kind of bites down on what he thought was a stutter. You get beat over top in cover three. If you know peewee football, you stay deeper in the deepest is what they say. You were in the safest coverage you could possibly be in and we weren't. You just give them momentum. 94 yards, coming out situation, where the coming out situation before that we go three-and-out, get the ball to our offense at the 39 yard line, score seven points. We need to stop them on third down. You're feeling pretty good at that point until someone runs right past your corner. Nobody is perfect. Again, those are all learning situations. It's the same thing, you learn from those things. Your offense gets an opportunity to go run the football and run the clock out and get in a four-minute situation. As a coach, if you said, You're guaranteed the win... I would say like in a scrimmage, Let's go with a four minute in the end and see if we can execute, get the game finished. We were able to do that. No one asked me if I wanted to do that, didn't guarantee the win. Keeps us on edge, you guys on edge. Four-hour game, you might as well be on edge for four hours. Makes it fun. Q. From a blocking standpoint, did your running game make progress? PAT NARDUZZI: It did. There was some progress in there. Again, the progress will have to increase this week with Shaq Quarterman in there. Different style guys up front this week. We're going to have to be even more physical up front, create some seams for our tailbacks. Q. Two years ago, the end of the season that didn't go the way you wanted. From that game on you have been besides Clemson maybe the second best team in the conference. Did that moment signal any sort of attitude shift, adjustment? PAT NARDUZZI: I don't think so. I didn't see it. The season was over. We regrouped. It was a good win. Kids played good. That's long gone, and so is their victory last season down there in Miami. I don't know. Q. (Question about conference rankings.) PAT NARDUZZI: It really doesn't matter. All that stuff, you guys look at it because you're looking through a piece of paper, look at the Coastal. Look at Wisconsin in the Big Ten, got beat by Illinois. Anyone can beat anyone on any given day. Not worried about what anyone else is doing. We got to do our job, prepare, focus on one team this week. You say that's coach speak and all that. It's a fact. If our guys start looking at the standings, results, what about this, it just doesn't matter, really doesn't. I don't want our kids getting caught up in it. You don't have to ask them any questions about that this week, it doesn't matter. I know you will, Jerry will. Doesn't matter, the standings or anything else. Q. On one Saturday to the next, no matter how good you look on one Saturday, the next Saturday, Miami specifically, how do you evaluate a team when they look so different? PAT NARDUZZI: Looked good in the first half, crappy in the second half. Some guys look good in one game, maybe not the next game, I guess. It's the world we're living in. Again, go back to a great Wisconsin team, what they looked like in one game, what they looked like in another. Is that something Illinois did, something Wisconsin did. Is it something we did in the first half, or something Syracuse did in the second half. It's a game of emotions and you better come ready to play for 60 minutes or you're going to have a problem. Every team in the ACC, Big Ten, SEC, same exact thing. Look at Georgia getting beat by South Carolina. It's the world we're in, a game of emotion. You better have your mind right going into the game or your mind will be real wrong after the game. Q. What do you attribute some of those second half struggles to the past two games? PAT NARDUZZI: I was going to ask you, if you noticed anything (smiling). You never know, man. I take all the advice I can get. It comes down to execution. Do our guys get lackadaisical thinking we're up. Last year, were we up at halftime? Maybe it's a different thing playing with a lead. This week, went in, didn't say a word about 0-0. Week before I said 0-0 next week, let's go out and play. This week, nothing about 0-0, I'm going to let it go, not talk about it. Again, it's all going out and making plays, doing the right thing. There's so many things the offense and the defense can do to you. If you lose your focus, you lose the play. If you lose that play, you might lose the next play. You have to refocus, stay focused for 60 minutes, execute. It's a game of execution. There's 11 guys out there. One guy does the wrong thing... On the big pass, Paris Ford is coming through, nobody touched him. If we can get back to where we're supposed to. Quarterback, I can't throw a pick here, he is going to get hit in the mouth, get down in the end zone. 10 guys do a good job, one guy doesn't, it's not good. One guy drops the pass on third down, your punt team is coming out, your field goal team. That's not what you want. That's not how you knock people out. Q. Four-game winning streak. I don't know if you've had a five-game winning streak here. How big would that be for this team to roll off five in a row? PAT NARDUZZI: It will be big to be 1-0 this week and beat them. You can sit back. We'll think about it Sunday, that's nice, that's five. Nobody cares. I say this every week, I tell our kids, Nobody cares what you did the week before. If you want to live on your laurels from the week before, you got some issues. We're going to have a great Tuesday. Last week we had kind of an average Tuesday practice. We're going to have a really good Tuesday. That's my goal, to have a great Tuesday practice, then I'll worry about Wednesday. The big thing is to get our guys locked into Tuesday, have the best Tuesday we can have, which will hopefully propel us to get the results you want on Saturday at noon. Q. Is it important to be balanced or does it matter how you get it done? PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, I've told him, I don't care how you score, move the sticks. We win in time of possession and throwing the football. That usually doesn't happen. We're completing a lot of passes, moving the sticks down the field. I don't care if we run it the rest of the year, as long as we win, are scoring touchdowns. That's going to be the most important thing. Doesn't matter how it gets done. Do I want to be balanced? Yes. It keeps both phases better, keeps the defense off track. I think we have to be to win a championship, have a chance to talk in those terms. But week by week, whatever it takes to get it done. Q. With the pass-rush, how much of that is schematics and how much guys doing their one job on a specific play? PAT NARDUZZI: You know what, coach would tell you it's all about the players. We got some guys up front that are just playing relentless. One guy doing his job. I just see the pockets collapsing. I don't see guys trying I want to get the sack, I'm going to go this way. A couple of those, you see the pocket get collapsed. That's when everybody is doing the right thing. I think that's what it comes down to, everybody doing their job. We got players up front. That's what it comes down to. You can have great pass-rushers that do what they want to do instead of what they're coached to. Our kids are doing what they're supposed to do on the rush, for sure. Q. Being around these kids as much as you are, are they focused individuals away from football as well? PAT NARDUZZI: They're focused. Sometimes you got to wake them up in here. Sometimes they're focused on their phones. My team meetings, Put your phones down, put them away, I don't want them on your lap. It's getting them focused to start off with. When you talk about spending so much time with them, we'll get them in a team meeting 7:30 tomorrow, by 11:30 they're gone. You count those hours. We don't have them for very long. What are they doing up on campus? Trying to make sure they go to class. This is not NFL football. It's making sure they're going to class, get your study hall hours in. We're thinking about coaching, teaching, schematics down here, then also getting emails from academics on what they're doing there, what they're doing in life skills, community service, all the other things we're trying to juggle and we're trying to juggle as coaches. Q. Will you hear about what they're doing off campus? PAT NARDUZZI: Academically we get a lot of feedback, yeah. That's part of the job. For us to be a successful football program, we have to keep our guys in school, keep them going to class, study hall. It's all part of it. It's not just the focus in here, what they're doing, on the practice field. That's like half my job. Being consistent with the punishment or the training they get to make sure they are going to class. Yeah, it all goes together. If you have no discipline up there, you'll probably have none up here either. Q. (No microphone.) PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah. There's always the big pass. I tripped and fell on that inside zone. There's always those. Q. (No microphone.) PAT NARDUZZI: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm not going to talk about their academics. There's fumbles. We fumble the ball time sometimes there, too. Sometimes we get beat deep. You're trying to keep 115 guys doing the right things. Q. You are making the mistakes when it gets tight lately this season. Can a team develop a sense of calmness being in those situations over and over, coming through? Does that give you an advantage? PAT NARDUZZI: It does. It does. We've been in tight games. Some people aren't in tight games. We have been. We put ourselves there. Like I said, it's a nice thing. It's nice to be in a four-minute at the end when you know the pressure is on. Kind of like in practice when you try to create those situations. Four-minute drill, two-minute drill before the end of the half, great drill. It's nice to be able to be put in those and still win the football game. Q. How much do you think the first four weeks have helped you guys get to where you are now? PAT NARDUZZI: I think it always does. That's why you build your schedule a little bit. Sometimes you're not battle-tested. You can blow some people out, but you don't get into the battles you want to near the end, learn how to finish, how are we going to finish that game. I think every game is a learning opportunity for our kids. Whether it's a blow-out win or a tight win or a tight loss, they're all learning situations. It's why we come in on Sundays and review the tape, talk about the situations, talk about the keys to victory, things that are important to winning the game, why you win, why you lose. Even when you win, you're looking at the things you did bad to make sure, You screw these things up next week, you might have one of those big Ls. That's why we coach. That's why we teach. That's why we have meetings. Q. You have a lot of Florida players on the team. Is it extra motivation? PAT NARDUZZI: I would imagine, it always is. There's always that little edge, playing with a chip on your shoulder if you're from that area. They're coming up to your house. Certainly. I don't care who you play, whether you're from New York or New Jersey, playing Syracuse, you're from Miami, playing in that area, there's always some type of edge. I hope guys find motivation to play particularly teams every week. Q. (Question about replay review, injuries and officials.) PAT NARDUZZI: Not really. Injuries and officials. I love 'em. Next (smiling). Thank you. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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