Late-game decision still on everyone's mind

Sometimes you lose football games, and sometimes you lose football games to your in-state rival when you have the ball at one-yard line, first-and-goal, down by seven points late in the fourth quarter.

Saturday’s 17-10 loss to Penn State won’t soon be forgotten by Pitt fans, and in many respects it might be one of the more defining plays, decisions, and sequences of the Pat Narduzzi era in Pittsburgh.

The sequence as a whole was one that will continually run through the heads of Pitt players, coaches, and fans alike for years. Pitt had three shots at the one-yard line, with all three plays failing to result in a touchdown. Rather than take the chance at a tie on fourth down, Narduzzi called for a field goal - it bounced off the upright. The Pitt defense got the ball back a few minutes later, but it was too late and the Nittany Lions claimed the 100th meeting of the rivalry - perhaps the last one ever in the series.

After a few days of letting that loss marinate, Narduzzi still stood in there with his decision. He took it head-on during his opening statement during his Monday press conference knowing he would likely be asked about it quite a bit.

“But again, the thinking and the logic, guys, is I have no regrets with the call at all,” Narduzzi said. “I really don’t.”

The Panthers coach looked back to the first three plays of sequence. Pitt went with a tight look on first down, Pitt quarterback Kenny Pickett was flushed from the pocket and threw it out of the end zone. On second down, Pitt employed a shotgun set and used a read-option, Pickett held onto the ball and was stuffed at the goal line. Pitt went back to a tight look on third down, and a Penn State defender immediately got penetration on the play forcing a bad throw.

“And I look back and we had two plays in that series - my regret is that we didn't score in one of those three plays,” he lamented. “That’s the regret. And my regret is we didn't execute them properly, and our kids know, our coaches know.”

The noticeable thing from those three plays was the lack of a handoff to a running back. The Panthers rushed 25 times on Saturday for 24 yards on Saturday. It’s a large contrast from being one of the top rushing teams in the country a year ago. That obviously changed how those plays were called down one the one-yard line, but even so Narduzzi said he liked two of the plays they called in the scenario.

“I mean, we can't have a film session here, but in your pocket you've got a game plan here, and you've got so many calls that you go -- it's going to work, and we had two that we really thought were going to work, and if I dissected them with you, you'd go, okay, I see what you're talking about,” Narduzzi said. “We didn't have a third one that we said was going to work like those other two, and if you didn't execute those properly, which it came down to execution - I thought we had the plays, and we just didn't do it right. And it comes down to that.”

The play calling and how things played out on the first three downs are one thing, but the decision on fourth down was the bigger thing no doubt. Pitt opted to kick a field goal with no reassurance that it would even get the ball back, let along having the ball close to being on the one-yard line again. Not only that, a miss moved the ball away from the goal-line. If you fail to convert on fourth down, you at least are saving time and field position as a consolation - not a bad one in a tight game like that. But that’s not what the Pitt coach chose.

“We wanted to get three there,” Narduzzi explained. “We wanted to go out and play defense again. Our defense had been playing good all day long except giving up a couple explosives, which three in this game of football today is probably on the low of Saturday afternoon across college football from the east to the west. But our defense was playing good, and our deal is we work it all the time is four-minute defense, four-minute offense, whatever it may be, we wanted to be in four-minute defense, and trusted our defense was going to get a stop.”

Narduzzi’s sentiments about his defense are generally correct. That group played well all game long. They limited big plays, and there was a ton of signs pointing towards them stopping Penn State to give Pitt one more chance. That’s what happened, too -albeit with less than an ideal amount of time. In the end, was it worth it? That’ll never be easily justified.

So that appears to be that from that play in that game, one that will most assuredly live in the minds’ of Pitt fans forever.

“Enough of that, but it's what it is, and we can debate it for the next 10 years and maybe we will because we probably won't play them the next 10 years,” Narduzzi said. “I apologize to Panther Nation because we all wanted to win that game, and there's nobody that feels worse about that than the guys in this room.”

When asked to further elaborate, Narduzzi seemed more interested in discussing Pitt’s upcoming game against UCF than talking about that decision further. So the book is closed on that apparently and that chapter of the Penn State rivalry is closed. The explanations on Monday probably won’t settle it, but really would any explanation have done just that?