Narduzzi on communication and more

Pitt football coach Pat Narduzzi met the media prior to the Panthers' practice on Thursday and talked about improved communication, the run game and a lot more.

Here's the full rundown of what he said.

Narduzzi: Perfect weather for the ACC Network that’s here today. Going on practice 15 and we’ve got shells today, we were in pads yesterday with just one live period. But some good stuff in yesterday’s practice, so we’ll just keep strutting along.

You said it was a disappointing practice two days ago; did the tone change yesterday?
Narduzzi: Much better. Much better. And again, as I look back - and I tried to compare it to our kids today - it was just the focus. It comes down to focus. You’re trying to get these teenagers, these 18, 19, 22 whatever they are years old, just getting them focused daily is a struggle., Sometimes you get that great focus day on a Saturday for a game, and then all of a sudden Tuesday isn’t such a great focus day. We’ve got to learn and teach them how to focus every day. Just because you had a good day doesn’t mean you - we have a lawnmower driving by, making all kinds of noise; got no clue what’s going on, I guess. So just teach them how to do that, and yesterday’s focus, you could just see it in the penalties. I just compared penalties from the one day to yesterday, and it was like night and day, and that comes down to focus.

Charlie was talking to us about Dayon and said that he needs to be more consistent. What have you seen out of Dayon? I know you guys were expecting a lot out of him this year.
Narduzzi: Yeah, and he does need to be more consistent. Again, consistency is the main ingredient. Everybody can flash for a play, okay? There’s not one player out there that hasn’t had a play where you go, ‘Wow.’ But can they do it everyday? Can they get to meetings everyday early where they’re getting extra work? It just comes down to consistency. We preach it daily as far as what we want out of these guys, and Dayon’s got - he shows more than one play. Put it that way. A lot more. Dayon’s going to play a lot of football for us. We just want it to be more consistent because it hurts your teammates when you’re not.

I saw that Frank had a headset on yesterday. Are you just adapting to different communication from what you’ve had the last few years?
Narduzzi: Yeah, I’ve never done it before. It was something that Frank has used in the past. As a head coach, I’m always like, ‘Give me some information,’ and it’s awesome. It’s just a way of communicating during practice. We obviously do it on game day, but if he wants something, he doesn’t have to run all the way over to the receiver coach to tell him during practice. It’s just easy communication. I loved it yesterday. The defense was like, ‘Ah, we’re not gonna wear them’ - I’m like, ‘Listen, you’re gonna wear it.’ Theirs weren’t set up; we just got them in yesterday. So we got the defense, they’re getting them all set up properly. But I believe the defense is going to be ready today as we go out there.

So it’s just communication on the field. It makes it easy. I don’t have to yell at the defense from the sideline. They don’t hear me. Or they pretend like they don’t hear me because they don’t want to hear me yelling at them. So it’s just a communication part.

In the past years, you guys have had a player run in the play from the offensive coordinator. Will that change this year? Will you guys have a different system how you get plays in?
Narduzzi: Yeah. I’m not going to tell you, but yeah, we’ll have a different one. I’ll say this and I’ll say it again: I liked what we did, okay? I know that nobody else out there did, but Kenny loved it. Now Kenny’s got that microphone in the ear and he’s going to love that where Coach Canada can say, ‘Here’s your play.’ He’s got up to 15 seconds on the play clock, and then he can tell him, like, ‘Hey, don’t forget, third-down-and-long, they like to be in this’ or ‘Watch that corner blitz.’

But there are some great tips that are - I’m listening to what’s going on, so that’s why I like it. The communication as far as the headsets here, just the communication, we like to over-communicate. In this game of football, it’s all about communication, so it’s good stuff. But we will do it a different way. But no one’s going to be talking to the quarterback out there. We’d like to talk to the Mike linebacker and say, ‘Hey, remember this’ or whatever. But we can still run plays in that way; we’ve got that open, too.

Do you think college football should or will go to that system of in-ear?
Narduzzi: That’s a great question. It’s great for the offense, and everything’s about the offense. Some of the changes they’ve made, it’s all offense-related because everybody from offenses are on the rules committee, I guess, so they just make it offensively-related. But I would love to have it, but it’s one guy, it’s the quarterback. The quarterback can get everybody the call, the quarterback can be in the huddle, we can huddle up here, ready, break and we’re good to go. Nobody’s stealing signals. I like it because nobody can steal our signals. That’s what I liked about our quarterback going to the sideline last year: nobody could steal our signals. There’s something to that because there’s a lot of thieves out there, as we know. But it doesn’t help the defense any. Defensively, if one guy’s got it and all these tempo offenses - let’s just say SirVocea’s got the defense, now he’s got to signal it to everybody around him but the corner’s way out there, the safety’s way back there, he’s got to get it to everybody, so it kind of makes it tough on the defense. So it doesn’t make it easy on the defense. It just really makes it easy - even easier - for an offense to go faster, which I don’t like.

Given your emphasis on the run game this year, could this be the first time in four years that you get a thousand-yard guy?
Narduzzi: Could be. Expect it.

Expect it?
Narduzzi: Yeah. Let’s get it done.

You mentioned things that are an advantage to the offense, what do you tell your defense when they say, ‘Here’s another rule that’s going to make it tougher for us.’
Narduzzi: Yeah, I don’t tell them that; it’s just, that’s the rules. We don’t talk about it much as far as, you know, from a coach’s perspective. The rules are the rules and you try to abide by the rules. And they know it’s tough on them. We’ll do a period today where it will be rapid tempo and really work kind of on Tennessee, which will be the fastest tempo of the year. We anticipate that West Virginia will have a tempo offense as well. So you’re always preparing for that. Our offense doesn’t do tempo; we huddle up most of the time. So it will be good for us.