Narduzzi on Jurkovec starting, fixing the offense and more
Pat Narduzzi held his final press briefing of the week on Thursday and talked about Phil Jurkovec starting, how Pitt will fix the offense and a lot more.
Here's the full rundown of what he said.
Narduzzi: Alright, game number four against a really good North Carolina team, number 17th-ranked, obviously, and it should be a great atmosphere at Acrisure Stadium. The guys have worked hard, we think we’ve cleaned up some things we need to clean up and obviously nothing is - you don’t snap your fingers and fix everything you’d like to, but hopefully, we will go out and play like we expected to when the season started.
It occurred to me that on Monday, we never just asked you directly: is Phil starting on Saturday night?
Narduzzi: Yes.
You talked on Monday about how you thought you guys needed to do a better job of having simulated pressure in practice. How did you go about that this week?
Narduzzi: Just getting our rocks, our scout team - simulate is a little bit different from what you’re talking about, but just getting the better pressure and guys picking it up. It’s just a matter of how fast you’re playing. If it’s really slow, it’s not as good. In some of our individual periods, we brought over the rocks just to help the out the D-line on twists, just getting fast guys doing it quicker. You can never emulate it. We have an ACC period every day - we call it ACC - where we go good-on-good. It’s 1 defense against the 1 offense. We go. We got 10 plays this week; usually we get eight-to-ten plays a week. Besides that, we go fast in skelly, which doesn’t really help. So we’ve worked it enough in individual for the quarterbacks, just to feel pressure and throw better during pressure, because we’re getting a lot of pressure. We’re not protecting like we’d like to, and that’s why the run game has got to be clicking and we’ve got to give our quarterback time.
I heard you cleaned up your pass rush skills from Rhode Island.
Narduzzi: I did?
In practice.
Narduzzi: Um. I don’t know about that. I don’t know where you got those -
You didn’t get involved and rush the quarterback a little bit?
Narduzzi: Oh, a little bit in individual, just because I wanted to teach some of those DBs just how to do it. But yeah, I guess maybe you saw that.
What did you see from the offense this week? Were there some encouraging signs you saw from practice?
Narduzzi: Yeah, no doubt about it. And again, we always like to look at what’s wrong and not what’s right, but there’s always something to fix. I’m glad it’s really just isolated in one unit as opposed to all three. If you had all of these things and you’re busy plugging up holes everywhere, that becomes even more problematic. But we will get it right. That’s what we do, that’s why we get to coach and that’s what you love about what we do; otherwise, if everything was perfect, like, what would we do? So it’s a challenge and it’s fun. We’ll get it right. It’s our coaches’ job to get it right, our offensive staff, it’s our players’ job to get it right and we need to go out and execute as a unit.
In your time as head coach, I’ve seen you take the reigns and kind of get hands-on with a coach when you see something that’s very important to an upcoming matchup. What are the things - I know you said you’re not a quarterback guru or a quarterback whisperer, but what are the things that you do to be hands-on to help with the quarterback situation?
Narduzzi: Jerry said it: I’m rushing the quarterback, trying to put some slow pressure on. That would be slow pressure.
You know, I’m doing whatever I can. I think I mentioned it in the meeting, just about where my time is, and when I say I spend time - I spend time in the meetings with the defense and I don’t spend much meeting time with the offense. But if you notice, when I’m on the field, I’m spending 100% of the time with the offense, trying to look at those little details, looking at the effort, looking at the execution right there and getting immediate feedback as opposed to waiting. That’s kind of been my method all along. But doing whatever we can do to clean up the details and get it fixed. And it’s been little things here and there. I don’t want to get into the weeds, but we got some good work in this week, I can tell you that.
How have your Eagles helped Phil? Your Eagles and your captains, the guys that can help set the tone - maybe not necessarily helping by talking to him, but helping him in doing other things on the team to make the situation better?
Narduzzi: Yeah, I think the Eagles met with Phil. Phil actually asked to meet with them, to be honest with you, because he’s a leader and I think they had a great meeting and show of support, like everybody needs. I think they all recognize - they know the issues. They all watch the tape. Not everybody gets to watch the tape, but we all get to watch the tape together, and they know that it’s not just one guy, and that’s where it always is: he gets all the highlights and gets all the lowlights. We’re expecting to have a great day Saturday.
I think it was maybe 2020 that midway through the year after the Notre Dame game, you got more involved with the offense -
Narduzzi: It was the Covid year, maybe?
I think so.
Narduzzi: It was the Covid year. I sat right in here. But again, we’ve had those conversations and the offense has been great. So I’m going to have my opinions and stuff, but I’m not the guru. I don’t think any offensive coordinator, defensive coordinator, special teams coordinator wants a guy that doesn’t really know the details - like I said, I think they do a fantastic job. I’ve been around some offensive coordinators, whether it was at Michigan State or here, and they’re detailed and we’re good at what we do. We just have to execute it better.
Is that slimming down what we do? When I see a lack of execution, I think: too much. That’s my feeling as a coach. So whether we have to slim it down - that’s been some conversations - make it simpler, because it’s detailed, and if it’s executed properly, it’s great. But if our guys don’t execute it properly, than what does it matter?
Do you feel like your team is a little on-edge this week? Do you feel like they are upset to be in this current spot?
Narduzzi: There’s no doubt about it, but we’re not looking backwards, we’re looking forward, and I think they’re edgy. But we actually had more - they were edgy last week. There were more fights last week in practice - they were antsy last week as well. There’s no lack of desire. They want to go out and perform, but you have to execute and perform at a high level. And it’s not easy. Everybody thinks it’s easy. It’s not like - this is not something where you click your fingers and - you can see it with other teams around the country, you can see it with - you know, Alabama’s got issues, too. There’s issues out there. There’s a bunch of teams that have things they’re trying to fix, and we’re one of those as well.
When you have one unit that’s kind of lacking confidence, do you think all it can take is maybe one really good drive to get them going in the right way?
Narduzzi: I think it can take one drive - it takes one game. You’re in a one-game season and again, like I said, I’m always going to take it from a positive, but I see the tape, I know what we’re doing; we’ve got to finish better. We have to finish the details. We know how to get lined up; we just have to finish it. It’s up to 11 guys finishing the play, and we have not done a good job finishing the details. Until we do that, we’re going to have the same thing.
You just mentioned Alabama. They made a quarterback change and they’re trying to find their guy. You mentioned the other day that you don’t like to change that position, but in the past, 2017 for example, you had three guys in there, so what makes this situation different than that one?
Narduzzi: Because I watch practice every day. I watch the game tape every day. I watch the pressure the quarterbacks have been under. And I see all the issues. Back in whatever year it was you’re talking about - I mean, every year is different. Every quarterback is different. I’m going to be patient with it. No one’s saying there’s not going to be a change, but I look at the whole picture. I see everything. I don’t see - the little things are just this - I have to look at the overall picture and I think I’m smart enough and I’ve done it long enough that we’ll make the right decision when the time is right.
And hopefully you guys will come in here and say, ‘Coach, you’re damn right. Good job.’
You often talk about the 24-hour rule: win or lose, you absorb it for 24 hours and get rid of it. How has Phil dealt with that? Has he been a 24-hour guy where he comes in and refocuses really quickly to get back in it?
Narduzzi: He’s been great. He’s been great. And he’s done that every week. So he can be great during the week; we need him to do it on game day. But he’s been great. Not issues at all. He’s just as cheerful and as happy as I’ve seen a guy.
What does your defense have to do this week specifically to stop Drake Maye?
Narduzzi: Great question. We can’t lose our details. We lost our details a year ago. He will drive you crazy because he can throw it and make every shot, he’s got great ability, and then he scrambles. If you go back to my press conference after that game or on Monday after North Carolina last year, the major issue with our defense is, when Kancey went down, our guys panicked, there was no pressure on the quarterback, he had all day and then they felt like, ‘He’s gonna run again so I have to go get him,’ and then they lose coverage and they let the DBs hang out.
That won’t happen again. You’ll go back and watch the tape and go, like, ‘Oh my God.’ We’ll be looking for that to happen when they have success. Because they’ll have success. They’re going to throw the ball. But we can’t lose our fundamentals. We know how to play defense, we know how to play pass coverage; we have to just stick with it and not - he’s going to scramble for his yards, it’s going to happen. You can’t stop it all. When you have good pass coverage, that dude’s going to take off and there’s going to be time when the ratio up front with those four guys pass rushing is going to leave a lane for him to go. More than ever, he’s been looking; if he doesn’t like it, he takes off and runs. So we have to be patient.
How much of a factor is their run game?
Narduzzi: It’s a factor. They like to run the football. They’ve got good tailbacks. They like to run the football and they’re probably going to watch our last two games and go, ‘We can run the football.’ So that’s what we have to make sure we’re good at. I would imagine we’re going to see some outside zone, which usually we don’t see a ton of outside zones because of our ends and how well we’ve played it, but we’re going to see some outside zone and we’re going to have to stop that. We cannot let the two-headed monster go. If they can run the ball and Maye can throw it when he wants to, that’s a problem. They did not attempt - because of the way we stopped them two years ago when they came here, we stopped the run and they struggled to throw it every down. We made them one-dimensional. Last year, we did not really make them one-dimensional. I shouldn’t say that: we did make them one-dimensional and it didn’t matter. They didn’t really try to run the ball on us. They were like, ‘Okay, they stopped us a year ago.’
Now I think they’re going, ‘Okay, this isn’t the same defense from a year ago. We’ll find out.’ But I think last week helped us a little bit, if you looked at the play and not look at the yardage. You look at the yardage, you go, ‘Woo, they still ran the ball pretty good.’ But there was 51 rushes and I think three yards per carry. Something like that.
Your run game - the best way you can stop a quarterback is to keep him off the field. Is your run game up to the standards that bump up that time of possession for you guys?
Narduzzi: You know, Izzy was pretty good, guys. Remember Izzy? Remember that guy, number 2? That guy had the ability to explode, and we miss Izzy. Rodney, we’re going to put a load on Rodney tomorrow. He needs to go. I think you guys will all be happy with that. He was a little banged up during camp, but we’ve got him probably back to as good of health as we’ve had. So Rodney’s ready to go. But we need some explosives. Again, how do explosives happen? When you talk about getting the run game - you’re exactly right: we haven’t - what’s the longest run of the year? I don’t know. Does anybody know?
23 yards?
Narduzzi: 23 yards. That’s not very long, okay? So we need some explosive runs, we need some explosive passes. We have to get some of those. It’s hard to go 13 plays all the time and kick a field goal or score a touchdown. It’s hard. You’d like to do it quicker than that and we have to get explosives in the run game and pass game. But how do explosives happen? The receivers have to go downfield on the runs and help Rodney. Help Daniel. Help C’Bo. Help Phil. Last week, I think I mentioned Monday, there’s times where the quarterback run should be another 10, 12 yards but we don’t block for him. That’s disappointing, and that goes on other guys, not just the ball carrier. So we have to finish every play to the echo of the whistle.
In terms of North Carolina’s defense, do they play similar to how they did last year? Do you expect much of the same?
Narduzzi: It’s hard to tell. They play some four-down, which is what they major in. They do sprinkle in the three-down stuff, so I wouldn’t be shocked to see them play some three-down. But the good thing is, we’ve done that for a couple weeks, so we’ve got our answers for that. So we’ll see. But I can see them jumping into some odd stuff and maybe blitzing like the last two teams have done, which has caused us a little bit of issues, I guess. But our protection was much better last week compared to Cincinnati, which was atrocious.