Pat Narduzzi met the media on Thursday and talked about Tennessee’s tempo, playing on the road, Brian O’Neill and more.

Narduzzi: Had a really good week. Our kids are locked in and focused, like they were a week ago, so I like where we are mentally, I like where we are physically. We have a great challenge headed down to Knoxville to take on the Volunteers. So I’m looking forward to heading down. Questions?

You look at Milton, physically he has everything you would want out of a quarterback but he’s going into his second game now in Heupel’s offense. When you look at it from a defense, is that an opportunity to attack a quarterback that’s still kind of new to the system?
Narduzzi: Yeah, well, he’s played a lot of games. He’s been in these games. He’s played at Michigan. I think Heupel’s as good a quarterbacks coach and offensive coordinator as you’ll get in the country. I truly believe that. So they’ll be ready. They’ll make their - first-game jitters, whatever it may be, they’re going to make their best improvement from Week One to Week Two as well, so we have to be aware of that. What you see on tape is not always what you’re going to get, so we expect to get the best Joe Milton that we can get and we have to be prepared for anything.

I think he’s a good football player. I think he’s got composure, he can run, he can throw on the run and he can make good decisions. He didn’t throw the ball into traffic.

What makes Heupel’s offenses so tough to face?
Narduzzi: Everything. Let’s start with the tempo. You put it on, they’re snapping the ball, at least in the first quarter, 7-10 seconds and they’re not slowing down. In the fourth quarter, they slow down just to get out of the game. But what they want to do is be high-tempo, and I’m talking as fast as you’re going to see. They’re faster at Tennessee right now than they were at Central Florida. I want to say it was somewhere between 8 or 9 and 13 seconds when we played them a couple years ago.

So they’re faster. A lot of snaps at 7 seconds, which is blazing fast. We snapped it that fast this week with scout teams. We had one GA working the receivers on the right, one GA working the receivers on the left, one guy working the left side of the offensive line, one guy with the right side of the line, someone working with the quarterback and tight ends - it’s like, to even get our scout team to do that with all those coaches holding up cards, just for right side, left side, inside, the preparation it takes to just emulate the speed was incredible by our defensive staff this week.

That’s what makes it hard. The splits make it hard, because they’re putting you out on an island. Spread offenses put you on an island; this one really puts you on an island. You’re going to see receivers - if this crack here (in the table) is the sideline, they’re lined up right next to the sideline. So they’re going to spread you out and make you cover them. They’ll throw quick routes, they’ll go vertical and even your ‘backers are too far removed. It’s like they’re in the middle of nowhere: are they going to play the run or are they going to play the pass? There’s a lot of different things. Those are just a few of them.

Do you set up two different offensive units with your scout team so one can just jump in after the other?
Narduzzi: No. We don’t have two offensive lines. We only have one offensive line. We have one scout offensive line, so they have to take every rep and we just set the periods up where - Tuesday we did eight straight plays in somewhere between 7 and 12 seconds. And I’m fast with the watch, too; I think on TV they kind of wait two seconds to start the 40-second clock, so I start it right as soon as that whistle blows. I’m the timer. I make sure that the quality of the timing is good.

But we only have one offensive line, so they have to go and then we give them a two-minute break and then we go. We get a lot of plays in a 10-minute period.

Phil Campbell said that Nate Yarnell has been doing a good job on the scout team. What have you seen out of him?
Narduzzi: Nate Yarnell is outstanding. He was the “rocks” player of the week a week ago, and if you had to give one after Week Two, you’d give it to him again, just because of how he operates the offense. And the other guy that’s been - Matt Altsman, our center on the “rocks” has been outstanding, too. I’ll give him one. There’s times when we’ve had some centers and the ball rolls back or goes over the quarterback’s head and you have to start the play over. Two weeks in a row, he’s been shooting the snap right back where the quarterback needs to get it. Sometimes you don’t have that. So Altsman has done a great job, too.

There seems to be an emphasis on spearing this year. There were four ejections in the game Monday night. How do you teach your guys to avoid that?
Narduzzi: That’s a great question. We’ve watched those on video tape. I wanted our defense to watch them so they see. We don’t need to lose anybody; you work too hard to be playing with backups in there and we want our best on the field. It’s tackling the right way. When you look at what Phil Campbell did on the second play of the game, he had his head up and they got it right. If you look at all four of those clips from the Mississippi and Louisville game, they had their heads down.

Not only is it targeting - you’re going to hurt yourself and you might hurt somebody else. So we coach and we’re going to use those lessons from that game as a lesson for our kids that, ‘Hey, if you want to play, keep your head up and keep yourself healthy and keep somebody else healthy and do it the right way.’ So we’ve watched those.

On Monday, you said the crowd noise shouldn’t be a problem. Obviously you’ve worked with sound in the team periods; how do you feel about that?
Narduzzi: I feel good. The coaches laugh at me because I’ll ask, ‘Was it good enough today?’ And they’re like, ‘Coach, it will be fine.’ As a head coach, you always get worried. You want to give them as much as loud as you can get it, so I think we’ll be fine there. We’ll find out at game time.

It’s been a long time since Pitt won at another Power Five school. Is there anything different about going to a place that you’re less familiar with, maybe as opposed to a Virginia Tech - obviously still a hard place to play but somewhere you’re more familiar with?
Narduzzi: I don’t know if being familiar with it really matters. It’s playing good teams on the road; it’s not easy. Wins are wins. They’re hard to get, okay? Everybody is on scholarship on the other team as well. Everybody’s working at it. Wins on the road are even harder when you play a talented football team, and they are talented. You put the tape on; that’s a great job and they’ve got talent all across the board. They’ve got receivers running 4.4’s and 4.34’s, 10.35 hundred-meter guys, No. 11, Jalin (Hyatt). They’ve got speed all over the place and you look at their D-tackles, they’re good. So we’re going to have to play really well to go on the road and get a victory.

You used a lot of running backs on Saturday. Did you get any clarity over this past week of who might get the most carries?
Narduzzi: Yeah, we just got out of that meeting, just getting clarity on who’s going to be the short-yardage back, and yeah, we’re clear.

How many guys do you think might get double-digit carries? Two? Three?
Narduzzi: Double-digit? Depends on how the game’s going. But I would like to use three. Not four or five or six. But we’ve got it down to three now that are going to be the guys carrying it. It depends on how many runs you call in a series and it depends on how the game’s going. If we can run the ball and continue to go run it, I’d like to see two guys with double digits.

The first five series back in 2019 against UCF, you guys had three three-and-outs on defense and two picks. How important is it, with an offense like that that goes tempo, to break them up like that and get them out of rhythm early in a game?
Narduzzi: It’s huge. We’ve got to get stops like that. Three-and-outs are big. We’ve got it down where, when you get into an eight-play series, you find out who can handle eight plays. If it’s four or five plays, we’ve got to somehow get the ball on our hash so we can get a sub if they don’t sub. They have not subbed a lot; maybe they will this week. It sounds like they’ve got one of the receivers (Jimmy) Calloway back, so if they get another receiver back, maybe they’ll sub him so we can sub. If they run the ball out of bounds, we’ll have an opportunity to sub.

All of those things are stuff we work and we’re prepared for. But if they stay in the middle of the field and they never - you know, that’s when things get - it’s bang, bang bang. I don’t care how good of shape you’re in, it’s a different deal. Some guys can take more plays than others. So we’ve got to be prepared for that.

Your D-tackles, those guys aren’t really used to sprinting 50 yards to get off the field.
Narduzzi: Yeah, well, they’ve got to. But they’re sprinting in short spaces; they may move 10 yards a play. But it’s like wrestling. They’re in a wrestling match and then having to sprint. Anybody that’s ever wrestled knows how exhausting that is compared to anything else.

How much time do you think they spent on ‘Pitt Special’ this week?
Narduzzi: Probably they ran it once, maybe twice, figuring we won’t use it again.

A few years ago when you moved Brian O’Neill to tackle, you said you just made him a lot of money. Did you think you were going to make him almost one-tenth of a billion dollars?
Narduzzi: You know, I’m proud of Brian. That’s awesome. He texted me last night something to that effect. But I’m just proud of what he’s done. We knew that guy could be a great player. He talked about convincing - you know, he made the decision, I just recommended it. The player has to make the decision.

But that’s awesome for him. He probably wasn’t going to get drafted where he got drafted. It’s a guy trusting a coach and a staff to put him in position to be successful down the road. Not only does he have a degree, he’s making a lot of money and I’m sure he’s smart enough, he’s investing that money and I’m happy for him. That’s awesome.

You didn’t have to convince him very much, did you?
Narduzzi: It took 12 hours. I didn’t say, ‘I need to know now.’ We just talked about it. I said, ‘I think it’s going to be the best thing for the team and the best thing for you.’ We went through how many tight ends were drafted in the first round and second round, just gave him a couple years’ stats of that, and then talked about all the offensive tackles that were drafted in the first round and second round, kind of like, ‘That’s what you’re going to grow into.’

I don’t know if you remember some of these stories, but he used to set his alarm through the night to eat, just to get the weight up. So the guy has worked his tail off for what he’s getting, and he deserves every nickel.