Narduzzi on the Sun Bowl, the offense and more
EL PASO, Tex. - Pat Narduzzi met the media after Pitt’s 14-13 loss to Stanford in the Sun Bowl on Monday, and here’s the full rundown of what he said.
Narduzzi: I’ll start off again by thanking everybody involved with the Sun Bowl. Great experience, great game day. Obviously, not the outcome we wanted. Defensively, when you look at the stats, it almost makes me want to fall over. And again, I give Stanford credit. I look at our 208 yards rushing to their 103, I look at our 344 total yards to their 208, it just doesn’t add up how that score is 13-14, and that’s really the only stat that matters.
Offensively, we’ve got to finish drives down in the red zone, across the 50. We had opportunities. We take a sack one time that puts us out of field goal range, which is all we need - another field goal. We miss a 55-yarder, which is a long one but it could have been a 52-yarder, we had a little exchange problem. That’s kind of what you get.
Overall, offensively and defensively, we outplayed them. We just didn’t win on the scoreboard. I feel bad for our seniors. I think I hugged every one of these guys in the locker room. A lot of crying. Like I said, I feel bad for our kids because we wanted it for them. But they played their tails off, they gave us everything they’ve got, and as a coach, that’s really all you can ask for.
What accounted for the inability to get those points and put this game away early on? Because you really controlled the tempo and the flow; it just seemed like this game was yours for the taking.
Narduzzi: Without replaying the whole game in my head, and I’ll watch it on the airplane back, it starts with a holding on the first drive, then there’s another holding - it’s all those errors that we’ve talked about so many times and we’ve been plagued with this season. It’s those errors that put you behind the chains and it’s tough to get out from them. But we’ve got to make plays and we’ve got to call a better game. We’ve got to do it all.
Three straight games, you guys can’t get more than 13 points offensively. I know you tried to iron some of that in the month between, but what can you do to fix that going into next year?
Narduzzi: Well, we’ve just got to continue to look at what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and evaluate, really, every part of the program. You look at - I mean, you’ve got a second-team All-Pac-12 quarterback that throws for 105 yards - it looks like 105 yards and we threw for 136. They’re averaging 250, 280, but obviously some good defense being played out there so give them credit. But I thought we did some better things, obviously, than we did in the last game, so we’ll just continue to go back to the drawing board and evaluate what we’re doing.
Do you anticipate making any staff changes in the offseason?
Narduzzi: I’m not going to talk about that right now. I like our staff right now. I like our players. I’m going to digest this football game.
You say about evaluating the program - as it relates to your offensive coordinator, what’s your confidence level right now in him after the season?
Narduzzi: High. High. What’s their confidence in their coordinator? They had 208 yards, we had 344. I don’t know. I mean…
Have you been involved in many games where you’ve dominated the statistical stat sheet and not won the game?
Narduzzi: I’ve been in a few of them, but I can’t remember - you coach 30 years and you’ve been in a few of them and you’ve won some of the stats. Stats don’t matter. The only one that really matters is that score.
Does the way the season ended with three straight losses take away all the success you had when you won a division title and you were able to get to a championship game?
Narduzzi: I don’t think so. I really don’t. Our goal is to get to a championship and win an ACC championship. We got there and we had a chance. We didn’t play great. That was our first time there. I think we rebounded and played a lot better in a bowl game against a quality opponent. Then you see what happened to Notre Dame against a Clemson football team that, like I said after that game, is a measuring stick.
We got there. There’s a lot of people that would like to be there. We rolled through the Coastal Division and that’s - you can walk away from that season saying we were Coastal Division champions. That c-word is still on this football team and this 2018 senior class.
Was there any thought after they stopped you on fourth down to letting them score and you’d be down eight?
Narduzzi: That’s a great question. We went back and forth, even with 3:44 in the game of, do you go for it on fourth at the 2-yard line? We obviously went for it down there on the 2 or 3-yard line, wherever we were, and Ffrench caught the ball, Kenny threw a great pass and we converted on that fourth down. We don’t convert the next one but we talked about it. I’ve never been from that philosophy. It’s hard as a defensive coach to let somebody score but being that it would have been an eight-point game and a touchdown and going for two was…even the last play, they ran a reverse and we had everybody up, we were blitzing, you know, we were blitzing everybody, we didn’t cover the receiver out wide and we’ve never practiced that but we’ll practice that for the future.