Narduzzi's puzzling quarterback management has led to 1-2 start

Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi has been given multiple chances to address the elephant in the room for two weeks now. It’s painfully obvious Pitt has a major issue with its offense and it is coming from the most important position on the field.

When you’re starting quarterback goes 18-for-52 with four turnovers over a two-game stretch, there is something fundamentally wrong with the direction of where the season is going. Pitt lost two winnable games to two teams who aren’t particularly good and it really starts and ends because of bad quarterback play.

Pitt did not need 2021 Kenny Pickett these last two games, but really they just needed someone capable of hitting on at least 50% of his passes. That’s the crazy thing. That is all this team needed in back-to-back losses, but Phil Jurkovec has not been able to provide that. For the sake of the entire team, it’s worth trying something a little different to try to salvage a season that is heading in the wrong direction in a hurry.

In each of Narduzzi’s past two postgame press conferences, he was asked immediately if he had any consideration to switch quarterbacks, and he has shot down that notion quickly both times. In fact, most of the postgame press conference following the West Virginia game, Narduzzi was given multiple opportunities to divulge deeper into his starting quarterback’s play, but he has been reluctant to cast blame on him directly, but rather has deflected it and put the loss as a team effort.

That’s noble, I guess. Most college coaches don’t throw players under the bus publicly to the media, but again, some of his wording or logic gets a little contradictory and that’s where I see the issue.

“You guys are all fast to want to pull the plug on somebody, but that’s not how we do it,” said Narduzzi after his team dropped to 1-2 on the season. “I’m a positive guy. I try to stay positive, and when you start dumping people whether it’s a corner or a tackle, or a quarterback, it’s not good for you. We’ll look at the tape. It’s never one person. You guys want to point the finger at one person and it’s not. We all have a part in it and it starts with the game plan and we’ll get it right.”

Narduzzi mentions he is not quick to pull the plug on one particular player, but there have been multiple instances on the team this year where he has done just that. Following a preseason injury to starting guard Ryan Jacoby, Pitt opened the season with fifth-year senior Jason Collier as the starter. Collier struggled against Wofford and the following week Pitt went with freshman BJ Williams in the starting lineup against Cincinnati.

There were breakdowns with the starting safeties in Pitt’s loss to Cincinnati in the first half and over the course of the game Donovan McMillon started to take away more snaps from PJ O’Brien. McMillon ended up starting on Saturday against West Virginia and produced a career-high 17 tackles.

It can’t be both ways.

Pitt has done the very thing at other positions where Narduzzi said he wouldn’t do at quarterback. The fact of the matter is, you should never lose a football game by double digits when you only allow 211 yards and 17 points, but Pitt managed to find a way to do that last night against a West Virginia team running a one-dimensional offense because it was down to its backup in at quarterback.

In Pitt's case, the Panthers were running a one-dimensional offense with their starting quarterback. The play calling in the first quarter could be looked at like they wanted to establish the run, which was likely the right call, but it also showed the coaches had little faith in the passing game.

"We wanted to establish it and play with an attitude and I thought we did that," Narduzzi said of opening the game with a strong emphasis on running the ball. "But did we consistently do it? When you turn the ball over, bad things happen. When we ran it, we didn’t turn it over."

If I have this interpreted correctly, Pitt's plan was to run the football as much as possible, but he is also saying out loud that he did not have faith in his quarterback to execute a basic passing game from the start on Saturday. Pitt ran 14 offensive plays in the first quarter, with 13 of those calls being running plays. I mean, if that's the initial game plan, then what's the point of not making a change at quarterback?

Is everything on Jurkovec? No. I even agree with Narduzzi there. You can see offensive line issues, the backs and receivers aren’t always making the plays when they get their seldom chances, but again, we’re talking about the most important position on the field and he is not delivering. A good quarterback can mask issues or raise the level of play around him, but when that position is struggling, everything else is magnified and that is what we are seeing with this 2023 Pitt team.

I get the backup quarterback can always be the most popular player on any struggling football team. We don’t exactly have evidence that Christian Veilleux or Nate Yarnell would fix the issues at hand for this Pitt team, though Narduzzi did say they have ‘a lot of confidence’ in both players in his postgame comments.

Well maybe it’s time to see that confidence on the field. With an undefeated and ranked North Carolina team coming to town and Pitt only mustering 236 yards per game against power-five competition, it is absolutely worth a shot, or no, let me take that back, it’s really the only answer.