DALLAS — Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi met with the media following Pitt’s 48-25 loss to SMU on Saturday night at Gerald R. Ford Stadium. Here is a complete transcription of everything he had to say.

Narduzzi: Well, that was not the football game that we all expected. We'll start off by giving SMU credit. Coach Lashlee’s got a good football team, really good football team. They made plays and we didn't. It starts with me. I obviously didn't have our football team ready to go today. We didn't execute like we have. A lot of missed tackles on defense. We give up too many explosives. And again, it starts with me, and it ends with me. I'll take full responsibility for the loss. I apologize to our fans out there. I know we all expected to get it done. It's hard to win every week. It's harder on the road. And when you don't play great, and you don't coach great, this is what happens. So it starts with me.

Questions?

Pat, over the past three games, you guys are 7 of 35 on third down conversions. Why do you think you guys are struggling so much there?

Narduzzi: I don't know. We gotta go back and look at what we're doing as coaches and what we're asking our kids to do and figure it out. It starts with good defense. Sometimes SMU's defense we know was good, stopping of the run, top 25 defense in the country. They've been good all year. And we didn't do a good job. We're not making plays. And we're not doing a good enough job coaching.

It seemed like they were able to get pressure on Eli a bunch tonight. What's the solution in offensive line?

Narduzzi: Well, we gotta protect him better. Whatever it is, whether we gotta put six guys in there, whatever, max protect, we gotta find a way to protect him. We gotta get the ball out, and then we gotta catch the ball. I think we had probably more drops today than in the seven previous games all together, and we gotta make plays. And it's hard to win when you're minus two in the turnover ratio. We didn't get any on defense, and we didn't tackle well. And that was the most disappointing thing. Just going underneath blocks and things that we've been pretty good at doing, and we didn't do that today.

It just seems like mistakes kind of compounded throughout the game. Was it just kind of one of those nights where one thing led to the next?

Narudzzi: It was one of those things. I mean, again, regardless of offense, defense, special teams, we didn't punt the ball well when we had to punt it. I think we had a 31-yard average. That's not where we've been. That's not what we've done. So it snowballed a little bit, and again, it starts with me. I’ve got to get our guys better prepared to get a W.

About Eli specifically, it just seems like he's not being as decisive as he was in the first couple games. I mean, what do you think that is about him? Is he starting to hit a freshman wall, or…

Narduzzi: You know, again, it's a team game. It takes 11 guys out there running the right routes, and it takes protection. And you gotta trust your protection, and you gotta get the ball out. And we'll look at it, but it's one of those games. He's played well all year. And again, we just wanted to get him out of there at the end. Just to protect him, and make sure we didn't lose him late in that game. But hey, you can't be great every day. And again, we'll bounce back. We got Virginia at 8 o'clock on Saturday night at Acrisure Stadium, and we’ll be ready for them.

On your scoring drive in the second half, it seemed like he was being more decisive, like the Eli we saw early in the season. It seemed like he was making better decisions, confidence in his throws, everything like that.

Narduzzi: Yeah, again, we'll look at that videotape and see what the difference was from the first half to the second half. And again, he's always better when he knows he can just turn it loose and go. And he had nothing to lose at that point. And we've got to play to win every down, every quarter. Again, that starts with coaching, and it's our job as coaches to get it right.

You mentioned getting Eli out of there to protect him. A few of those other starters that stayed late into that fourth quarter, did you consider pulling them any earlier than you did?

Narduzzi: We played all our tailbacks, didn't want to pull our wideouts, I guess. The offense makes that decision, they wanted to keep going. I'm sure the receivers wanted to keep going. And Konata did a great job at the end. Malachi, we got three tight ends working in there. So that's just a decision by the coaches and what they do on the sideline. And we had that last drive at least, we had the entire second offense line in there as well. And it was good to get those guys experience.

Right before halftime, obviously, the kid from SMU got taken off the field on the ambulance. I saw you and Rhett have a discussion. How difficult is that for both sides to see an ambulance drive on the field?

Narduzzi: Yeah, you don't see it very often. It's the first time I've seen it in a long time. And I go back to watching Damar Hamlin being laying down on the ground with the Bills, and it's never a good situation. So we pray for his health and hope he's doing fine. I just went up to Rhett and just tell him, we're praying for him. And Rhett just said, ‘hey, he’s going to be okay.’ So that's not easy, you don't want to ever see anybody go down and you never want to see those lights come on on the field.

Defensively, how frustrating was it that it seemed like a lot of it was missed tackles, not necessarily missed assignments?

Narduzzi: It's frustrating, and that starts with us as coaches, making sure we're giving them the right look and practice. And they gotta do it right, they know how to do it. For whatever reason, it's one of those games we haven't tackled that bad. I mean, I'm talking from the first play down our sideline, when I think it was the second play of the game, when we think he's down. Like, finish the tackle, we gotta finish. And we didn't do a good job finishing the plays today. Whether it was a tight end on the far sideline, I mean, there was just a ton of missed tackles. And way, way, way too many explosives. They ran a couple traps on us in different plays that we had not seen. We did a better job after we saw it. And then at the end, they have an 80-yard pass on a Y-shoot. We had to come in the box and knock that guy out. As he's running through the B-gap clean, we've seen it before. And we practiced it all week, and we did not execute. And obviously, we gotta do a better job as coaches.

What's your message to your team after a game like this?

Narduzzi: The message is it's one game. And like I kinda started off at the beginning, it's hard to win every week. It's hard to be on every week. And maybe as a team and as a staff, we didn't handle success. I always say the hardest thing is to handle success. Our guys will handle adversity, okay? And this is adversity. And our guys will bounce back. You can see it in the locker room. They're not discouraged. I told them I love them. And I love them as much or more than I did game one or game seven. And we win as a team or we lose as a team, but we'll be fine. We'll bounce back and be ready to roll.

Earlier in the season when you guys came back against West Virginia, came back against Cincinnati, you said that you could see the belief on the sideline. Was there any moment where there wasn't that belief or anything like that?

Narduzzi: Not at all. Not at all, and again, like I said, I'll give SMU credit. They came out and played hard in the second half. And again, we came out with the intentions of we were gonna come back. They believed that at halftime, they were gonna come out and do it. It's not the first time we've been down. And we just didn't get enough stops on defense, and we didn't score enough on offense. And we didn't do a good enough job coaching, period. And again, it starts with me. I didn't do a good job.