‘Play fast, score faster’ was supposed to be the calling card, but it has been anything but that for Pitt’s new look offense over the past four games.
Following a 24-19 defeat to Virginia on Saturday night at Acrisure Stadium, the Panthers once again failed to deliver on offense, which is a stunning turn of events from how this season started under first-year offensive coordinator Kade Bell.
Pitt generated only 292 yards, 165 passing and 127 rushing, in the defeat to the Cavaliers. It was the third time in four games the Panthers were held under 300 yards. Pitt was just 4-of-13 on third down conversions, committed two costly turnovers, and the offense as a whole was flagged nine times.
It was bad.
It’s even worse when you compare the first five games of the season to the most recent four. As Pitt raced out to its 5-0 start, the offense was humming, going for 521.6 yards per game and totaled 26 touchdowns as a unit.
The Panthers are going for only an average of 313.2 yards per game with nine touchdowns against Cal, Syracuse, SMU, and Virginia.
“The teams got better,” Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi cited as one of the reasons for the recent decline. There has to be more to the story, right?
Pitt four-game stretch here on offense isn’t just bad, it’s terrible. Last year’s team posted 317 yards of offense per game, so over the past four games, this offense isn’t even reaching 2023 three-win standards.
Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the decline is that nobody knows what started the issues, or seemingly how to remedy them either. Narduzzi himself was a little perturbed by the current developments.
“We'll sit down and reevaluate where we are, what we're doing, how we're doing it, and try to put a better product out there,” the Pitt coach said after the game. “But it's frustrating, it's frustrating for our offense, coaches. It’s frustrating for our offensive players.”
It has to be especially frustrating because this offense was supposed to be everything the 2023 team’s was not. The Panthers were expected to use speed and tempo to light up the scoreboard this season, but in the loss to the Cavaliers, some old issues started to come to the surface.
Pitt was constantly behind the sticks from the nine penalties. There were five dropped passes charged to Pitt, and it felt like more. The protection let up constant pressure on the quarterback.
Oh yea, and that’s a pretty big issue right now as well.
Eli Holstein was just 10-of-23 for 121 yards. He left the game with an injury, and his replacement, Nate Yarnell, went 4-for-12 and threw two interceptions in his place.
“It starts with coaching,” Narduzzi said when asked how he can get better play from his quarterbacks. “It starts with our offensive staff, our head coach, me, and we have just got to get better play. It wasn't good enough overall.”
Narduzzi then correctly pointed out all the other failures of the offense to deflect all the blame being heaped on the quarterbacks. Although, I think he was onto something when he touched on coaching, however.
It was to start there, right?
If last year’s failures were pinpointed to the guy calling plays, then the current struggles have to be attributed to the same position, I would think.
The whole switch to this offensive philosophy was basically to avoid 24-19 losses at home to teams like Virginia, and that's the bottom line. Bell was brought to Pitt to potentially be an offensive innovator, or if nothing else, a play caller who could at least score some points.
