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How do you get comfortable facing a style of play you only see once per year?

You practice against it more than once per year. At least, that’s the answer Pat Narduzzi and Pitt defensive coordinator Josh Conklin came up with.

This week, the Panthers will meet Georgia Tech, an ACC Coastal Division matchup that annually puts Narduzzi’s team neck-deep in the triple-option offense. Last year, Pitt got a double-dose of the triple-option, facing Georgia Tech in Atlanta during the season and taking on Navy in the Military Bowl last December, and both times, the Panthers struggled.

Georgia Tech and Navy combined to rush for a whopping 793 yards on 111 carries - 7.1 yards per carry - and scored eight touchdowns on the ground. 24 of those rushing attempts gained at least 10 yards, eight gained at least 20 yards, seven gained at 30, six gained at least 40 and three carries gained at least 50 yards.

And while Navy positively blew Pitt’s doors off with the option running, Georgia Tech had more big plays. All three of those 50-yard runs came from the Yellow Jackets, who averaged 9.4 yards per carry against Pitt last season.

The Panthers didn’t have much in the way of an answer for Paul Johnson’s offense, and the 44-28 annihilation in the Military Bowl was even worse. So Narduzzi, Conklin and the defensive staff went looking for answers in the offseason. They talked with other coaching staffs who regularly face the triple-option offense, and one conclusion they drew was that the team simply needed to spend more time preparing for it.

So, every day in training camp, the coaches put the players through a bit of Georgia Tech prep. The coaches called it the “Panther period” during each practice, and the focus was all on the Yellow Jackets.

“Defensively, it was Georgia Tech. That’s what it was. Period,” Narduzzi said. “Team situations and just working on the little things that we need to do mentally…we’re just working on those little things that we need to get better at that we looked at during the summer and said, this is where our focus needs to be, just so we can get our kids further along.”

According to Conklin, the team’s first practice in preparation for this week’s game was pretty well ahead of what he saw from the players the first time they lined up for Georgia Tech week last season.

“No question, it was,” Conklin said. “And last year, when we were coming into camp, we felt like we had so much volume of our base package that we kind of put that on the backburner and didn’t spent nearly as much time as we did this year defending it because it was something we wanted to get better at.”

“I feel so much more comfortable right now on a Monday coming into this game than we did a year ago,” Narduzzi said, “because you had no time to think about it (in the summer of 2015) and you’re just worried about doing what you do and not worrying about Georgia Tech. I think that will help as we move forward with the option.”

“It was definitely a good thing to work on,” linebacker Oluwaseun Idowu said Monday. “It’s not something we see all the time. I kind of practiced in it last year and saw some stuff being here last year and traveling with the team and practicing with the team; seeing that stuff, it’s definitely necessary to have that period to work on that stuff. It’s not something you usually see with every team.”