The Partridge effect: How Pitt's DL coach landed three transfers
NIL deals with players are off limits for college coaches.
But a trio of press conferences on Wednesday morning in Pitt’s South Side facility sure sounded like paid advertisements for defensive line coach Charlie Partridge.
Perhaps it was due to the featured speakers. There were four in total, and three of them were defensive linemen Nick James, David Ojiegbe and Nate Matlack. And those three were a diverse group: James is an Alabama native who is transferring to Pitt from Indiana; Ojiegbe is from Maryland and went to Clemson; and Matlack is a Kansas lifer who spent the last four seasons at Kansas State.
But while they took unique paths up until the point where they decided to commit to Pitt last month, James, Ojiegbe and Matlack all picked the Panthers for the same reason.
“Coach P and just his development with defensive linemen; that’s just one thing that stood out for me,” James said.
“I wanted a coach that’s going to coach me to the highest level, and I wanted to have a relationship with him as a person, too, as well,” Ojiegbe said. “Coach P, he has relationships with all his players and he has a great track record for producing great defensive linemen that go to the NFL. So I feel like, under him, I can definitely grow as a man and grow as a football player.”
“Coach P, obviously,” Matlack said.
Matlack is a bit different from James and Ojiegbe in that they were recruited by Pitt and Partridge out of high school, but Matlack was not. In fact, he never spoke with Partridge or even knew much about him prior to entering the transfer portal.
But once he went into the portal, Partridge’s name started coming up a lot - and from some unlikely sources.
“As I was getting recruited by all these different schools throughout my transfer portal time, it was just, ‘Oh, you’re visiting Pitt? I love Coach P. He’s such a great coach,’” Matlack said. “It seems like he has a lot of notoriety throughout the country, and I’ve obviously seen that since I’ve been here and the way he coaches and the way he talks to guys, you can see how much he cares about people. So that was probably the main reason.”
Matlack committed during his official visit to Pitt in December, but by that point, he had done enough research to know about the Panthers and Partridge. .
“I didn’t really know anything about Coach Partridge or Pitt football, to be honest, I’ve always been a Kansas kid, a Big 12 kid; that’s what I grew up in. So I really just went off his word and went off what I heard from other people. And just doing some research myself, you can see from the past three years of the guys he’s produced. With me only having one year of eligibility left and my goal of playing in the NFL, I mean, that speaks for itself.”
Matlack’s relationship with Partridge is still relatively new, but that’s not the case for Ojiegbe. As a four-star prospect at St. John’s College High School in Washington, D.C., he was ranked the No. 17 weak-side defensive end recruit in the country in the class of 2023. Ojiegbe visited Pitt in March 2022 and committed to Clemson a month later, but his connection with Partridge stayed strong throughout his high school recruitment and into his second recruitment from the transfer portal.
“100%,” Ojiegbe said when asked if Pitt was one of the first schools he had in mind when he went into the portal. “I feel like I had a relationship with Coach P out of high school. He was the first coach my junior year to come recruit me in September of my junior year, so he showed the effort and always stayed persistent with it, too, checking up on me, still reaching out to me after I committed, so 100%.”
Pitt started recruiting James when he was a sophomore at IMG Academy in Bradenton, and when he went into the portal last November, Partridge came to mind right away.
“I think he’s one of the greatest defensive line coaches in the country,” James said. “Just his teaching style, him being able to explain from little things and his love for the game, it’s amazing to be around.”