PITTSBURGH (AP) — Minutes after Pittsburgh introduced Pat Narduzzi in the waning days of 2014, then interim athletic director Randy Juhl gave the school's new football coach a pretty unique mandate.
The way Juhl figured it, if the university can find a way to help cure polio — as Dr. Jonas Salk did in a basement laboratory at Pitt's Medical School in the early 1950s — then it “ can sure as hell win 10 football games.”
Yet winning with regularity wasn't the only thing the Panthers lacked at the time. Narduzzi was Pitt's fifth coach in six years. The program's lack of stability became a running joke as it bounced from Dave Wannstedt (fired in 2010) to Mike Haywood (axed just weeks after being named Wannstedt's replacement) to Todd Graham (who bolted after a season for Arizona State) to Paul Chryst (who turned three so-so years into an offer to head home to Wisconsin ).
While Narduzzi has only hit that 10-win plateau once — during a magical 2021 season in which the Panthers captured the ACC title and quarterback Kenny Pickett became a surprise Heisman finalist — he has made the program a consistent contender in a conference not exactly known for consistency.
Narduzzi has clutched the job no one seemed to want with both hands. And when he jogs onto the Acrisure Stadium turf on Thursday night when the Panthers (2-0) open ACC play against Syracuse (1-1, 0-1), he'll do it for the 144th time, breaking a tie with Jock Sutherland for most games coached in the program's 122-year history.
Not that Narduzzi wants to talk about it much. While the 60-year-old's passion remains evident nearly four decades into his coaching career, his eyes remain fixed on the windshield and not the rearview mirror, a habit he picked up while watching and then playing for his father Bill Narduzzi at Youngstown State.
“He was on to the next, I think all the time,” Pat Narduzzi said. “And I tell our kids all the time, nobody gives a crap what you did last weekend. Nobody cares about the rain. Nobody cares about the score. Nobody cares about the defense or the offense. Because one week you’re a hero and next week you are a zero.”
It's a roller coaster Narduzzi has grown comfortable riding. Pitt's 56 conference victories since his arrival are third in the ACC, trailing only Clemson and Miami. The Panthers are one of just four programs to win a conference championship since they joined the league in 2014.
Pitt has largely stayed above the mushy middle thanks in part to the kind of continuity among the coaching staff that can be hard to find elsewhere. Defensive coordinator Cory Sanders, for example, is in his ninth year on the staff. The man he replaced, Randy Bates, spent eight years in the job.
“If it’s a revolving door with your coaches, I’m constantly worried about coaching the coaches up so we can make sure we’re taking care of players like I want to,” Narduzzi said.
Narduzzi is firm in his belief that the level of care the staff takes is one of the reasons nearly two dozen former Panthers find themselves on active NFL rosters. It's also one of the reasons Pitt doesn't frequently find itself being raided in the transfer portal (with a couple of notable exceptions).
While the program has a proud history — when Sutherland was hired in 1924, the man he replaced was Pop Warner, yes, that Pop Warner — Narduzzi also makes sure the Panthers carry themselves with a bit of an edge. Sometimes that edge can lead to self-inflicted wounds.
He raised eyebrows both internally and externally following a blowout loss to Notre Dame in 2023 when he vented publicly about the quality of the roster, something he walked back days later while stressing the responsibility for the result falls exclusively on him.
More than once, he's parried with opposing programs or conferences. While answering a question about the uncertainty surrounding NFL players returning to college a few weeks ago, he stated bluntly, “one minute the SEC says ‘We’re going to do this’ and the next day they’re like, oh, you know, on their knees.”
That is just Narduzzi being Narduzzi. So is pulling off a stunner or two every fall. The Panthers have appeared in at least one AP Top 25 poll in eight of his 11 seasons and knocked off a dozen ranked opponents along the way.
There's a chance to do it again this fall behind sophomore quarterback Mason Heintschel, who stayed at Pitt even after Narduzzi claimed Heintschel received overtures from Miami.
The threat of losing a top player to a program with deeper pockets is not something Narduzzi had to worry about when he took over nearly a dozen years ago. It's now become an uncomfortable reality — not just at Pitt, to be clear — that Narduzzi stressed does not come close to outweighing his passion for a job he hopes to have for the rest of the decade and beyond.
“We can’t control some of the craziness that’s going out there,” he said. “It is about love. You love the game. You loved the game of football. You love what you have in this room and coaching these young men every day. That’s the fun part. I mean, all that stuff is, you know, I let other people worry about that and I’ll just get to coach football.”
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