Pitt football head coach Pat Narduzzi did not enjoy his team’s performance against Cincinnati in the 27-21 loss in the River City Rivalry Saturday night.
Panthers redshirt senior quarterback Phil Jurkovec had a disappointing night against the Bearcats, completing just 10 of his 32 passes for 179 yards and three touchdowns with no rushing yards. That 31.3% pass completion is the worst of his career with that many throws, with only his 3-of-11, 27.3%, game for Boston College against Wake Forest at the end of 2021 worse.
Despite his poor performance, Narduzzi never considered benching his starting quarterback at all throughout the game.
“I think first thing, it starts with the offensive line,” Narduzzi said. “It takes 11. Everybody is going to point at the quarterback. He’ll get all the glory when you win football games. He’s a great quarterback, got a lot of faith in him.”
Jurkovec did take five sacks against Cincinnati, something that Narduzzi said can’t happen if they are expecting to win games.
“We’ve got to shore up the protection,” Narduzzi said. “We’ve got an idea where we are now, what we have to do to protect the quarterback, and that was one of our goals going in is to make sure we protected the quarterback, and we did not do that.”
Redshirt senior wide receiver Bub Means is the No. 1 for the Panthers, but he had, literally, no stats against the Bearcats. Jurkovec targeted him a team-high 11 times, but Means didn’t make one catch at all in the game.
On those targets, Means did have some that Jurkovec threw out of his reach, but others he didn’t make a good enough play on or simply dropped the pass.
Narduzzi wants better from that quarterback-wide receiver connection going forward and took a lot of blame on himself for the loss.
“Bub was definitely targeted, and from my old receiver days, you expect those guys, whether it’s an underthrown ball or not a great ball, doesn’t matter,” Narduzzi said. “You get a chance to make a catch, you’ve got to make a catch, and there were some drops out there. There was drops, period, and again, it’s not on one guy ever. It’s 11 on offense, 11 on defense, and again, it starts with the head coach. I guess I didn’t have them ready to play, and we’ll be ready for this week.”
One word to describe that decision, ‘pathetic!’
Not that Jurkovic wasn’t bad in this game, but can someone explain why the offensive strategy in this game was just to have him chuck it deep down the sidelines to guys who weren’t open, again and again? That was bizarre.
Yep, and they did this before, calling plays (deep outs to the sidelines) which are the toughest to complete. They called a lot of these for Slovis as well, but his accuracy was much better, but threw to Means to much, like Jerk did last nite. 11 targets & 0 receptions. Jerk can’t throw a deep out, terrible footwork, throws off balance on scrambles. Pitt is not going to win 9 games this year with him as QB. And if last night is an indicator against FBS teams maybe not more than 3 or 4 wins. Cincy had mostly an… Read more »
it’s called lobbing it up and pray for a penalty because you don’t have the talent to match up
The French Canadian kid is either really bad or this is just Cignetti’s call since he brought Jerk to Pitt.
What’s the deal with Rodney Hammond ? He actually beat out Izzy last year for the starting job, had over a 100 yards against WVCC and then got hurt and of course Izzy became the star feature back. Now reduced to sharing carries with 2 other backs.
Thought he might become the next Pitt great back, but not on 6 carries.
Narduzzi has had two hires that define him as a poor offensive coach.
Watson and Cignetti.
No QB in the country wants to play for Cignetti. That is why we have terrible talent in the QB room.
Maybe Narduzzi should take a look at all of the offenses that clown on his defense and find a guy to coordinate something similar here.
that’s duzz problem. too loyal…phil isn’t the answer.