Pitt concluded its 2023 season with a 30-19 loss to Duke, the first time that the Blue Devils have beaten the Panthers since 2014, and it’s the worst finish to a season since 1998.
It goes without saying that the season with a complete and utter failure for Pat Narduzzi’s squad, winning just three games in a season two years removed from the best season in 40 years, and it came about largely because of one overarching problem.
Pitt averaged just a hair over 20 points per game this season, down from 41.3 in 2021 and 31.3 in 2022 to 20.2 in 2023.
There were three different quarterbacks used this season, to varying degrees of success, and the offensive line — one that cycled through different formations just about every game — wasn’t good enough. The play-calling was suspect, the development was almost non-existent and the personnel usage was baffling.
But Narduzzi isn’t going to hurry to make any changes when it comes to the coaching staff.
“We’ll digest this, watch the video and the evaluation goes year-long,” Narduzzi said following the loss. “Every game, every Sunday, every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday through Friday. We’ll just evaluate where we are and what we can do to get better. Again, it starts with the coaches. Period.”
It does start with the coaches, and the coaches were not good enough this season. Not against Duke, certainly. And while the players themselves are not without blame, it does start with the coaches putting their players in the best position to succeed.
And the individual meetings with the players will begin Monday, right after the team meeting, which is how Narduzzi and his staff have handled it since he arrived in 2015.
When it comes to what Pitt needs to do this offseason to get back to the heights it achieved under Narduzzi, aside from the obvious in finding a Heisman Trophy candidate quarterback and Biletnikoff Award-winning wide receiver, Narduzzi pointed to cornerback. The cornerbacks will lose M.J. Devonshire, A.J. Woods and Marquis Williams, and Narduzzi said there will need to be a re-tooling. But it goes much deeper than that.
There needs to be an injection of talent and depth across the board. “We’ve got a good football team, and we’ve got a lot of good players in that locker room, and we’ve got to build around them,” Narduzzi said. But it’s not the cornerbacks, or the defense as a whole, that held back Pitt this season.
It was the offense. It was the scheme, the execution and pretty much everything about Frank Cignetti Jr.’s offense.
“We’re going to look at that, and find out what it is,” Narduzzi said. “Obviously, we’ve got to score more points and we’ve got to convert in the red zone and find out what we’ve got to do. But we’ve definitely going to score more points. That’s a fact.”
