‘We’re Gonna Hit the Gas’: Pitt OC Kade Bell Brings Fresh New Look

Kade Bell was on a flight home shortly after 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, but if he had his way, he’d have been flying back Thursday to get back to work. Pat Narduzzi wasn’t going to allow it.

“Just so you know, I sent Coach Bell home, too,” Narduzzi said when he spoke Wednesday on the South Side, breaking down the Pitt class of 2024.

After a long week of locking down the class of 2024, a successful week after securing all 19 verbal commitments in the class, Narduzzi told the staff to head home. Take some time off. And since it was an important day for the Bell family, Narduzzi told Bell to take off a little earlier.

“It’s his daughter Palmer’s birthday today, her second birthday,” Narduzzi said. “So, I was like, get out of here. He was gonna, ‘I’m coming home tomorrow.’ No, you’re gonna be home for your daughter’s birthday. He got here on Tuesday. I offered him a job on Sunday. I’d never seen a guy get here so fast and on the road and get working. And he did a heck of a job for us in the four or five days, I got a ton of text messages, you know, new guys here, got some things going here. I mean, he’s a grinder that way.”

Bell, who held the offensive coordinator and quarterback coach role at Western Carolina before arriving at Pitt, has been the Panthers’ offensive coordinator for a little less than a week. But his impact has already been felt.

He’s been an incredibly active recruiter, perhaps already the most active recruiter Narduzzi has had in nearly a decade at the helm of the program. In six days, he brought his leading rusher and receiver from WCU with him, took home visits with transfer portal targets, extended offers to the class of 2024, 2025 and 2026 and began to establish connections with dozens and dozens of potential Panthers recruits.

He hasn’t limited his focus to quarterbacks either. Bell has been comprehensive in beginning to revamp a Pitt offense that stagnated under Frank Cignetti Jr.

𝐌𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐚 𝐄𝐝𝐠𝐞 #LOTE #HTG⛽️ pic.twitter.com/zSbPNdQMZ5

— Western Carolina Football (@CatamountsFB) November 24, 2023

Narduzzi tried to avoid talking too much about Bell at his National Signing Day presser, instead choosing to focus on the 19 signees, which is fair, but he couldn’t avoid talking about his new offensive coordinator through 40 minutes of speaking to the media.

It took just about two weeks from when Narduzzi dismissed Cignetti, the Sunday following the season-finale loss to Duke, to land on Bell. There was an extensive coaching search, with several names linked to the position as Narduzzi worked through potential candidates, and it was Bell who came out on top.

Bell is certainly a non-traditional Narduzzi hire considering his age, 30, and the relative inexperience that comes with it, but he fit the mold Narduzzi searched for this time around.

“You always got to change, and you’re moving with it,” Narduzzi said. “You know, we talked about evaluation of what we do, how we do it, we’re spread anyway, and we’re gonna play good defense no matter what. I wanted to play great offense, and I wanted to get a guy who could score points, a guy that had an attitude that we’re score, we’re gonna go and push our guys to be the best they can be and have fun doing it. And I think that’s what we got.”

Bell is the sixth offensive coordinator that Narduzzi has hired, and he’s certainly not the “sit on the football, run the clock down and grind out wins” style that Narduzzi likes. But as Narduzzi faced the most important hire of his tenure, as he mentioned, he — and perhaps Heather Lyke — realized that the game has changed. Pitt’s offense is certainly going to change.

“We’re gonna go faster than what we have,” Narduzzi said. “Probably won’t see a huddle out there much. So, when you’re going fast, you’re gonna use more guys in there. You know, is it six or seven plays fast? You know, run the skill guys out, stick another six in there, and let’s go.”

Pitt operated out of the gun a lot last season, using some 11 and 12 personnel sets (75% 11 personnel sets, Narduzzi said), but there was certainly no sense of urgency. Lots of huddling and ground-and-pound playcalling. Narduzzi pointed to dabbling in things that he didn’t feel necessary.

That’s going to change with Bell calling plays, and the tempo is going to change, too. “His little term is hit the gas, so we’re gonna hit the gas a little bit faster,” Narduzzi said. And that scheme and energy and youth has reflected well with recruits.

“(It was a) really good reaction,” Narduzzi said. “We had people calling from outside saying we want to come, and we didn’t have any spots. So, yeah, the guys who were committed to other schools calling asking, ‘Hey, want to be a part of it.’ So, I think it spiked recruiting a little bit, the freshness, newness, what we’re gonna do.”

Bell loves speed. His scheme has a lot of tempo, relying on his quarterback to make a lot of quick decisions, and he likes to use a lot of pre-snap motion and force defenses to make quick decisions of their own when matched up against creative sets — often using 11 personnel.

Of course, he’s able to slow it down, huddle and operate out of 12 sets, too, but speed is the name of the game. RPOs, play-action, explosive plays. Spreading out opposing defenses and taking advantage on the ground and in the air.

Bell has not spoken to the media yet, and Narduzzi said there will be a time soon for Bell and the transfer portal commitments to speak, so it’s coming soon, but it is hard to get a true sense of what Bell is planning. It’s going to be fast. It’s going to be very different than what Cignetti did.

And it’s going to be a fresh approach to how offenses have generally operated at Pitt under Narduzzi.