PITTSBURGH – Last winter, removed from the worst season of his head coaching career, frustrated with the performance of his offense and steamy about the attitudes of his players, Pat Narduzzi tackled the issues in his typical way: painfully direct and brutally honest.
Narduzzi fired almost his entire offensive coaching staff, completely changed the distribution of NIL money to his team, and finally opened the exit door for a few players who were looking for more money when they hadn’t necessarily earned it.
“I said, ‘S***, I gotta clean the house,’” Narduzzi said from his office on Tuesday.
Eleven months after these housecleaning decisions, the Pitt Panthers are in the midst of one of the biggest turnarounds in college football, going from 3-9 last season to 7-0 this season.
They are off to the best start in the program in more than four decades, have one of the highest scoring offenses in the country and have shown their invincibility with a pair of double-digit fourth-quarter comebacks. They use a newfangled offense from the FCS level, play a new quarterback acquired from Alabama and have a rebuilt defense that is thriving despite the departure of a handful of starters.
But perhaps most interesting of all is that the school’s NIL collective, working with Narduzzi, made the offseason decision to overhaul the team’s distribution structure – from paying each player in a tiered system to paying from selected players who deserve it.
“We won three games and had a structure where everyone got paid and that didn’t work for us. So we changed it,” said Chris Bickell, a technology entrepreneur and Pitt booster who not only founded the school collective Alliance 412 but also donated $20 million of his own money to the 2021 football program.
“You must be hungry,” Bickell continued. “If you want sponsorship and get paid like a professional, you have to earn it. This team is hungry.”
In this era of escalating athlete pay rates, this move is one of the most unique approaches in the industry: a public acknowledgment of scaling back, not scaling up.
But it works for Pitt, even the most experienced players say so.
“I don’t want to say money had an impact, but the attitude toward money did,” said Brandon George, Pitt’s starting sixth-year linebacker.
“Money doesn’t buy you a championship,” Narduzzi told Yahoo Sports. “If it was, all these teams that spent all this money would be really good. State of Florida. Michigan spends a lot of money. I want hungry players.
“You’re talking about how we went from 3 to 9? That’s how.”
There are of course other reasons.
As the 18th-ranked Panthers (7-0, 3-0) prepare to travel to 20th-ranked SMU (7-1, 4-0) on Saturday – an unexpected showdown of undefeated ACCs – comes Narduzzi’s club enters with an offense that exceeds last year’s unit by double. Pitt has the nation’s sixth-best scoring offense (40 points per game) a year after ranking 116th (20 points per game).
Behind the improvement are a transfer quarterback from Alabama, Eli Holstein, and a first-year FBS offensive coordinator, Kade Bell. Bell brought with him not only his up-tempo, movement-heavy schedule from Western Carolina, but also two coaches and two players, including all-around back Desmond Reid, a 6-foot-1, 175-pounder who has burst onto the major college football scene. with some stellar performances (he became the only player in Pitt history to rack up 100 yards rushing and receiving in a single game earlier this season).
Holstein and Reid operate in a multi-faceted offense, with concepts from the NFL (pro style), Josh Heupel at Tennessee (hurry) and LSU’s 2019 national championship run (the RPO and vertical passing attack), said Pat Bostick, the former Pitt quarterback and color analyst for the team’s football broadcasts.
Holstein makes it happen. He threw 17 touchdowns and is the team’s second-leading rusher, behind Reid. While his status for this week’s game against SMU remains uncertain — he retired in the second half last week — the undisclosed injury is not serious, people here say.
How Holstein, a Louisiana native, ended up here has to do with a connection to a Holstein family friend and former Pitt football letterman, Mike McGlynn. He served as a conduit for school and player after Holstein entered the transfer portal following his true freshman season last year at Alabama.
Eleven months later, he is leading an undefeated ACC team. But not everything is perfect.
“I wish he had gone a little further out of bounds,” lamented a smiling Narduzzi.
Holstein is physically imposing at 6-4, 225 pounds. And he’s growing a scruffy goatee that Narduzzi often jokingly suggests he shave off.
“It gets the girls,” Holstein jokes back to his coach.
Considering his start to the season, it might be best to keep him unshaven.
It’s been quite a wild ride so far. Holstein led back-to-back comebacks in the fourth quarter. Against Cincinnati, the Panthers trailed 27-6 with 4:50 left in the third quarter before leaving 22 unanswered. The following week against West Virginia, Pitt trailed by 10 with five minutes remaining before Holstein led touchdown drives of 75 and 77 yards.
“The turning point was Cincinnati,” George said. “The defense got a stop and our offense scored. It was like, ‘Okay. This is not last year’s offense. ”
No, it certainly isn’t.
Narduzzi fired four offensive coaches, including coordinator Frank Cignetti, and a fifth offensive assistant left for an NFL assistant job. Two of those coaches, Tim Salem (tight ends) and Andre Powell (running backs and special teams), had been with the coach throughout his tenure at the school. The overhaul has led to the arrival of younger coaches who, Bostick says, have breathed new life into the operation.
The staff also changed. Players like Holstein and Reid joined. Others were shown the exit door.
“They wanted more money,” Narduzzi said from his office on Tuesday. “It made us better. We didn’t need those guys.”
And then came the change in the collective’s NIL distribution structure.
“I sat down with (some) guys and told them, ‘You’re not getting paid,’” Narduzzi said. “I told them the man investing in you is not happy. I said, ‘If you were an investor and you put down your money and you win three games, what would you do?’ Kids said, ‘Coach, I wouldn’t give it.’ That’s what he does. You have to earn it.”
Those who earn it will be rewarded after the season, Bickell suggested.
“We are careful with our dollars,” he said. “There are guys on this team who don’t get paid a ton and they produce. We know we have high-quality players in the market. There will be teams interested in Dez Reid, right? Nobody knew he could play. We will leave the negotiations until the end of the season.”
As a university, Pitt is in an interesting position in the changing world of college athletics. Although the school is located in a population center within a football state (Pittsburgh has a metropolitan area of about 2.5 million residents), the school is not often mentioned among ACC heavyweights like Clemson, Florida State and Miami. The program’s rich history – it ranks in the top 20 of all time in wins – is forgotten by some, lost to the sands of time.
Pitt was a regular national championship contender in the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s and has reached only two major bowl games in the past four decades. And yet, in his tenth season, Narduzzi is on his way to taking the program to heights it hasn’t seen in years. The Panthers are on their way to a third nine-win or better season in the last four years for the first time since the early 1980s.
As college sports moves closer to the era of revenue sharing for athletes, the school is bracing for its impact by making significant changes. Pitt Chancellor Joan Gabel, who arrived last summer, recently hired Allen Greene as the new athletics director, who brings experience at SEC football brands like Auburn, Ole Miss and Tennessee.
Bickell has staffed the collective, Alliance 412, as an entity to thrive in a future revenue-sharing world, and he expects to continue operating. The collective has an annual budget of approximately $6 million. He has hired a talent evaluator, former Buffalo Bills general manager Doug Whaley, and an experienced fundraiser, John Pelusi, with deep and strategic business ties.
“Believe me,” Bickell said, “what we’re doing at Pitt, we’re going to compete nationally in revenue sharing. I have been to those meetings.”
Despite the growing financial gap between the SEC and the Big Ten and everyone else, Narduzzi is confident Pitt can win its first national title since 1976. It can be done here, he says.
“There is more equality than ever before,” he adds.
“We operate Pitt football and basketball as a business,” Bickell said. “We see ourselves in a unique market. We are not a large market team. We’re sandwiched between Penn State and Ohio. But we are in a huge, amazing city. This is the revival of Pittsburgh.”
