Narduzzi building his legacy in Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH - As a train chugs along a few dozen yards from the south end of the Pitt Panthers’ practice complex, Pat Narduzzi’s engine kicks into overdrive.

His loud, barking voice encourages and critiques his players, just like always. His eyes dart back and forth, analyzing, scanning for anything out of sync, just like always. His frantic hands wave and point as if he's conducting an orchestra, just like always.

Narduzzi’s intensity and perfectionism haven’t changed one bit.

“Now, instead of just getting the defense revved up, you try to get the whole team,” Narduzzi said in his mile-a-minute manner. “You can affect the whole game instead of just one part. For me, it’s times three – it’s offense, defense and special teams. I don’t think it has to change.”

It’s a dream for a football junkie like Narduzzi. And the former Michigan State defensive coordinator lives it daily, surrounded by the game he grew up with and living his new life as the man in charge.

His title and responsibilities have changed.

But Narduzzi is doing things his way, the same way he did at MSU.

Narduzzi always said he needed the right fit to leave East Lansing for his first head coaching job, and he bypassed a number of opportunities as the Spartans’ recent run of success began to grow. He finally found it when the University of Pittsburgh came calling in December.

His perfect situation – at a school in a conference with an automatic berth in the College Football Playoff - without having to take a mid-major job first.

And Narduzzi’s 23rd-ranked Panthers are one 57-yard field goal at Iowa away from being perfect this year, sitting at 6-1 after winning Saturday at Syracuse. They are off to their best start since 2009 and have climbed into the Associated Press Top 25 for the first time since the 2010 preseason poll.

“I can’t say it’s been a challenge. The biggest challenge is winning on Saturdays,” Narduzzi said of adjusting to being a head coach.

“We were having so much fun up there – working with great people. Coach (Mark) Dantonio was the best. Everything was great. It was so fun to coach and play in that atmosphere in Spartan Stadium. Now, I’m able to do that on my own show and not have to be able to take a step backwards.”

Narduzzi was hired on Dec. 26, six days before he finished his MSU stay with the Spartans’ thrilling 42-41 Cotton Bowl victory over Baylor on New Year’s Day. He replaced Paul Chryst, who left for Wisconsin after just three seasons.

It immediately generated a buzz that has continued to build deep into October. Pitt hosts North Carolina on Thursday night, beginning a stretch in which the Panthers play four of their final five regular-season games at home. A spot in the ACC title game remains in front of the Panthers, should Narduzzi’s team keep winning.

They’re getting front-page headlines in the local daily newspapers. They’re pitching their program on social media and seeing a response to the hype in recruiting. They’re getting callers on sports radio airwaves that are typically filled with pro team talk.

Most importantly, they’re playing winning football.

“It’s been in neutral too often,” longtime Pitt radio broadcaster Bill Hillgrove said. “If this program wins, they’ll draw at Heinz Field. So far, it’s looking pretty good.”

Chryst didn’t leave the cupboard empty for Narduzzi. Tyler Boyd is a future NFL receiver. James Conner was an All-American and reigning Atlantic Coast Conference player of the year, but the junior running back got hurt early in the season and is done for the year.

Pitt has gone to seven straight bowl games and already is eligible for an eighth. But the Panthers had played .500 football the past four seasons. It’s been a revolving door of coaches since Walt Harris, a former MSU assistant in the 1970s, was forced out in 2004 after eight seasons.

Enter Narduzzi. He turned the Spartans into a ferocious bunch on defense that punished opponents. The hope is he will bring stability, as well as enthusiasm and success from MSU, to energize Pitt’s program. He’s been an immediate hit with his players, who have embraced his passion and attention to detail.

“More than anything, I just think everybody’s bought in, everybody believes in it,” defensive end Ejuan Price said. “There’s no locker room lawyers, nobody saying, ‘Well, I think I should be doing this or that’ like in the past. I just feel like everybody believes in it and, if we do what we’re supposed to do, good things are going to happen."

Narduzzi’s blue leather office chair points toward a picture window that looks northeast into the tree-lined, rolling hills of western Pennsylvania. He sits and stares directly into a football mecca. Every day.

On one of the well-manicured fields below his opulent office, the Pittsburgh Steelers are practicing a kicking game that’s betrayed them all season. The Panthers and Steelers share the UPMC Sports Performance Complex, about 2 miles and a 15-minute drive down the steep hills from Pitt's campus. It’s a rare opportunity for a college coach and his players to get a daily glimpse into the NFL grind.

Off in the distance, the rust-worn metal roof of an old steel mill peeks above the changing leaves. It’s an iconic view that forged so many kids’ dreams of chasing gridiron glory and escaping the hard labor their parents and grandparents endured.

Narduzzi is the foreman of this Pitt football renaissance. It’s the same role his most recent mentor, Dantonio, has played at MSU for the past nine seasons and three years before at Cincinnati.

And much like when he arrived with Dantonio at MSU in 2007, Narduzzi is attempting to resurrect a rusting giant, a program with championships and tradition in the quickly fading past.

Twice jilted by coaches in the past four years, Pitt alums and fans quickly embraced Narduzzi as one of their own – he grew up less than 70 miles away in Youngstown, Ohio, where his father, Bill, was Youngstown State's head coach from 1975-85 and recruited from the same talent-rich area of western Pennsylvania.

“People in Pittsburgh hold onto his past at Youngstown State and look at him as a local,” said Tom Paserba, a 1997 Pitt graduate who also attended MSU. “With every win, people are starting to love him more and more. His style of football matches the Steelers’ brand of smash-mouth defense with a blue collar offense. People around here love this type of football identity and respect it.”

Pitt became one of just 19 Football Bowl Subdivision programs to win 700 games when it beat Virginia on Oct. 10. It claims nine national titles, the most recent of which came in 1976 with Heisman Trophy winner Tony Dorsett. The names of the Panthers’ greats – Dorsett, Dan Marino, Mike Ditka, Darrelle Revis, Larry Fitzgerald, among others – are some of the best-recognized in football history, college and pro. Many of them are hometown legends.

The Steelers remain the darlings of this town, win or lose. Narduzzi, with his molten intensity and highly physical on-field product, provides an ideal pairing as the fall weekend undercard. He’s revived interest that has fluctuated since the early 1980s.

“Pitt fans have suffered much like Pittsburgh Pirates fans, through many years of losing seasons and a revolving door of coaches,” Paserba said. “People are re-finding their excitement in the program and team.”

Pittsburgh’s revival begins with its defense. It’s the blueprint MSU followed under Narduzzi’s direction to become part of the national elite.

The Spartans ranked in the top 10 in both total defense and rushing defense for four straight seasons (2011-14), the only program in the country to achieve that. That was a big reason Narduzzi turned into a hot coaching candidate.

Ben Mathers saw his growth along the way. The 27-year-old spent seven seasons at MSU next to Narduzzi in MSU’s coaching box, progressing from student assistant to graduate assistant and eventually leaving with Narduzzi in the winter to become Pitt’s director of football operations.

“He definitely changed from when he first started to now. But you could see the last few years at Michigan State that he had more of that head coach approach, more big-picture in terms of the overall planning of everything,” Mathers said. “Even though he was still just in charge of the defense, you could tell he was starting to take more note that, ‘These are the things I want to run my program based off of, and this is the structure I want.’”

The Panthers’ coming-out party was a stifling victory at Virginia Tech on Oct. 3. They allowed just 100 yards in total offense – only 9 yards rushing – and sacked the Hokies seven times. Pitt currently ranks 16th in the country in total defense and 33rd against the run. The Spartans are 19th nationally against the run and 37th in overall defense.

“He’s intense, and he drives hard,” said Josh Conklin, Pitt’s defensive coordinator charged with implementing Narduzzi’s vision. “He wants perfection. But I think the players and the staff knows all the time that he cares about you.

“He’s got a big persona and he’s been very, very successful. So obviously, you understand that he’s got a way of doing things and it’s worked. So you learn from it.”

Like his old boss at MSU, Narduzzi still finds himself gravitating toward a tough-nosed, improving defense that bears many of the fingerprints he left behind in East Lansing. He’ll drift that way during practice, helping to coach drills. He does the same on the sideline during games, lending his coaching and blending what he sees with Conklin’s instructions.

He also shows many of the traits he learned from Dantonio in transitioning from a coordinator to a head coach, giving Conklin the same latitude to run his defense that Dantonio – also a former defensive coordinator – gave Narduzzi with the Spartans.

“He’s calmer,” said defensive tackle Mark Scarpinato, who played for Narduzzi at MSU and left medical school to rejoin his former coach at Pitt. “When you’re the head guy, you gotta be calm. He knows when to get us fired up. As a defensive coordinator, you get to say things that you can’t say as a head coach.

“You still sometimes can see the glimpses of when he was a D-coordinator and he’s fired up, but then he catches himself and says, ‘All right, let’s go.’”

Taking the Pitt job meant Narduzzi would uproot his wife and children for the first time in eight years. He lived out of a hotel for the first few months. The rest of his family relocated from Haslett to the northern Pittsburgh suburb of Wexford in late May.

Son Patrick is now a 17-year-old junior on the North Allegheny High golf team and youngest daughter, Isabella, is a 13-year-old seventh grader who owns a Pitt jersey with her first name stitched on the back. Oldest daughter, 22-year-old Arianna, graduated from MSU in December and left a job in suburban Detroit to join them in Pittsburgh. Their other daughter, 20-year-old Christina, transferred to Pitt after three semesters at MSU. Both are Haslett High graduates.

“The biggest adjustment is changing schools and adjusting to everything,” Narduzzi said. “My daughter, the youngest, came home from school the other day, saying, ‘I miss my old house. I miss home.’ This is not home yet for them. That’s the biggest thing. Me, I’m here and having fun. It’s tough on them figuring out where to go to the store or what dance studio are we going to go to now.”

It’s much like his own early childhood.

Bill Narduzzi bounced around from college to college, including a short stay in Pittsburgh before Pat was born, before becoming YSU's head coach when Pat was an 8-year-old third grader. The elder Narduzzi turned the Penguins into a Division II power, leading them to the 1979 championship game and winning three national coach of the year awards in his tenure there.

Narduzzi’s father also spent time as YSU's athletic director in the early '80s, helping take the program into the newly created Division I-AA while also being a driving force in building Stambaugh Stadium, which has been the Penguins' football home since 1982. Pat served as a ballboy as a kid before eventually deciding to become a Penguin and play for his father.

That didn't last. Bill Narduzzi was fired in 1985, when Pat was a freshman linebacker. Pat transferred after that season to Rhode Island and played his final three years there. His father went to Columbia as an assistant coach for the next two years but died in early 1988 from cancer.

Narduzzi earned his first head coaching victory against Youngstown State on Sept. 5. He’s 49, the same age as his father was in his last year as a head coach with the Penguins. Bill remains Pat’s biggest mentor.

“I think a lot of my philosophy, in terms attitude and toughness and work ethic, really comes from him,” Narduzzi said. “And fundamentals. All that stuff is what I grew up with. It’s not something I got at Michigan State.”

After transferring, Pat met his wife, Donna, in a psychology class. She’s from Rhode Island. They’ve been together since, and she’s adapted to the nomadic coaching lifestyle in which her husband grew up. That included three years at Miami (Ohio), seven years at Rhode Island, three at Northern Illinois, another year at Miami and three years at Cincinnati with Dantonio before coming to East Lansing.

Their eight-year stay at MSU was the family’s longest in one place, which made moving on difficult at first.

“We’re so appreciative of that. That doesn’t happen all the time,” Donna said. “We know that things worked out the way they’re supposed to. But it was a great time we had (in Michigan). We knew it would come eventually. You kind of expect it almost in this profession.”

With every job rumor and interview, Donna said, Pat and the family discussed the pros and cons of how it would affect all of them. He turned down a chance to take the top job at Connecticut in late 2013 while the Spartans were preparing for the Rose Bowl.

The decision to move to Pittsburgh was a shared choice, Donna said. And a move of both faith and fate.

“He’d even ask me. I said, ‘If you have to ask me, you must be questioning it inside. There must be something inside telling you that it’s not the right time yet,’” Donna said of other offers. “I think that’d been the case a few times over the past several years. … I knew in my heart, too, it was probably not the answer. I don’t know, it probably sounds philosophical and deep. We like to go with our gut a lot, too. In our guts, that’s where we realized, ‘OK, it’s not the right time yet.’

“This was why. Because Pitt was coming."

College football can be a tough sell in an NFL-centric city, even one as steeped in the sport as Pittsburgh. The NHL’s Penguins have become the second draw in the city over the past two decades, but the Pirates’ resurrection the past few years has also revived interest in baseball. The Panthers have to fight for the No. 4 billing with Penn State, which is three hours away.

They aren’t yet the Steel Curtain Steelers of the 1970s, but Narduzzi and the Panthers’ defensive performances have catapulted it back into the city’s sports conversation, even with the Pirates making the playoffs, the Steelers’ season underway and the Penguins just getting started.

Narduzzi got plenty of experience with that sort of battle for eyeballs when he was defensive coordinator for Dantonio at Cincinnati from 2004 to ’06.

“There’s advantages and there’s disadvantages,” said Dantonio, who would visit Bengals practices with Narduzzi then to glean new techniques and strategy. “You’re in a metropolitan area, so there’s some advantages in that. But there’s some disadvantages in that the Steelers – I don’t want to say they’re the talk of the town, but the Steelers are the talk of the country sometimes. It’s just like the Bengals were. I understand that.”

Narduzzi said he and Dantonio have talked from time to time this season. He watches the Spartans when he can, and Dantonio is keeping an eye on Pitt. The two talked after MSU defeated Michigan and the Panthers beat Georgia Tech, big wins for both programs.

And all Narduzzi has to do now to get pro tips is to look out his window. He watches Steelers coach Mike Tomlin, with whom Narduzzi developed a relationship while Tomlin was scouting MSU players such as Le’Veon Bell, Darqueze Dennard and Trae Waynes the past few years. Bell is in his third season as the Steelers’ top running back, and Narduzzi coached at Miami (Ohio) during Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger’s final season. To Narduzzi, sharing a training facility and a home stadium with the Steelers are significant recruiting tools.

To add to it, he got Pitt to invest $4 million in its half of the building, patterning much of the renovation after what MSU did at the Duffy Daugherty Football Building – adding risers and leather theater-style seating to the team meeting room that once had classroom chairs, getting new lockers and LED lighting to spice up the locker room and creating a player lounge with a Pitt pool table and video games, as well as a big wall of TVs. Signs with inspirational quotes and team goals are all over.

Without an athletic director at the time, Narduzzi had more responsibility in overseeing those renovations, on top of doing media interviews, a weekly radio show and many things beyond the football field. When Narduzzi was at MSU, Dantonio handled those things.

Now, he’s the boss, learning those ancillary duties on the fly.

“You’re going from a defensive meeting saying, ‘I gotta get out of here to meet with the architects and the engineers,’ just to find out what’s going on in here,” Narduzzi said. “Finding out what they want and saying, ‘That’s not what I want, I want it to look like this,’ and picking pictures to put up. That’s the hardest part, trying to coach football and do all of that.”

The Oct. 10 game against Virginia was homecoming for the Panthers. It’s different at Pitt than for most college programs.

Heinz Field, which doubles as the Steelers’ home stadium, is 4.5 miles away from campus. Students take school buses from the Oakland neighborhood to the north shore of the Three Rivers to join the tailgating masses in the black-topped parking lots. A few industrious fans docked their boats along the bank of the Ohio River, their script Pitt flag fluttering high above as the fountain at Point State Park splashed a few hundred yards behind them at the Golden Triangle.

That week, Narduzzi welcomed some of Pitt’s students to his team’s practice. His message: Get loud, affect the outcome. During the fourth quarter, they abided. The student section disrupted the Cavaliers in the fourth quarter after a Pitt fumble near the north goal line. Chants of “Let’s Go Pitt” and other less intelligible screams forced Virginia to call a timeout.

Seconds later, linebacker Mike Caprara dashed through the line and sacked Virginia quarterback Matt Johns in the end zone. Fans erupted. The Panthers did the safety dance while Narduzzi jumped up and down on the sideline.

The Panthers held on late to win, 26-19. Narduzzi summoned the crowd of 45,237 as the final seconds evaporated, waving his arms up and down to incite one final roar.

“It’s just the entire culture, and it starts with coach Narduzzi,” junior linebacker Matt Galambos said afterward. “All of his energy trickles down to us, whether it’s before the game, during the game or after the game. … He said, for us, if the fans see all of us energized and having fun, it trickles over to them. It kind of all works together.”

Five of the Panthers’ six wins have been by single digits, including two in a row on late fourth-quarter field goals. Narduzzi is a midseason candidate for the Paul “Bear” Bryant Coach of the Year Award. So is Dantonio.

“When you start winning close, that's a sign of a good football team, and you build confidence like that. You really do,” Dantonio said of Narduzzi’s debut season. “You start to feel like, ‘Hey, we can make plays down the stretch. There's pressure on us, and we can make plays.’”

And November is when the Panthers say they want to be playing their best, the same mantra Dantonio has used with the Spartans over the years. Galambos said Narduzzi also has carried another of Dantonio’s favorite phrases with him.

With his own variation, of course. Minus the lions. At Pitt, they belong to the other, unmentionable team in the state.

“Yeah, yeah,” Galambos said, “now it’s, ‘Let the panther out of the cage.’”

Just like before. Only different.

Click below to hear Chris Solari discuss his week with the Pitt program and share behind-the-scenes stories and tidbits:

{Scroll down to read more after the audio clip}

It’s no secret that Pat Narduzzi most likely will be a candidate to replace Mark Dantonio whenever he steps aside at Michigan State. Pitt fans already expressed their concern when Steve Spurrier retired earlier this month at South Carolina, fearing that Narduzzi would return to East Lansing if Dantonio were to leave for his alma mater.

Dantonio has a number of current coaches who could also eventually assume that mantle. Here is an alphabetical look at some outside the program who might join Narduzzi as a potential candidate, whenever that time comes.

1. Chuck Bullough: Defensive coordinator at Syracuse, program alum (linebacker 1988-91), son of former player/assistant coach Hank Bullough

2. Dan Enos: Offensive coordinator at Arkansas, program alum (quarterback 1987-90), former assistant under John L. Smith and Dantonio (2006-09)

3. Josh McDaniels: NFL offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach with New England Patriots, grad assistant under Nick Saban at MSU (1999)

4. Jim McElwain: Head coach at Florida, former associate head coach at MSU under Smith (2003-05)

5. Pat Shurmur: NFL offensive coordinator with Philadelphia Eagles, program alum (offensive lineman 1983-87), former assistant under George Perles and Saban (1990-97)

Pat Narduzzi said filling out his coaching staff was one of the toughest parts of taking the head coaching job at Pitt. He mentally crafted a list throughout his time as an assistant coach, then had to whittle it and hire the right pieces to fit his system.

It came down to a lesson he learned when Mark Dantonio hired him at Cincinnati.

“Dantonio didn’t know me very well when he hired me. He knew who I was, I knew who he was. That’s it. We’d never worked together,” Narduzzi said. “That was something that always stood in my mind – get the best guy for the job, don’t just get a friend. It wasn’t just about hiring friends, it was about business and hiring the right people. Get good people first and then great coaches.”

It just so happened a number of those on his Pitt staff have ties to MSU.

* Renaldo Hill, cornerbacks coach: Played at MSU from 1998 to 2000, graduated in 2012 after a 10-year NFL career.

* Rob Harley, linebackers coach: Served as a graduate assistant with the Spartans in 2012 and ’13.

* Ben Mathers, director of football operations: Spent seven seasons alongside Narduzzi as a student assistant, operations assistant and graduate assistant from 2008 to ’11.

* Landan Salem, assistant director of player development: Graduate assistant in 2014.

* Tim Salem, tight ends coach: Landan’s father and brother of MSU quarterbacks coach Brad Salem.