Pat Narduzzi had the right idea. He just got it a little backward.

No coach wants to see any bulletin-board material emanating from his own side before a big game against a rival. The Pittsburgh coach is obviously so concerned.

That’s natural. It’s fine. He rightly is a little cautious about comments being spoken or posted from the Panthers’ side that might ignite Penn State during the lead-up week to the schools’ final game for the foreseeable future.

So, on Monday at his scheduled press conference, he let it be known that the Panthers will not be available for any interviews this week. Big game. Important. Gotta keep focus. Or something:

“I wanna keep things tight this week again. It’s just kinda what we do when there’s a big opportunity. If you got questions for me, I’ll talk on Tuesday, I’ll talk on Wednesday, I’ll talk every day if you wanna talk.”

See, here’s where Narduzzi is expanding rather than limiting the chance of somebody saying something stupid that might roust the opposition. Because I don’t think the Pitt players are the high-risk sector of the Pitt program.

If Pat Narduzzi really wants to limit the possibility of inflammable comments, he should gag Pat Narduzzi.

He should’ve said: “Hey, see ya Saturday after the game. I’m out for the rest of the week. My players can handle themselves tomorrow. Me? Ha! Well, you know me. I just think this is the best way to handle myself.”

Now, that, I would understand.

I don’t mind one way or another if players talk before games. But then, I’m not a beat person. They have to depend on that sort of day-to-day content from a program while columnists don’t.

Either way, it’s no skin off my back if I can’t talk to Pitt football players this week. I don’t mind.

So, when Narduzzi said this on Monday, I was fine with it:

“I just wanna keep it tight with our kids and let them focus on what they need to focus on. We’ll all be happy in this group when there’s a lot of focus on Saturday. And that’s what I want.”

There is some hilarity, though, in Narduzzi annually getting all worked up – the past three seasons and this one – over a game that simply isn’t of the import that it used to be and probably never will be again. This is the third time in four years he’s instituted a needless gag order on Pitt players who seem to handle themselves in public quite well, guided as they are by a peerless communicator in Pitt associate athletic director E.J. Borghetti.

But, if Narduzzi wants his guys “locked in,” as he likes to say, maybe he shouldn’t get into little quibbling quote battles with James Franklin as he’s done in the past.

The Penn State coach is famous at this point for playing Narduzzi like a Stradivarius. There really are minimal in-state recruiting consequences as there used to be 40 years ago when both programs were top-10 and the rivalry was scalding hot and so many great high school players came from western PA. So, Franklin rightly insists that this onetime in-state grudge match is pretty much just like any other non-con game to him, because it’s equal in impact to Idaho or Buffalo.

This, of course, insinuates that, to Penn State, it matters not in the grand scheme if Pitt happens to win this game on occasion – because recruits and fans and media will always consider Penn State the superior national brand.

Which so obviously drives Narduzzi nuts. To the point that he finally boiled over just a little last season and blustered:

“If anybody wants to argue and say this is no different than any other week — it is. That’s a fact. If you wanna ignore that, ignore it. But it’s a big game.”

To which, Franklin responded with the same casual tone and comments he uses every week, suggesting in so many words: Yeah, well, not to us. But fine, you go ahead and believe that if it makes you feel better.

And then, in the steady rain at Heinz Field, the Panthers played as if they’d been holed up in somebody’s basement with military marches playing nonstop until finally being released Saturday morning. You know the result: Penn State 51, Pittsburgh 6.

Joe Paterno used to occasionally pull this trick before “big games” in the Big Ten with not a lot better results. It was usually before a conference matchup with Michigan or Ohio State that players were gagged. PSU’s win-loss during the Big Ten era against those schools under his regime: 12-22.

Does anyone honestly believe college athletes play better because their coaches treat them like little kids? Because they aren’t trusted to act as adults? Does anyone think this anal-retentive behavior resonates with college students who grew up in an age of unlimited public expression?

What do you imagine college athletes think when they are silenced for a week? Sure, many are happy to be freed from the obligation of having to construct careful answers to sometimes dopey questions from a lot of middle-aged geeks with whom they have very little in common.

But on a deeper level, I’d bet a lot of players come to an unavoidable conclusion about their coach: We’re big boys. Doesn’t he trust us?

The same is true of walling off any other platform, including social media. Look, I don’t enjoy the trend of nonstop personal branding where every single experience somehow must be documented for all to see. I think it’s stupid and further, probably damaging to our spirits.

But online social networks are real. Their emergence has created a world within which our current young adults have grown up. Nobody is changing that. Kids can’t be cordoned off from it.

They must learn to live civilized lives within it. To function within such a world, not because they’re restrained from entering it but because it’s the right way to live within or without it – humbly, not boastfully; with poise, not ostentatiousness; comfortable in one’s skin, not constantly fighting one’s own impulses.

From a wider viewpoint: Is gagging college students how you teach them to be adults? By sheltering them from any risk? It’s the football coach’s equivalent of helicopter parenting.

Wanna teach them how to operate in the real world? Treat them like adults living in it. Give them guidance and direction the best you can. Then allow them to venture out and experience it. Maybe they’ll screw up. Maybe they’ll say things they shouldn’t. Maybe they’ll have to pay for those comments with a rough afternoon.

Then, you bring them back in the house, under shelter, and calmly say: “See? That’s what can happen.” And then you toss them back out into the world and let them try again.

That’s how you experience. That’s how you learn. By messing up, making mistakes, dealing with the consequences and learning from them.

So, if Pat Narduzzi and his Panthers win on Saturday afternoon at Beaver Stadium, good for them. It’ll probably mean they were the better team.

But it won’t mean they focused better because they “kept it tight.”

Loose and free and easy is the way to play kids’ games. That’s the way they’re played best. Even by adults.