By MARTY LEVINE

“You learn something from every coach, every leader,” Pitt head football coach Pat Narduzzi told the Feb. 15 Coffee and Conversation event held by Staff Council, and for him, it started with his dad.

Narduzzi spent his first year of college football playing defensive linebacker under his father, Bill Narduzzi, a very successful and celebrated coach at Youngstown State for 11 years. “You watch that” growing up, he said, “I wanted to be a college head coach like my dad.”

In his younger days, he often quizzed his father after work about everything happening with the team. But actually being a part of the team was “not easy,” he recalled. “He was harder on me than on anybody else on the team. I appreciated it — but not then.”

Today he remembers it as the “best year of my life. Everything I am today I got from him.”

Narduzzi opened the event — a public interview conducted by Staff Council’s Samantha Young — by noting: “It’s great to get over here. We’re over on the South Side,” at a practice facility shared with the Steelers, “sometimes secluded, so it’s great to be involved in this.”

He recalled the decision to come to Pitt as being “a no-brainer.” In fact, he said he turned down another head coaching offer in the days before Pitt hired him. It helped that the offer was from a Rocky Mountain state institution and he had promised his East Coast-born wife they’d never go further west than Illinois.

But when he was called in for the Pitt interview, Narduzzi had told his long-time mentor, former Michigan State head coach Mark Dantonio, under whom Narduzzi was defensive coordinator: “This is the one I want. This is the place you can win a championship. We’ve won them before and we’ll win them again.”

He recalled his first day on Pitt’s campus, near Christmas 2014, for an interview with then-Chancellor Patrick Gallagher: “The warmth of the Cathedral (of Learning) around Christmas time, that’s where it started. I felt comfortable with the chancellor …”

Today, you just might find him at another warm place, his favorite Pittsburgh restaurant — at least for Italian food — Sarafino’s, “a little hole in the wall” in Crafton.

Noting that two of his assistant coaches made the jump to the NFL in the past two weeks — one to the Patriots — he said he is at home with college football and has no wish to move to the pros. Here at Pitt, he said, he gets to be an influence on young lives and a mentor to other rising coaches. “I hope anybody who has worked with me has learned something,” he said.

Asked what edge Pitt has in recruiting, Narduzzi mentioned several areas that are “critical.” First was “the city of Pittsburgh and everything it offers,” especially to his football players practicing in the summer. In some smaller towns where the college is the main attraction, the place might be mostly empty of younger people and a social life during those months. “Pittsburgh in the summer for our students is not a ghost town,” he noted.

He feels his coaches and their relationship with the students also give Pitt an advantage: “It’s about caring for (students) through all facets of life. That’s why I think we have the fewest kids who jump into the portal” — college football’s “transfer portal” through which players can now more easily move to another team.

Another advantage is training in the Steelers facility, where Pitt players observe head coach Mike Tomlin and his players run through their own drills. “It’s a great deal, having that relation with Coach Tomlin and that whole organization there,” he said — an NFL/NCAA cooperation which he says happens “nowhere else in the country.”

Asked about the football team’s biggest challenges for 2024-25, given that last season was not Pitt’s best of recent years, Narduzzi believes “there’s a bunch of little things. There’s no big thing. Looking at the kids’ attitude right now … in team meetings they are locked in.”

What makes Pitt special to him? “It comes down to people,” he says, and it’s that way in every job, he has learned. “If I was not happy walking into my office every day, I would not be head coach at Pitt. ... Whatever we do, whatever your job is, you better have fun. You better have fun on the field. It’s the same in the (practice) building. All the coaches better have fun.”

As for the team’s prospects this fall: “With a 12-team playoffs, we’re going to have a chance to get there. If you become one of these teams in the playoffs, things will explode here in Pittsburgh.” Overall, he added: “We expect to be in the playoffs and win a national championship. That’s what we expect to do."

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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