Serious question here, as I heard Madden on his show ripping Narduzzi a new one yesterday, saying he’s stopped going to games because of him, he’s made the program worse, is a jerk, if he and Narduzzi were at a bar more people would flock to Madden and it wouldn’t even be close, etc.
Are you all happy with him as coach? If I was a Pitt fan, I’d be lukewarm. Not thrilled. But at the same time, who better could you get and what good would hitting the reset button on the program yet again do?
I take everything Madden has recently said about Pitt football with a giant grain of salt because he's been mostly down on the program since Wannstedt was dismissed. While I think some of his criticism of Pitt under Narduzzi is valid, I think MM is off base on some other points - namely, that Pitt should have never gotten rid of Wannstedt and that Narduzzi has made the program worse.
As we get ready for Year Five, I think lukewarm is pretty accurate for me. Call it lukewarm but trending back upwards.
The last two seasons have really revealed some things that I DON'T like that he does. I hate that he closes off so much of the practices to the media because I think last spring/summer and so far this offseason, it has recently hurt the program's ability to build interest. When talking to the media, I think he needs to have more of a filter when it comes to certain things; he's taken some shots at coaches and even a player or two that are no longer with the program, and I think that comes off as petty.
As an on-field coach, some of his player deployment decisions were baffling. I didn't get the loyalty he had to a handful of veteran players last year, particularly on defense. I don't know what in the absolute hell he saw in Shawn Watson, and the decision to hire and keep him here for two seasons may have cost the team 4-5 wins between 2017-18. I saw enough that by the time the UNC game ended last year, had they fired Narduzzi I wouldn't have cared.
To that end, I've come back around a bit. Last year, he could have and other coaches may have very easily lost that team after the UNC & USF losses, but he didn't. The losses to Miami and Stanford were bad, but I think there's something to be said about the way that team played from the Syracuse game through the Wake Forest game, especially given the one-dimensional offense.
He corrected the Watson mistake and while any inanimate object would have been an upgrade, Whipple may be a huge help when it comes to balancing the offense because he seems to genuinely understand how to build a scheme around his players' strengths. The Beatty hire (WR coach) should be an upgrade from both a coaching and recruiting standpoint.
Can Pitt do better? Of course they can do better. Pitt will never be a blue-blood program, but it's a P5 program that has proven it can compete in and win a division in a conference where there is only one major roadblock. If Pitt needed to move on from Narduzzi, there's no reason why they could not be in the mix for the next Neal Brown, Matt Campbell or PJ Fleck, just the same way WVU, Iowa State and Minnesota were, respectively.
Ultimately, I want the team to succeed under Narduzzi not because Pitt can't do better, but because I think he genuinely wants to be at Pitt, to build something at Pitt and to sustain something at Pitt.