Pitt's 7-1 record, No. 18 CFP ranking increase the urgency to win

Compared to other sports, college football seasons are short — 12 games and three months for a team to state its case amidst the pressure of often-unreasonable expectations.

For Pitt, they became great expectations after the Panthers started the season 7-0.

There is a school of thought, however, that the pressure might get turned down after Pitt gained a loss on its resume last week at SMU. But that probably won’t happen after the College Football Playoff committee saw fit to slot Pitt No. 18 — only six paces off the 12-team tournament that will decide a national champion.

Who knows what a couple of more victories will mean?

Pat Narduzzi gets it. He claims to have been unaware of Pitt’s ranking before a staff member told him about it after its release Tuesday night. Either way, he said, the pressure only gets more intense with Pitt venturing into the all-important month of November, starting Saturday against Virginia at Acrisure Stadium. Kickoff is 8 p.m. on the ACC Network.

“I can see both sides of it,” he said. “To me, there’s more pressure. There’s more urgency. We have to get it done.”

Asked if he had been part of a scenario where the pressure was lessened, he answered quickly and definitively.

“Never,” he said. “Every week it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. When you’re in November playing for something, it’s big.”

Looking at the past five Novembers and subsequent postseason weeks, Pitt is 17-7 in those games, including 10-1 in 2021 and 2022. The outlier was last year when the Panthers lost three of four.

Already with one loss this November, Pitt has four more opportunities to make amends. The trick for Narduzzi and his staff is to keep players focused on football matters, especially now that Pitt has achieved national relevancy.

“There are a lot of things going on in their heads,” he said. “There’s school. There’s girls. There’s whatever out there. There’s video games. There’s agents. There are all kinds of things going on in the world.”

Narduzzi has warned his players to pay no attention to the people on TV and social media who may be too liberal with their praise.

“I got my message (to the players) in here,” he said. “But what’s the message they’re getting on the outside? As (former Alabama coach Nick) Saban would say — I hate to use his phrase, but it’s about the best one out there — ‘rat poisoning.’

“You start to believe you’re good. You’re never as good as you think you are. You’re never as bad as you think you are.”

Narduzzi coaches by the directive of keeping your head down and only looking up when there are no more games to play.

You might think players are shielded from the outside world because of the recent increase in the number of students who take classes remotely. Enrollment statistics from 2022 showed that 26% of all college students took classes exclusively online; 54% had at least one online class, according to a survey by bestcolleges.com.

But Narduzzi is no fan of remote learning.

“They go to class a lot,” he said of his players. “As a matter of fact, we check class.”

While many schools have turned to remote learning, Narduzzi said that’s not the way he prefers it.

“That’s not learning at all, in my opinion. What kind of football team would we be if we taught football by Zoom? I go back to covid. That was some bad stuff. That was bad.”

He estimated 75% of the classes his players take are in-person.

“We want to keep in-person classes, education the way it’s supposed to be,” he said. “Everybody gets a little bit lazy since covid. It’s easy to sit in your kitchen at home and do a Zoom class. Get up and go to class.”