Coastal champ Pitt closes with Miami
The late season surge by No. 24 Pittsburgh (7-4, 6-1 ACC), punctuated by last week’s 34-13 beat-down of Wake Forest, has locked up a spot for the Panthers in this year’s ACC Championship Game.
In Pittsburgh’s regular season finale, they’ll face off against the Miami Hurricanes (6-5, 3-4 ACC).
Panthers head coach Pat Narduzzi said there wasn’t a specific point his team believed it could win the Coastal Division title in the ACC.
“We never lost faith. There’s going to be ups and downs. You can’t beat everybody. You can’t be perfect,” Narduzzi said. “I don’t think anybody lost faith in this room, and we kept them together, and that’s how you have success.”
While Pittsburgh has its date with Clemson for the ACC title locked up, Narduzzi said his team’s only task this week is beating Miami.
“We’re putting all our effort, I guarantee you, into this week, into this Miami Hurricane football team,” Narduzzi said. “If we aren’t focused, we’ll get smacked in the mouth real hard, and the next week won’t matter. …
“We’re not talking about it. It won’t be mentioned in here.”
Miami ended its four-game losing streak last week as it upended Virginia Tech 38-14.
Pitt is known as a run-first outfit, but sophomore Kenny Pickett is coming off his most productive game. Pickett, whose previous season high for passing yardage was 197 on Sep. 15 against Georgia Tech, tossed for 316 yards and a season-best three touchdowns with no interceptions against Wake Forest.
“I’ve always had faith in Kenny and what he could do with his arm and those receivers,” Narduzzi said.
“But that was last week, and two weeks ago we rushed for 500 yards … so what are we going to do this week? We need to have some consistency, so a 300 game, can we back-to-back that? Can we have another 300-yard rushing game? We need to do those things to have success, and you can’t be one-dimensional all the time.