Morgantown and Pittsburgh are close enough that the weather doesn’t drastically change from one place to the other. We’ve had a beautiful week of weather here in Morgantown and it was pretty much the same up in the Steel City.
And yet, Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi held football practice inside every day this week.
Why?
“Extra careful, paranoid,” Narduzzi said during a press conference on Thursday. “You’ve got people in the hills, I mean they live in the hills, they’ve got binoculars.
“Mountaineers, man, they’re up there, in the mountains right there,” he said pointing out the window. “You’ve got to take nothing for granted.”
Narduzzi was kidding — I think — about being worried that mountain men were spying on the Panthers’ practices. It was a nifty bit of coach speak, not directly answering the question while still giving reporters something to run with.
I got a good laugh when I heard it for the first time and then I stopped to imagine what it would have been like if WVU coach Neal Brown gave such an answer in a press conference. WVU’s media staff very well might usher him out of the room and rush him over to Ruby Memorial Hospital for a psychological evaluation.
Brown and Narduzzi are pretty different, as far as head football coaches go. Other than just their backgrounds — Narduzzi came up as a defensive coach while Brown was an offensive guy — their demeanors, at least in press conferences, are totally different.
Brown is calm and collected, he gives measured, thoughtful answers to questions no matter what they are.
Veteran scribe Bob Hertzel asked Brown on Monday if he thought WVU fans could “take over” Acrisure Stadium on Saturday, playing off a popular jab the fan bases like to throw at one another about attendance.
If Brown had said yes or no it probably wouldn’t have made the national media, but it would certainly have gotten a good amount of play on social media this week. He went with an answer that wouldn’t make any waves.
“You’re opening up a can of worms,” Brown said with a chuckle. “There’ll be a West Virginia presence. What percentage, I have no idea.”
Narduzzi seems like the kind of guy whose brain out-paces his mouth. He talks fast and not always in complete sentences, as if his brain moves to the next thought faster than his mouth can get the words out.
He’s also not afraid of saying exactly what’s on his mind. Just in the past year, Narduzzi has publicly accused Colorado coach Deion Sanders of poaching Panthers players, thrown repeated jabs at Penn State for refusing to schedule Pitt and even referred to Pittsburgh as “Boo City” after Pitt fans voiced their displeasure about quarterback Phil Jurkovec last season.
Again, can you imagine Brown saying any of those things? I, for one, cannot.
This is not to say either coach is right or wrong in what they do, or that one way is better than the other. This is just to point out that there’s more than one way to coach a football team.
College football is full of characters, that’s part of what makes the sport fun. It’s also what makes rivalries fun. The Backyard Brawl has featured all sorts of characters throughout the years.
This will be the third Brawl for both Brown and Narduzzi. Time will tell if either one of them will etch their own name into the Backyard Brawl myths. Maybe even Narduzzi’s superspy mountain men could find their way into the history books.
