David Green Says Pitt Must Forget to Move Forward
PITTSBURGH -- The Pitt Panthers are mired in a miserable 1-2 start and staring down a difficult path back to a .500 record with No. 17 North Carolina coming to town to open ACC play this weekend.
But as the Panthers begin to think about mounting a comeback from their lackluster start to the season, no one is panicking, least of all super senior defensive tackle David Green, who encouraged his team to simply wipe away last week's loss to West Virginia.
“I really said that we got to leave it behind us now," Green said. "Because we have a 24-hour grace period to get all that out. We really got to just leave that behind. All our goals are still in front of us and now we’re into ACC play so we just got to start fresh now and keep battling every day.”
Head coach Pat Narduzzi echoed a similar sentiment earlier in the week, encouraging his players not to fixate on what went wrong down in Morgantown, West Virginia last week and refocus on honing their fundamentals.
"Believe in the system and stick to your fundamentals and what we do as a program," he said when talking about the keys to improving as the season wears on. "You don't change and go, well, we've got to stop doing that. You don't bail and change a defense when the defense is not going good. You stick with what you do, and it will get better. That's what you do."
Green has been at Pitt since 2018, when the Panthers were decimated by a pair of top-15 teams in Penn State and UCF by a combined score of 96-20 before ripping off a 6-2 conference record, climbing into the top-25 and clinching an ACC Championship Game berth.
After he had worked his way up the depth chart, Green was a part of the 2021 team that rallied after a brutal early-season loss to Western Michigan and rose to become ACC Champions and a participant in a New Year's Six Bowl game.
In other words, this is not Green's first time trying to engineer a mid-season turnaround. The Pitt teams he's played on have done it well and they'll have to replicate their skills for recovery to get back on track.
"This is a sport where you go through a lot of adversity, so you just got to continue to keep your head down and keep working," Green said. "No matter the ups, downs, no matter what it is, you got to stay committed to getting better every day.”
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