How Pitt Plans to Contain Louisville QB Malik Cunningham
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PITTSBURGH -- With their first game back from the bye, the Pitt Panthers have been handed a tall task in the talented, but underperforming Louisville Cardinals.
The Cardinals boast a strong defense but their best player and catalyst is the quarterback, Malik Cunningham. The Panthers have seen a lot of players like Cunningham but that won't make facing him any easier.
"Mobile quarterback" is the new "RPO" - a football buzzword with high usage but no clear definition. There are levels to the description but it's the sign of a game that is demanding speed and versatility more and more often. It's almost an "I know it when I see it" type of quality, but you can see it plain as day in Cunningham, who Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi says is as confident as ever.
"I think he just has a great knack for making you miss," defensive coordinator Randy Bates said. "He's explosive, he's fast and he's got great change of direction so you can't sit there and hope you're going to tackle him. You got to go make that tackle."
A quarterback like Cunningham is dangerous not because of his legs alone, but because of the varied threats they pose to a defense. When he takes the field this week, his ability to burn the Pitt defense comes from both his arms and his legs.
Narduzzi has made this point but about his own offense. There's a reason "establishing the run" is a worn-out cliche and "establishing the pass" is not. Except for a few elite passing offenses, running well is required to open everything up. Cunningham, while he's been somewhat underwhelming as a passer so far this season, makes room for easy throws simply by existing in the pocket - as long as the threat of a scramble exists, defenses have to account for it.
To limit that, Pitt will have to trust the back end of its defense to make tackles in space so they can stop the run, something it struggled to do against the last opponent of a similar skill set, Georgia Tech's Jeff Sims. Historically, there's a correlation between the Panthers' ability to stop these players as throwers first.
Since Bates took over as defensive coordinator in 2018, Pitt's played roughly 14 games against bonafide mobile quarterbacks (Mackenzie Milton, Erick Dungey, D.J. Uiagaleiei, Sam Hartman, Jordan Travis, Malik Cunningham, Bryce Perkins, Hendon Hooker and Jeff Sims were counted for this exercise) and owns a 10-5 record against them.
The common denominator when Pitt has lost (2018 vs. Milton's UCF, 2019 to both Perkins' Virginia and Hooker's Virginia Tech, and 2022 again to Hooker as a Tennessee Volunteer and Jeff Sims' Georgia Tech) has been an inability to defend the pass first.
Those three didn't burn Pitt by running the ball - 87 total attempts for 230 yards (2.64 per carry) and three touchdowns combined across five games. The ripple effect that comes from the attention their running ability is felt in the passing game as they averaged 217.8 yards, 2.2 touchdowns and zero interceptions while completing 58% of their throws.
Narduzzi thinks those struggles have caused Pitt to overcorrect at times. He said that against Sims three weeks ago, the Panthers were too focused on his passing ability.
"We showed a weakness with Jeff Sims when he dropped back to throw and we lost concentration for whatever reason and he's going, he's running," Narduzzi said. "That's where we've gotten hurt."
To that end, the Panthers have put an emphasis on tackling this week. Cunningham's running ability gives the Cardinals an extra blocker on the many designed runs in their playbook, so Pitt will need to maximize the space their own run-stoppers can cover.
"They'll run some, you know, zone read where, you know, the tight end's hooking the end and the tailback is going to wrap up around, try to get up on your safety or your support player and it's a designed keeper, which is a tough play to defend," Narduzzi said.
That said, It's difficult to give the first-team defense a comparable look in practice. Scout team quarterback Eli Kosanovich is athletic, but not at the same level as Cunningham. That's why they're emphasizing angles over tackling technique. Narduzzi has told his players they'll need to calibrate for the added speed and make sure they meet Cunningham not where he is, but where he's going to be.
"We don't have a quarterback that looks like Jeff Sims or Malik Cunningham," Narduzzi said. "We just don't have a guy who can replicate that athletic ability so we talked a lot about angles. I told them 'Don't misjudge his speed.' If Eli Kosanovich is running out that way, don't run to where you're going to meet Eli. You've got to go like you're going to get Malik. ... You got to make those plays. It's a concern, obviously."
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