The Balancing Act of Changing the Pitt Spring Game

Prior to the Blue-Gold Game, Pitt Panthers head coach Pat Narduzzi was a guest on ACC PM, the afternoon show on the ACC Network.

There have been mixed emotions across the college football landscape regarding teams making various tweaks to their spring games, some scrapping the annual matchup altogether.

Coach Narduzzi weighed in on his approach to the spring finale in Pittsburgh in a segment available on YouTube. Of course, as a defense-oriented coach who wants contact by nature, the shift in the dynamic of the competition can be tricky.

“Yeah, it’s tough to manage and sometimes you bite your tongue and you worry about all those things, about getting someone hurt,” Narduzzi said post-game, available on YouTube. “It’s not about wearing them out. You have time to get them fresh for August camp. It’s about making sure you’re not going too much live."

“So, we get into our real scrimmages. Our spring game is not a real scrimmage. It’s a game. We’re going to go out there and we’re going to go hard thud. We’re not going on the ACC Network. If it was on the ACC Network, I would certainly go live and put on a show, and we’d save one of our hard scrimmages for that."

“Thud, if you’re an offensive lineman or a defensive lineman, there is no such thing as thud. Every snap is live. It’s really talking about the skill guys getting tackles, big collisions and gang tackling, that happens in three previous days that we got really, really good work in as a football team, and then we’re going to try to go thud, teach them how to keep each other safe.”

Following the spring game, Coach Narduzzi was asked about how the plan around partial contact played out.

“Again, it's a thud scrimmage. So, it's different than what I've seen,” Narduzzi said. “I think when you get into a spring game like that, our guys, they played smart today. We didn't go live. We didn't tackle anybody. I'm sure there'd been a lot more yards had we done that."

“It was a solid day. Again, the main thing is we came out healthy, because we couldn't afford any more injuries.”

During his segment on ACC PM, Narduzzi explained that although the lack of contact in the spring game draws concerns from some around readiness and development ahead of the 2025-26 season, the Pitt staff created plenty of contact over the previous 14 spring sessions to offset the loss of full-tackle football in the Blue-Gold Game.

“We had two day scrimmages at the stadium, and then we had one (at) night, what we called a situational practice,” Narduzzi said. “We did a lot of live drills there. So, it was about 70 percent live."

“I think a lot of people nowadays aren’t going live in scrimmages. They’re going thud. And we go live a lot. And that’s, to me, how you develop your football team. This is a tough football game. It’s a hard-nosed football game. It’s about contact."

“You have to tackle and you have to block. You’ve got to make somebody miss on offense. And that’s the only way you go that gives a live look.”

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