Getty Image
The advent of the NIL Era sparked an arms race among college football teams who’ve come to the seemingly obvious conclusion spending more money puts you in a better position to win, but Pat Narduzzi has undermined that conventional wisdom based on the strategy he deployed to help Pitt turn things around.
It’s been 10 years since Pat Narduzzi replaced Paul Chryst as the head coach of the Pitt Panthers, and while he didn’t exactly transform them into a national powerhouse (nor was he expected to), he’s posted a winning record more often than not while leading the team to six bowl games.
It seemed like Pitt had turned a corner after following up an 11-3 campaign in 2021 (which included an ACC Championship) with a 9-4 showing in 2022, but things took a turn for the worst last season after they went 3-9 and 2-6 in conference play.
However, they’ve bounced back in a big way this year, as Pitt is currently sitting at 7-0 and ended up at #18 in the most recent AP Poll. There are a number of factors that have played into that drastic resurgence, and Narduzzi’s decision to harness a fairly unorthodox NIL strategy appears to be a big one.
The head coach recently chatted with Yahoo Sports about the soul-searching he did in the wake of the disastrous 2023 campaign.
His decision to clean house by firing four offensive coaches certainly appears to be a wise one, but he also credited the choice to reevaluate the approach to paying players who failed to produce the desired results while addressing some of the people who decided to take their talents elsewhere, saying, “They wanted more money. It made us better. We didn’t need those guys.”
The outlet also spoke with Chris Bickell, the Pitt booster who founded the school’s Alliance 412 NIL collective, who credited the decision to deploy the “carrot on a stick” strategy to give players more motivation to step their game up.
Narduzzi noted he was very blunt about the new approach to NIL payments in the wake of last season, adding:
“I sat down with guys and told them, ‘You’re not getting paid. I told them that the guy investing in you isn’t happy.
I said, ‘If you were an investor putting your money down and you win three games, what would you do?’ Kids said, ‘Coach, I wouldn’t give it.’ That’s what he’s doing. You’ve got to go earn it.”
Pitt has subsequently opted to dole out those funds at the end of the season to reward the players who’ve contributed to the turnaround, and other schools may want to end up taking a page out of the program’s book based on how things have gone so far.