Tim Benz: Attempts to rebound result in very different outcomes for Pitt, Penn State

Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi told a whopper of a lie during the opening comments of Saturday’s postgame press conference following the Panthers’ 48-7 drubbing of Boston College.

“It was not my intention to mislead you guys as far as the quarterback goes, but I did what I felt like was the best thing for our football team,” Narduzzi said. “My job is to protect our team. My job is to protect our kids and give us the best chance to win, and that’s what I did. So it was not to mislead you, but I wanted to eliminate distractions during the week. Didn’t need that. We needed to focus on what we needed to do. I think we accomplished that. … Questions?”

Yeah. I’ve got a question, Pat. How did you just say that with a straight face?

Of course your intent was to mislead the media about who the starting quarterback was going to be. You just admitted it while trying justify it and explain it away.

You wanted to minimize the distraction of a quarterback change, so you spent all week pretending like one wasn’t going to happen. That’s why on Monday you said that Eli Holstein was still the starter going into the week, and why on Thursday you were talking about how long his “leash” was, and how well he had bounced back from losses to West Virginia and Louisville in practice.

Then, Mason Heintschel got the start against B.C., completing 30 of 41 passes with four touchdowns and 323 yards through the air en route to a victory.

So, whatever media misdirection end-arounds Narduzzi was trying to run ended up working out. And that’s fine. I’m not offended by it.

Just don’t try to tell me I’m smelling the flowers when in reality I’m waist high in your own fertilizer, coach Duzz.

To whatever degree Narduzzi wants to celebrate keeping a lid on his quarterback change in advance of kickoff against the Eagles on Saturday at Acrisure Stadium is a secondary story anyway. The bigger deal is that Heintschel’s performance stopped the bleeding on the 2025 season and gave Pitt fans hope the rest of the way.

Well, until Heintschel’s first bad game, anyway. Maybe that won’t come until 2026. Or maybe it’ll be this Saturday in Tallahassee against Florida State. Who knows.

But at least for the time being, Panthers fans have a reason to think that fortunes could change for the team after they appeared to be stalled out with Holstein under center.

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Meanwhile, exactly the opposite effect is taking place in State College. While Pitt bounced back from the doldrums of two straight losses via blown leads, Penn State has gone from bad to worse.

Losing to sixth-ranked Oregon two weeks ago is one thing. That type of loss is nothing new. That’s a James Franklin special. He has a 4-21 record against AP Top 10 opponents.

But to respond by falling at 0-4 UCLA just a week later was … well … what did we just say about being waist deep in fertilizer?

“We lost some players during that game, and then everything else. Travel, everything else,” Franklin said via postgame quotes from the Associated Press. “Did not come out with the right energy to start the game. Before you know it, they got a touchdown drive and an onside kick.”

Stop, James. Just … stop. You don’t get to make excuses about travel and a sluggish start when the team on the other sideline had two days to learn its game plan after changing offensive coordinators in the wake of firing its head coach the previous week.

And did I mention the Bruins were 0-4? Your team was ranked seventh-best in the country. In fact, according to ESPN’s Field Yates, UCLA became just the fifth team to be 0-4 or worse and beat a Top 10 team. It hasn’t happened since 0-6 UTEP shocked No. 7 BYU, 23-13, in 1985.

Franklin’s record at Penn State is 104-44. As bad of a loss as that was, when a coach is 60 games above .500, they are normally allowed to stub their toe on the occasional “how the heck did that happen” upset.

Franklin isn’t. When your record is so dramatically bad in the 50-50 games, you simply are never allowed to lose in the games you are supposed to win 100% of the time. Ninety-nine percent isn’t good enough.

Not when you are facing an opponent that just got its game plan installed 48 hours earlier and had previously lost by 25 points at home to New Mexico.

That’s why you can’t Google James Franklin’s name this morning without the words “buyout” showing up in every article that pops up in your search.  

At the start of the season, it was estimated to be at roughly $56 million, in case you were wondering.

For years, Franklin could offset his team’s annual failures against top-notch competition by way of how the Nittany Lions handled their business the other 10 or 11 weeks out of the year. This humiliating loss in Pasadena changes that narrative.

“Obviously, we didn’t handle last week’s loss well,” Franklin said.

Gee, Coach, ya think?

At 3-2, Penn State is out of the Top 25 for the first time since September 2022, and you’d think the sky is falling above Beaver Stadium. At 3-2, Pitt just beat a 1-4 Boston College team, and there is a renewed enthusiasm around the program.

That just goes to show the massive gap of expectation between the two schools and the fickle definition of what “success” is in the weird landscape of college football.

For a week, though, Narduzzi can puff out his chest over how things went in bouncing back from difficult circumstances, and Franklin has to keep his head down until he has another chance at significant redemption, which won’t really come until Nov. 1 at Ohio State.

We’ll see how that goes for him when his Lions will no doubt enter the game as massive underdogs.

And we’ll see how it goes for Narduzzi this weekend when Florida State knows what’s coming at quarterback.

Unless Coach Duzz accidentally misleads anyone again this week.