Pitt coach Pat Narduzzi talks with reporters after the Panthers defeated UVA, 45-31, on Saturday.
On the game overall: “Obviously it is a great road win, and long overdue. I challenged our guys to be road warriors, and to come here and finish the game off on the road against a good football team that has a lot of skill and is well coached. I am very proud of them.”
On what they did differently defensively in the second half: “The difference is we played with fundamentals. In the first half, one example is with Terrish Webb. He almost gets an interception on the same kind of ball that he gave up a big pass on. So you start to get a little focused on ‘Me, Me, Me’ instead of ‘We, We, We’ thinking that you are going to go get that next one, and you start to get a little greedy. The defender slowed down a little bit, so he thinks the ball was coming in and he just misjudged it. Just do your job. That was one thing we talked about at halftime. When you are trying to play good defense, you need to pay attention to details. Terrish is young so things like that are going to happen, but you take that away and we were pretty happy with the entire effort of our defense.”
On the magnitude of the interception before halftime: “It was gigantic. We have been waiting for one of those picks in that coverage, and we finally got one. We kind of baited him [Benkert] in there. To get it before the half was huge. It was a tremendous football play by him, and then he finds a way to get into the end zone, not just get the interception. We scored on a kickoff return for a touchdown, scored on defense and scored on offense. When you score with all three phases, you have got to be happy with that.”
On what it means that his team persevered through injuries: “It says a lot. You have to live and learn from your mistakes that you’ve made in the past. I think we really paid attention to details in the second half in all phases and finished off the game. It’s impressive.”
On the feeling in the locker room at halftime: “We knew we just needed to keep peddling uphill. We had some good plays in there. I think we scored on two out of our four series in the first half. We just needed to stay patient with it. Every week someone tries to do something a little different that we haven’t seen before to stop our running game, but we took what they gave us, and made some great drives in the second half.”
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