Pitt HC Pat Narduzzi fires shot at Coach Prime: ‘I disagree with that whole process’

Immediately after taking the Colorado Buffaloes head coaching job, Coach Prime addressed the team and expressed his desire to rip the program down to the studs and rebuild from scratch.

The NCAA allows coaches, during their first year with the program, to remove as many players from his roster as he wishes, so long as they stay on scholarship. Building on the rebuild strategies that experienced tremendous success just last season, in the form of Sonny Dykes at TCU and Lincoln Riley at USC, Coach Prime has made sure to take full advantage of that NCAA rule.

That strategy has drawn plenty of criticism from around the college football landscape, most recently from Pat Narduzzi, the head coach of the Pittsburgh Panthers’ football program.

“I grew up in a profession that you can’t tell a guy that he has to leave based on athletic ability,” Narduzzi said via 247Sports, at the ACC’s spring meetings. “I think he’ll be shocked that he probably had some pretty good football players in that room. When I got to Pitt back in 2015, I didn’t kick anybody off. Zero. Those are your guys. When you become a head coach you inherit that team and you coach that team. If someone wants to leave, that’s great. You don’t kick them out. I disagree with that whole process. That’s not why I got in the game.”

One thing to consider is how different the scenarios are that Coach Narduzzi and Coach Prime both entered.

Narduzzi took over a 6-7 Pittsburgh program that had won at least five games every season for the past 17 years. Prime took over a Colorado program that was lucky to be 1-11, had won five games combined over the past two seasons, and was six seasons removed from their last campaign that tallied more than five wins.

Plus, when Narduzzi took the job with the Panthers, the NCAA didn’t allow coaches to overhaul their roster in this way.

These critiques of Coach Prime’s strategy will continue to pile up until we see the Buffs in action this September, but if it works out as well as it did for TCU and USC, it seems unlikely those critics hang around for too long.