Penn State hasn’t played Pitt since its 2019 17-10 win at Beaver Stadium, part of a four-year return for the rivalry. However, in the seven years since, it hasn’t been hard for Penn State fans to keep their hate up for Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi.
If that vitriol has waned, however, Narduzzi made sure to ramp it back up on Friday at ACC Media Days, this time taking on the entire Big Ten.
“This conference is as good as any conference in the country,” Narduzzi said during an interview with 680 The Fan, an Atlanta sports radio station. “Coming from Michigan State, spent eight seasons there as a defensive coordinator, coming to Pitt in 2015. I said it then, I said it now,” Narduzzi continued, “this conference is better. It’s better than the Big Ten.”
Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi isn't backing down.
— 680 The Fan (@680TheFan) July 17, 2026
"This conference is better. It's better than the Big Ten." @JohnMichaelsU @Pitt_FB pic.twitter.com/B6CHlgRcv2
That’s a strong message from a coach in a league that nearly missed out on the College Football Playoff entirely last year after 8-5 Duke won the league. Of course, Miami, which has proven to be head and shoulders above the rest of the ACC, ran through Texas A&M, Ohio State, and Ole Miss in the CFP, then eventually fell to Indiana in the National Championship Game.
The Hoosiers became the third-straight national champion in college football to come out of the Big Ten, which put three teams in the CFP field, all top-five seeds. The ACC’s last champ was Clemson in 2018. But if that doesn’t convince you, Penn State’s indifference to its biggest rival should.
Penn State has no use for Pitt, and that’s a major indictment of the ACC
Penn State has attempted to build a rivalry with Ohio State, and coming off the Block Six in 2016, it had some real juice. However, Ohio State’s biggest rival will always be to the north, not the east. In a lot of ways, Penn State doesn’t have a true rival in the Big Ten, and still the program doesn’t feel the need to have Pitt, the team it has played more than any other in its history, a clean 100 times, as a regular fixture on its schedule.
Pitt bucked in 2021 with Kenny Pickett, winning 11 games, including the ACC title, but that was only its second season with double-digit wins since it won 11 games three years in a row from 1979-81.
That’s a long time without truly contending for anything substantial, and with Penn State’s schedule becoming more difficult in the Big Ten, there just isn’t any upside to playing Pitt. Penn State is expected to win the game every time and has much bigger fish to fry in conference play. Pitt plays like it’s the Super Bowl every time, and in 2016, that desperation led to Pitt’s lone win of the four-year rivalry renewal, and it was enough to keep Penn State out of the CFP.
A win over Pitt does nothing to build Penn State’s resume. A loss to Pitt destroys it. So, because of Pitt’s incompetence, a program without a true rival has no reason to play its biggest one. That isn’t just an indictment of Pitt; it’s an indictment of the ACC as a whole, because aside from Miami, the league is riddled with underachieving big-name programs with a storied history.
The ACC’s big move to counter the Big Ten’s expansion was to pick up the Pac-12’s scraps, adding Cal and Stanford, along with bringing SMU into the fold. That’s not quite the same as bringing in Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington.
It’s the same story for those big-time brands. For now, Oregon and Washington are humoring their in-state little brothers, Oregon State and Washington State, but as Penn State did, they’ll eventually move on. It’s not good for college football, but it’s in their best interest.
Maybe there was a moment when Narduzzi first entered the ACC, with Lamar Jackson running around and Trevor Lawrence about to take off for Clemson, that it was a better league. I’m willing to enter that. Not so coincidentally, that’s when Penn State was willing to play Pitt again. But not now. Now, it’s not even close.
The leagues aren't the same anymore, and Narduzzi probably doesn't know that because he hasn't played a Big Ten opponent since he lost 31-21 to Michigan State in the 2021 Peach Bowl. There have been none on his regular-season schedule since 2019, and he's spent his last two bowl seasons losing to Toledo and East Carolina.
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