Pat Narduzzi went to ACC Media Days on Friday and decided to swing at the Big Ten. Penn State fans, who already had plenty of reasons to dislike the Pitt coach, got another one.
Speaking with 680 The Fan, the Atlanta sports radio station, Narduzzi didn’t leave much room for interpretation.
“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.
"This conference is better. It's better than the Big Ten." @JohnMichaelsU @Pitt_FB pic.twitter.com/B6CHlgRcv2
- 680 The Fan (@680TheFan) July 17, 2026
It’s a bold claim for a coach in a league that nearly got shut out of the College Football Playoff last season after 8-5 Duke won the conference. 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.
Indiana became the third straight national champion in college football to come out of the Big Ten. The league placed three teams in the CFP field, and all three were top-five seeds. The ACC’s last champion was Clemson in 2018.
If that doesn’t settle the argument, Penn State’s attitude toward Pitt might.
Penn State hasn’t played Pitt since its 2019 17-10 win at Beaver Stadium, part of a four-year return for the rivalry. Even so, the Nittany Lions have not exactly been aching to bring it back.
That’s not hard to understand. Penn State has spent years trying to manufacture a rivalry with Ohio State, and after the Block Six in 2016, it briefly had some real bite.
But Ohio State’s biggest rival will always be to the north, not the east. Penn State doesn’t really have a true Big Ten rival, and still it sees no need to make Pitt - the team it has played more than any other in its history, a clean 100 times - a regular part of the schedule.
Pitt’s recent history doesn’t exactly make the case for urgency, either. The Panthers did break through in 2021 with Kenny Pickett, winning 11 games and the ACC title. But that was only their second double-digit win season since the three-year run from 1979-81.
That’s a long stretch without contending for much of anything meaningful. And with Penn State’s Big Ten schedule getting tougher, there’s little upside in taking on Pitt.
The Nittany Lions are expected to win every time. Their bigger concerns are in conference play.
Pitt, meanwhile, treats the matchup like its season depends on it. In 2016, that desperation produced Pitt’s lone win during the four-year rivalry renewal - and it was enough to keep Penn State out of the CFP.
That’s the math Penn State sees: beat Pitt, and the resume barely moves. Lose to Pitt, and everything gets wrecked. So the fact that Penn State can afford to treat its most-played opponent like an afterthought says plenty about Pitt, and plenty about the ACC too.
Outside of Miami, the league is full of big-name programs with history that haven’t consistently lived up to it. The ACC tried to answer the Big Ten’s expansion by adding Cal and Stanford and bringing SMU into the mix. That’s not the same as landing Oregon, UCLA, USC, and Washington.
Those schools are still humoring their in-state counterparts for now - Oregon State and Washington State - but the pattern is familiar. Eventually, they’ll move on, just as Penn State did. It may not be great for college football, but it’s what makes sense for them.
Maybe there was a time when Narduzzi had a point. When he first got to the ACC, Lamar Jackson was running wild and Trevor Lawrence was on the way at Clemson.
Maybe then the league had a better argument. That was also the period when Penn State was willing to play Pitt again.
Not anymore. And Narduzzi probably hasn’t been around the right competition lately to notice.
He hasn’t played a Big Ten opponent since losing 31-21 to Michigan State in the 2021 Peach Bowl. He hasn’t faced one in the regular season since 2019, and his last two bowl seasons ended with losses to Toledo and East Carolina.
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