August doesn’t leave much room for side quests in a college football coach’s world, but Pat Narduzzi found himself dealing with one anyway: a Pitt receiver, a river, and a bass that should have stayed a little more anonymous.
Tyreek Robinson, a redshirt sophomore from Shreveport, La., took his fishing rod down to the Monongahela River near Pitt’s South Side practice complex and came back with a 5- to 6-pound bass. He was proud enough to send a photo into the Panthers’ receivers group chat, and that was enough to send the story climbing straight to the top of the program.
Narduzzi didn’t love the details.
“What are you doing, man?” Narduzzi recalled telling him.
“Fish can’t be good out of the river. I mean, you can go buy some fish.
… There’s a fish market down the street right on campus. But he decided he wanted to go catch his own.”
Robinson said he didn’t think twice about the water itself.
“(The coaches) was like, ‘Where did you catch it?’” Robinson said.
“And I told them the river, and it was just like: ‘Don’t fish in that river. It’s bad.
It’s polluted.’
“I had no idea.”
For Robinson, fishing has been part of the routine for years. His father got him started young, using the pond beside their home in Shreveport as a classroom when he was 6.
The two even share a July 18 birthday, and they’ve marked it with fishing trips to Mississippi and Texas. On one of those trips, when Robinson was 14, he landed a personal-best 12-pound redfish.
That habit followed him to Pittsburgh. When he’s away from the football facility, Robinson said, “I’m really mostly fishing,”
The bass, though, never made it to the table. Robinson recently moved out of the dorms and said he never got the chance to cook it, so after holding onto it for a while, he eventually tossed it.
The rest of the summer fishing, however, fed a lot more than one story. Robinson went out with several Pitt defensive backs and came back with about 20 to 30 fish, enough to host them for the NBA Finals. He cleaned the catch, covered it in Louisiana Fish Fry and put it on the stove.
“They loved it,” Robinson said.
Narduzzi, meanwhile, has folded the whole thing into his broader view of Robinson. On a recruiting trip to Shreveport, he saw an S-10 Chevrolet in the family garage built for drag racing.
Robinson’s father drives it while Robinson films each run. Narduzzi also pointed to some of Robinson’s own driving, which was caught on video and led to a felony charge of fleeing from officers during a dirt bike-riding outing in June.
To Narduzzi, Robinson is a “country boy,” someone who is “as genuine as you can get.”
“He’s just a real kid that, you know, just gonna do what he wants to do or what he thought about doing back home,” Narduzzi said.
For his part, Robinson seems ready to avoid any more river-related headaches.
“I’m done eating river fish,” Robinson said.
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