August rarely affords a college football coach much idle time. With Pitt’s opener fewer than 20 days away, Pat Narduzzi has an offense to sharpen, position battles to settle, 100-plus bodies to keep healthy … and a wide receiver to keep out of the Monongahela River.

Pitt receiver Tyreek Robinson’s fishing habit might never have reached Narduzzi’s attention if the Monongahela hadn’t coughed up a 5- to 6-pound bass worth bragging about.

Robinson proudly sent a photo of his catch to the Panthers’ receivers group chat. What began as a fishing flex quickly traveled up Pitt’s chain of command and landed him in his head coach’s office.

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“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, a redshirt sophomore from Shreveport, La., saw untapped fishing territory in the river that rolls past Pitt’s South Side practice complex. He grabbed his rod, wandered down to the riverbank and needed only one attempt to prove himself right.

There was, however, one detail that complicated Robinson’s success.

“(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.”

The thought of dropping a line into the Monongahela — a river with a long history of pollution and lingering contamination concerns — never gave Robinson much pause. To him, finding a body of water meant fishing out what’s living beneath the surface.

Robinson’s father started him young, making the pond beside their Shreveport home a classroom by age 6. The two share a July 18 birthday and have celebrated it with fishing trips to Mississippi and Texas, where Robinson hauled in a personal-best 12-pound redfish during his 14th birthday trip.

That fisherman’s instinct followed him north. And now, when he’s out of the football facility, “I’m really mostly fishing,” he said.

Before long, though, Robinson’s first Pittsburgh catch earned him a trip to Narduzzi’s office.

The fishing episode resurfaced Monday when, while speaking to reporters, Narduzzi interrupted his praise of Robinson’s progress to volunteer perhaps the strangest reason his 20-year-old receiver gives him “chest pains.”

“Eating fish out of the river,” he said, “that’s not a good thing.”

Fortunately for Narduzzi’s cardiovascular health, Robinson never ate the bass. He recently moved out of the dorms and never got the chance to cook it, so after hanging on to the prize catch for a while, he eventually tossed it.

That hasn’t kept Robinson’s cooking from his teammates.

This summer, Robinson went fishing with several Pitt defensive backs and came home with enough of a haul — some 20 to 30 fish — to feed them. He invited the group over for the NBA Finals, cleaned the catch, coated it in Louisiana Fish Fry and got to frying.

“They loved it,” Robinson said.

Narduzzi has come to regard it all as part of the Robinson experience. On a recruiting visit to Shreveport, he discovered an S-10 Chevrolet built for drag racing in the family garage. Robinson’s father drives it while Robinson controls the camera, filming each run. Some of Robinson’s own driving — which was caught on film — resulted in his being hit with a felony charge of fleeing from officers during a dirt bike-riding outing in June.

Narduzzi calls Robinson a “country boy,” one 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.

Robinson might continue finding ways to raise Narduzzi’s blood pressure. The Monongahela, at least, will no longer be a weight on his coach’s mind.

“I’m done eating river fish,” Robinson said.