August rarely affords a college football coach much idle time. With Pitt\u2019s opener fewer than 20 days away, Pat Narduzzi has an offense to sharpen, position battles to settle, 100-plus bodies to keep healthy \u2026 and a wide receiver to keep out of the Monongahela River.<\/p>\n
Pitt receiver Tyreek Robinson\u2019s fishing habit might never have reached Narduzzi\u2019s attention if the Monongahela hadn\u2019t coughed up a 5- to 6-pound bass worth bragging about.<\/p>\n
Robinson proudly sent a photo of his catch to the Panthers\u2019 receivers group chat. What began as a fishing flex quickly traveled up Pitt\u2019s chain of command and landed him in his head coach\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
Bruce Feldman’s 2026 Freaks List<\/p>\n
Bruce Feldman<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat are you doing, man?\u201d Narduzzi recalled telling him. \u201cFish can\u2019t be good out of the river. I mean, you can go buy some fish. \u2026 There\u2019s a fish market down the street right on campus. But he decided he wanted to go catch his own.\u201d<\/p>\n
Robinson, a redshirt sophomore from Shreveport, La., saw untapped fishing territory in the river that rolls past Pitt\u2019s South Side practice complex. He grabbed his rod, wandered down to the riverbank and needed only one attempt to prove himself right.<\/p>\n
There was, however, one detail that complicated Robinson\u2019s success.<\/p>\n
\u201c(The coaches) was like, \u2018Where did you catch it?\u2019\u201d Robinson said. \u201cAnd I told them the river, and it was just like: \u2018Don\u2019t fish in that river. It\u2019s bad. It\u2019s polluted.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cI had no idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
The thought of dropping a line into the Monongahela \u2014 a river with a long history of pollution and lingering contamination concerns<\/a> \u2014 never gave Robinson much pause. To him, finding a body of water meant fishing out what\u2019s living beneath the surface.<\/p>\n Robinson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n That fisherman\u2019s instinct followed him north. And now, when he\u2019s out of the football facility, \u201cI\u2019m really mostly fishing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Before long, though, Robinson\u2019s first Pittsburgh catch earned him a trip to Narduzzi\u2019s office.<\/p>\n The fishing episode resurfaced Monday when, while speaking to reporters, Narduzzi interrupted his praise of Robinson\u2019s progress to volunteer perhaps the strangest reason his 20-year-old receiver gives him \u201cchest pains.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEating fish out of the river,\u201d he said, \u201cthat\u2019s not a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Fortunately for Narduzzi\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n That hasn\u2019t kept Robinson\u2019s cooking from his teammates.<\/p>\n This summer, Robinson went fishing with several Pitt defensive backs and came home with enough of a haul \u2014 some 20 to 30 fish \u2014 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThey loved it,\u201d Robinson said.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s father drives it while Robinson controls the camera, filming each run. Some of Robinson\u2019s own driving \u2014 which was caught on film \u2014 resulted in his being hit with a felony charge of fleeing from officers during a dirt bike-riding outing<\/a> in June.<\/p>\n Narduzzi calls Robinson a \u201ccountry boy,\u201d one who is \u201cas genuine as you can get.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s just a real kid that, you know, just gonna do what he wants to do or what he thought about doing back home,\u201d Narduzzi said.<\/p>\n Robinson might continue finding ways to raise Narduzzi\u2019s blood pressure. The Monongahela, at least, will no longer be a weight on his coach\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m done eating river fish,\u201d Robinson said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"August rarely affords a college football coach much idle time. With Pitt\u2019s opener fewer than 20 days away,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1012694,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[43],"tags":[1428,1318,1317,1315,1316,35606,62,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-1012693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-college-football","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-pittsburgh-panthers","tag-sports","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117127698814048010","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1012693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1012693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1012694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1012693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1012693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1012693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}