Peach Bowl reunion: Mel Tucker, Michigan State football vs. Pat Narduzzi, Pitt Panthers

Payton Thorne turned on his television Sunday afternoon just in time to see what he and the rest of Michigan State’s football team waited for.

The Spartans earned a spot in the New Year’s Six and are heading to the Peach Bowl.

“Five seconds later, that's what popped up,” Thorne said by video call Sunday night. “It was kind of ironic how it just kind of popped up right away.”

That actually proved merely coincidental. The real irony came in who MSU will face in Atlanta.

Hello again, Pat Narduzzi.

The 10th-ranked Spartans will face beloved former MSU defensive coordinator Narduzzi’s 12th-ranked Pitt Panthers at 7 p.m. Dec. 30 in Mercedes Benz Stadium. The game will be televised on ESPN.

“I've heard nothing but great things about Pat as a coach and as a mentor, and then obviously met him several times over the years and had really good conversations,” Tucker said on a video call with Narduzzi on Sunday night. “He's a really good ball coach, really good pedigree.”

The game also features two Heisman Trophy hopefuls who both are up for the Walter Camp Player of the Year award, MSU running back Kenneth Walker III and Pitt quarterback Kenny Pickett, who lead explosive offenses into the first Peach Bowl appearance for both programs and their first meeting ever in the postseason.

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“It's a great matchup,” said Gary Stokan, the Peach Bowl’s CEO. “Two of the greatest players in the game right now, Kenny Pickett and Kenneth Walker, both of whom should be in New York at the Heisman Trophy dinner.”

But much of the attention will be on the two head coaches.

In eight seasons under all-time winningest coach Mark Dantonio, Narduzzi served as defensive coordinator and architect of MSU’s “No Fly Zone” and helped the Spartans go 75-31 from 2007-14. That included winning Big Ten titles in 2010 and 2013, the Rose Bowl after the 2013 season and a Cotton Bowl Classic in the first year of the College Football Playoff’s New Year’s Six system after the 2014 season.

Narduzzi took over at Pitt in 2015 and is 55-36 in his seven seasons with the Panthers, and they are 11-2 this season. He earned his fifth bowl trip and first New Year’s Six game by defeating Wake Forest in the ACC title game Saturday, 45-21.

Narduzzi, while trying not to be nostalgic, said the Peach Bowl matchup “is gonna be a heckuva ballgame” against his old program.

“Obviously we as coaches don't get to play in the game. … But it's a football game. It doesn't matter who the opponent is,” Narduzzi said Sunday. “We've got a great opponent. It doesn't matter that I coached there for a few years. That will not play into any role at all.

“Coach (Mel) Tucker has got a brand new roster there, and I don't think there's any guys on that roster I know or ever coached. A few guys on the staff. But besides that, there will be no emotions. It's just another football game.”

It is MSU’s second New Year’s Six bowl, the first since the 42-41 win over Baylor in the Cotton Bowl Classic on Jan. 1, 2015. The Spartans would reach the College Football Playoff the following season with current secondary coach Harlon Barnett and now-Cincinnati defensive coordinator Mike Tressel taking over for Narduzzi as MSU’s co-coordinators. Defensive line coach Ron Burton also was on the Spartans’ staff with Narduzzi in 2013 and 2014.

It also will be Tucker's first bowl appearance as a head coach after taking over for Dantonio in February 2020. MSU did not go to a bowl after going 2-5 in Tucker's debut, and the Spartans’ last bowl appearance was a 27-21 win over Wake Forest in the 2019 Pinstripe Bowl in New York.

But MSU’s turnaround under Tucker this season, finishing 10-2, reenergized the program and the fan base. Though it is a step below the Spartans’ primary goal of playing for a national title, Tucker and his players feel the Peach Bowl and New Year’s Six appearance will give them one final chance to cap their surprising return to success.

“It's weird to see like how big of a deal it kind of is. I never really thought that before,” senior safety Xavier Henderson said of the NY6 bowl. “But now that we got picked for one, it kind of feels pretty special.”

Narduzzi long coveted the MSU job, and many felt he would be next in line to replace Dantonio. A day after Dantonio’s sudden retirement, which even surprised the understudy, Narduzzi tried to “squash” rumors that he wanted to return to East Lansing but also left the door slightly ajar.

It was closed a few days later, first after Luke Fickell turned down MSU’s overtures and the Spartans then quickly moved to hire Tucker — who was an assistant coach when Dantonio was defensive coordinator at Ohio State from 2001-03 and then replaced Dantonio in that same position in 2004 before going to the NFL for the next decade.

“I've admired Coach Tucker from afar. We've not been fortunate enough to work with each other, but just admired his work,” Narduzzi said. “I know he's been a defensive coordinator and DBs coach throughout his career, and I know Mark Dantonio spoke very, very highly of him in the days that he worked with him. That's my knowledge of Mel.”

Tucker said he was familiar with Narduzzi’s body of work with the Spartans and expects to see a Pitt defense that resembles those Spartan teams from the late 2000s and early 2010s.

“Did a really good job here defensively at Michigan State,” Tucker said. “They were very aggressive in coverage and pressures, and I really had a lot of respect for what he did here as a coordinator and obviously as a head coach he's done a great job.”

MSU finished No. 10 in the final CFP rankings, while Pitt was No. 12. Committee chair Gary Barta said the Spartans were the lowest-ranked team to receive an at-large berth in the New Year's Six, while the Panthers were guaranteed a spot by winning the ACC. The committee put No. 5 Notre Dame and No. 9 Oklahoma State — also both at-large picks — in the Jan. 1 Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Arizona.

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“The committee, we talked a lot about what's the best way to go about this, and we felt strongly that the most fair way to go forward was to use our rankings as the determination,” Barta said on a call Sunday. “We went in order of the way that they were ranked. … Then we considered geography for which bowl to send each of those pairings to, and we sort of moved the West and the Midwest to the Phoenix area and then moved those teams that were a little bit further east to the ACC country and to the East Coast.”

MSU is 6-0-1 all-time against Pitt, their last meeting a 17-13 MSU win at Spartan Stadium on Sept. 15, 2007, in the first season of Dantonio and Narduzzi’s tenure.

“Obviously, we fell short a little bit of what our goal was this year, to play in the (Big Ten championship game) and to win all of our games,” Thorne said. “But we won 10 games, we're gonna have a chance to win 11 with a New Year’s Six bowl, and that's a positive thing. It shows progress in the right direction.

“I feel like we're moving in the right direction here with Coach Tuck, and we're gonna have big things and big goals next year. But before we worry about, that we're gonna have to finish out this year.”

Contact Chris Solari: csolari@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @chrissolari. Read more on the Michigan State Spartans and sign up for our Spartans newsletter.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Peach Bowl reunion: Michigan State vs. Pat Narduzzi, Pitt