Pitt Keeps Digging for Newer Lows
PITTSBURGH -- An optimist at heart, I always try to look for the best in people and things and that applies to the Pitt Panthers, both when I was just a fan as well as in this new phase of my life when I cover them for a living. To that end, this season, when things have constantly taken worse and worse turns, I have found myself believing that better days were coming.
Unfortunately, that same glass-half-full outlook did not survive Pitt's embarrassing and confounding 28-13 loss to Syracuse. What looks like an innocent enough loss by two scores to a team with twice as many wins was in reality an abject disaster. Every part of the team has their share of blame to shoulder as they arrive at 2-8 and clinch the worst record of the Pat Narduzzi era, with an extremely uncertain future awaiting them after two more games.
It started right away, with the Pitt defense failing to muster any kind of resistance on Syracuse’s 75-yard touchdown march. They allowed positive yardage on nine of 10 plays through a combination of poor fits against the run and even worse tackling, something that's been a theme throughout this season. It took just eight minutes of game time for the Orange to amass 100 yards rushing and in four full quarters, Pitt allowed a season-high 382 rushing yards.
The Panthers were caught completely off guard by the use of motion and wildcat and option plays in an offensive game plan focused solely on the run and even Pitt head coach Pat Narduzzi admitted as much himself during a sideline interview with the ACC Network in between the first and second quarters. He said they hadn't seen anything on film like what the Orange broke out at Yankee Stadium.
Syracuse threw just eight times in this game and ran 66 times. Even with that heavy of a skew towards the ground game, Pitt didn't have a prayer of stopping it. Syracuse rushed for 108 yards in the first quarter, just 32 in the second, then 113 in the third and 133 in the fourth and final frame. Pitt was caught off guard, adjusted and then collapsed completely.
And on offense, they were just as bad - committing boneheaded penalties, throwing short of the sticks on third down, taking the ball out of the hands of their best playmakers, missing easy throws and committing frequent turnovers.
With 5:54 left in the first half, Syracuse had the same number of fumbles as Pitt had third downs. In the second half, every time they built momentum with a handful of positive plays, they turned it over - either a confounding interception thrown straight to a Syracuse defender for a pick-six or two inexplicable botched handoffs or a bad break on a forward progress call.
The same things fans have bemoaned week after week about this team continue to get worse and worse, week after week with only the end of the regular season figuring to provide any kind of respite.
The Panthers have suffered their fair share of bad breaks this season, maybe even few more than the average college football team, but 2-8 is no accident. 2-8 represents very basic flaws in the construction of a college football program. Pat Narduzzi had established Pitt as a high-floor outfit but he has sunk deep below the expected floor in 2023.
At this point, it's not only fair to wonder if Narduzzi can recover from a season like this (and few coaches in Pitt history have) but if a recovery will even matter. The unfortunate thing about all the goodwill Narduzzi earned with his winning in Pittsburgh, and he's done a lot of it, is that it created expectations for himself, expectations that he has failed to meet.
Just making a bowl game in 2024 is not a recovery and keeping his job in the long-term future will likely require more than that from next season. There's a conversation to be had about what's realistic for this program moving forward and an entirely separate conversation about whether what's realistic or not even matters.
Close the book on 2023 and the minutia of how we got here. The abject failure this season has been is set in stone, unchanged even if Pitt wins their final two games. It's time to start thinking bigger and more seriously about the future of the program and who leads it as Pitt appears to have found the bottom of an unthinkably deep hole.
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