What's Pitt's Worst Case Scenario After Bye Week?

The Pitt Panthers could post their worst season in nearly three decades.

PITTSBURGH -- The Pitt Panthers will enjoy an off weekend during a loaded Week 6 and get some much-needed rest before beginning the stretch run of ACC play.

With seven more games ahead of the Panthers, we'll dive into the best, worst and most likely case scenarios for the remainder of the season, continuing with the least hopeful outlook. 

Worst-Case Scenario

ESPN's Football Power Index (FPI) currently projects the Panthers to win just two more games and finish with a 3-9 record, but even that seems like a generous reading of the remaining schedule because of the low state this team is in now and the difficult path still ahead of it. 

Pitt has one win currently and it came against an FCS opponent. Of the four consecutive losses that followed, three have come by double-digit margins and three also came when the Panthers were favored. Four of their remaining seven opponents are ranked and of the other three just one - a weeknight date with Boston College in November - is at home.

FPI has the Panthers favored in two of those seven games - Week 8 at  Wake Forest (which is just a 50.1%-49.9% edge for Pitt) and Week 11 vs. Boston College. Were I a betting man, I'd say it's more likely that Pitt is loosely competitive against the Demon Deacons, who lost by 14 to Georgia Tech last week, but grab a win against Boston College. Barring any kind of shocking upset, that leaves them with two wins, a stunningly low total. 

Allow me to put what two wins would mean for this program into context. The Panthers haven't won two or fewer games in a season since the mid-1990s - a notoriously bad decade for this program - in the penultimate year of Johnny Major's second stint in Pittsburgh and the second year of Walt Harris' tenure. 

Over the past 118 seasons of Pitt football, just eight teams have won fewer than three games. And of the six coaches to guide the Panthers to those subpar records, just one - Harris - was still the head coach at Pitt for longer than two years after posting a record with fewer than three wins. 

That should be the primary concern at this moment for Pitt, that the momentum they built over the past two seasons could be so quickly and completely undone, ultimately leading to the end of Narduzzi's tenure and a search for a new head coach that comes when conference realignment and new player empowerment movements are threatening to upend college football as we know it. Pitt is not a blue blood and recruiting a coach to lead the program through those seismic changes would not be easy. 

The one caveat to the worst-case scenario is that Pitt playing poorly typically opens the door for one of the earth-shattering upsets that have salvaged lowly seasons of the past - think 13-9 in 2007, a road victory against then-No. 10 South Florida in 2008 or the home win over then-No. 2 Miami in 2017. There would be an opportunity to "charge the superweapon" with what will likely be top-10, maybe even top-five opponents in Notre Dame and Florida State on the schedule. 

But that would be but a minor cushion to the crushing blow of 2-10. The worst-case scenario for the Panthers is truly that bad. It would be different if this was 2015, '16 or '17, when Narduzzi was still building this program. But we are well past that expiration date. This is supposed to be built and instead, the foundation looks shaky. 

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