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QUESTION: Can anyone explain Pittsburgh’s unpredictability?
Just how good an explanation is there for the unpredictability of the Pittsburgh Panthers football team, year after year? The immediate truthful answer is that there ISN’T a good explanation.
An occasional upset — say, once every five years — is part of the randomness of sports. Pittsburgh, however, pulls off a big upset — a Pitt Special — every year.
Clemson in 2016.
Miami in 2017.
Syracuse in 2018.
UCF in 2019.
Keep this in mind: Pittsburgh has continuously changed offensive coordinators over the past four seasons: Matt Canada in 2016, Shawn Watson in 2017 and 2018, and Mark Whipple in 2019. The Panthers have authored these upsets in a context of instability. To put it plainly, they have not had the stable coaching staff of the ACC’s dynastic program, the Clemson Tigers, whose head coach and coordinators have remained intact during this run of supreme success.
What Pitt has done — going back to the 2007 win over West Virginia, and which also included a mammoth upset of Virginia Tech several years ago — doesn’t make logical sense.
The best explanation for this: Much as a baseball player seems to take on a new mindset when he wears the pinstripes of the New York Yankees, or as an international role player fits in with the San Antonio Spurs, Pitt players — knowing their program has established an identity as “the team which pulls the upset — build on the past and gain the extra measure of belief which carries them through tough times.
Pitt players might not remain with the program from one season to the next, but there are always some players in the locker room in one year who can tell the next recruiting class, “Hey, this happened last year. We did it. Not someone else.”
That simple reality offers no guarantees, but it does represent an example which tells the newer Panthers that success is possible. Someone else has shown the way.
College sports is full of stories like this: The players change, but certain programs in certain situations are able to carry success (or failure, for that matter) from one year to the next. That is the Pitt difference.
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