Pitt Football Needs Your Support on Saturday

Hey there Pitt football fans! This season certainly hasn’t gone how we all expected or at least hoped it would has it? What with the embarrassing performance against Penn State on National TV in Week 2, the inexplicable loss to UNC not long after, and then being blown out by Central Florida things looked like they were going to go off the rails rather quickly. Personally, I believed that Pitt was headed towards a 3-win season at this stage. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of the more casual fans decided to tune out for the season around this point. I wouldn’t even blame anyone who made this decision. Based on attendance at Heinz Field this year, it looks like this has been the case.

Given that there have been less than 35,000 people in attendance on average for the non-Penn State home games this season, perhaps I should bring everyone up to speed. An overtime win against Syracuse signaled a change. They followed that up with a near-upset of still-undefeated Notre Dame. After a bye week, Pitt won two games in six days to somehow put them in first place in the Coastal. You read that right, the 5-4 Pitt Panthers who started the season so miserably are in sole possession of first place in their division. They are coming dangerously close to making Pat Narduzzi’s preseason boast that we’d see them in Charlotte for the ACC Championship Game come true.

It is pretty surprising that Pitt is currently the favorite to come out on top of the heap in this year’s version of Coastal Chaos given where they’ve come from. However, there is still a lot of room for error with this team. While they can still win the division should they lose to Virginia Tech this weekend, they can make things a lot easier on themselves with a win. If they take care of business on Saturday, they can clinch the division just by winning one of their last two games against Wake Forest or Miami. Because of this, the game against Virginia Tech this weekend is the biggest one played at Heinz Field in quite some time and the team needs and deserves a good turnout.

If you haven’t been down to Heinz Field very much this year, coming down this weekend would definitely be considered better late than never. Pitt hasn’t played in too many vital home games in recent years. Games against WVU in 2010 and UNC in 2015 were also important, but you would have to go back to the game against Cincinnati in 2009 to find one that was definitively more significant. That game was a de facto conference championship game with the winner automatically winning the Big East and getting that season’s BCS Bowl bid for the conference. Pitt lost that game and the other two mentioned, so hopefully they can reverse their fortunes this time around. To do this, the team could use as much fan support as they can get to give them a home field advantage.

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