A moment of silence...
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At 11:57 pm on Wednesday October 10, 2007 Pitt finally, officially became a basketball school (Duke and Temple also lost to Navy). The need of Pitt as a football school in the Big East has been widely overexaggerated and shown to be incorrect.
What the numbers do tend to refute is that Pitt was a standard or flag bearer for the Big East as the Panthers never finished higher than third and would rank sixth in the old Big East order of average finish.
However, Dave Wannstedt dealt the final blow for Pitt football by throwing twice from the 2 yard line instead of using LeSean McCoy in overtime versus Navy. Pat Bostic's fourth down pass hit the turf to complete the loss to Navy and as it bounced it may as well have been a basketball. At least 10,000 fans in a basketball stadium is a good crowd. The loss will most assuredly keep Pitt from a bowl game again. The stache has yet to play a postseason game in his tenure at Pitt. The loss has been taken hard by Panther fans that wouldn't travel to a bowl game anyway, but would like to pretend they would.
UPDATE:From Joe Starkey today:
Navy handed the Panthers their ninth loss in their past 10 games against Division I-A opponents.Ouch, same as Duke.
3 comments:
This would be a good post to run the PW pabther growl clip again. Meow. Meow.
** panther
Damn, you beat me to this post. My only guess is that Wanny had a midnight curfew. Otherwise, there is no excuse for throwing those two passes at the end of the game. The Navy lineman, offense and defense, were visibly tired by overtime and were getting pushed around the field by Pitt. McCoy was running great.
The first overtime, Pitt marched down the field running almost exclusively and scored a TD. Navy responded by throwing a bomb on its very first play of its possession. A play that was open for most of the fourth quarter, but was more of an anomaly than a sign that Navy was scoring that easily.
Queue second set of possessions. Navy, now back to their usual running attack, was simply unable to move the ball effectively and was forced to kick the field goal. Pitt responds by running down to the 2 yard line after about 5 plays. So why not run it again on third and goal from the 2? Ok, so now its fourth down. Why not kick the field goal and kick their ass in the third overtime? I mean, momentum had clearly shifted and Pitt was dominating the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball.
But no, Wanny, demonstrating his coaching genius which has led him to unparalleled success in both the pros and college, decides to go for it. Ok, so run it again. No? Ok, well let's set up a play action bootleg pass with several options in the endzone. No? Well, lets just throw it up and hope for the best. Yeah, that worked well.
Oh, and my spelling in this comment? Screw off, I haven't had my second cup of coffee yet.
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