Who knows what to expect from the Pittsburgh Panthers when they take the field against Kentucky in Birmingham, Ala., this Saturday in the BBVA Compass Bowl.
Their coach, Dave Wannstedt, was pushed out, followed by a messy parting with interim coach Michael Haywood. And then when Wannstedt had one final chance to coach his team following the firing of Haywood, he decided to forego the chance to coach them in this game.
All that is in addition to a team dealing with unfilled expectations. The Panthers were ranked in the top 20 in preseason polls.
“I think a couple things went wrong,” said Paul Zeise, who covers Pit football for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “There was a number of players on this team that read the headlines and started to think they were better than they were, and early on, I think there was a sense of entitlement amongst some of these players and they didn’t show up to play.
“By the time things started to snowball, there were all kinds of chemistry issues and I think they had personnel issues, and I don’t think Dave Wannstedt had a good season either. It’s one of those things where everything seemed to fall apart and they couldn’t find a way to put it together ever. I don’t think I have ever said this about a team, but they went through 12 games, and outside of the Syracuse game where they won 45-14 and played four good quarters of football, I don’t think this team played a good game all year.”
Zeise said Pitt fans envisioned a 10- or 11-win season and a trip to a BCS bowl game. Falling a game short of a BCS game with the weakness of the Big East Conference only served to intensify the feeling of disappointment for the Panther nation.
In games like the one against Syracuse and in too-short stretches of other games, Pitt could look dominant, Zeise said.
“They were running a ball down teams throats, their defense was dominant, their front seven was dominating the offensive line, and they were going on these back-breaking eight-minute drives, really just grinding the other team into the ground and making things miserable for teams to try and stop them,” he said. “If (the opponent) is lining up and pushing you off the ball and getting five, six, seven yards every play, there is nothing more demoralizing, and at times they were able to do that.
“But they weren’t able to sustain that and far too often, those kind of drives were sidelined by turnovers, mistakes, holding penalties, by guys going offsides, by two guys going in motion at the same time, by one guy missing a block and creating a sack and creating second-and-12. Those are the type of things that have happened to this team all year.”
Zeise said it was much the same on defense, as the Panthers could overpower opposing offenses at times, but he said penalties or blown coverages would scuttle the momentum.
One interesting thing about Pitt: it rarely blitzed. Wannstedt preferred to use the front four to rush and then have the other seven players drop into coverage. That front four was good enough to notch 30 sacks. However, two starters, including Big East Defensive Player of the Year Jabaal Sheard, will miss the bowl game with injuries.
Zeise did note that Pitt’s defense has often struggled against the multi-threat type of quarterbacks that Randall Cobb becomes when he lines up in the Wildcat formation.
And he said the Panthers had mixed results with their special teams.
“Their punter (Dan Hutchins) is excellent” Zeise said. “He was unbelievable and really the way they play, he was tremendous at winning field position battles for them. As a placekicker, though, he was shaky. He missed too many kicks, clutch kicks that would have made the difference between winning and losing games. There were probably two or three games where he missed a kick that would have helped them win the game, so special teams are shaky.”
Hutchins kind of epitomizes the year Pitt has been through.
“We’ve seen moments where they play really well and when they have you look and say they can play with anybody,” Zeise said. “But they continue to shoot themselves in the foot, not because they weren’t good enough, but because they lacked concentration, lacked focus sometimes and didn’t play as hard as they could play. When you do those sorts of things, you become 7-5.”
