If you dig through the annals of Pitt football, the Panthers have played four schools way more than any others. West Virginia, Penn State, Notre Dame and Syracuse.
Pitt has played WVU 95 times, Penn State 93 times, Syracuse 78 times and Notre Dame 70 times (according to College Football Reference records). WVU and Penn State are considered rivals, to say the least, and while Pitt has struggled historically against Notre Dame, there’s certainly history. But is it really a rivalry?
Syracuse has played Pitt the third-most times in program history but is rarely brought up in the same breath as any of the aforementioned schools.
There isn’t the same proximity (although, ‘Cuse is one of the closer ACC destinations) or the same deep-rooted history between Pitt and Syracuse that Pitt shares with either WVU and Penn State — and the fanbases aren’t nearly as antagonistic — but Pat Narduzzi considers the series a rivalry nonetheless.
“There’s been a lot of close games,” Narduzzi said Thursday at his weekly press conference. “I think it’s a tough game. I think it’s physical. And I do see it as a rivalry. The longer I’m here, I really do. It’s one of the old Big East games that was played, and I do see it as a rivalry that we get to embrace.”
And with the ACC’s new, revamped scheduling model that now includes the incoming Cal, Stanford and SMU, Pitt has been placed in a “pod” with Syracuse and Boston College. Under that scheduling model, Pitt will Syracuse and Boston College annually through 2030. And Narduzzi is just fine with that.
“I love playing a team over and over again,” Narduzzi said. “I think that’s part of what makes a rivalry. You get to know who they are. It’s more fun to game plan. We go back to 2016, watching some of the plays they run, one of the plays they ran in that basketball game we played here, they ran last week against BC, they ran it against Western Michigan. It’s the same stuff coming back out, like, here it is.
“So, you’re practicing the heck out of that. There’s that chess match that you get when you play someone more than once or twice, and I kinda like that chess match.”
Pitt and Syracuse have met every season for the last 55 years, and obviously with the new scheduling format, that’s going to continue now.
In 78 all-time meetings now, dating up until Saturday’s contest at Yankee Stadium, Pitt has had the upper hand in the series — sitting at 43-32-3. And it’s been a somewhat recent stretch of play — considering the scale of the series’ history — that has really cemented the Panthers’ lead.
A 19-9 win over a then-ranked Syracuse last November extended Pitt’s current win streak to five games. And Pitt has won 18 matchups over the last 21 seasons. ‘Cuse hasn’t won in Pittsburgh since 2001.
But, while Saturday’s matchup won’t be played at Acrisure Stadium, it won’t be played at JMA Wireless Dome either. It will be a Syracuse home game, but the Panthers and the Orange will kick off at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx in a pseudo-neutral site game.
It will be Pitt’s fourth trip to Yankee Stadium for a football game, with the first being a 3-0 loss to the Orange in 1923. The most recent was Pitt’s Pinstripe Bowl appearance against Northwestern in 2016. Of course, Saturday’s matchup is the 100th anniversary of the first meeting at Yankee Stadium — the old Yankee Stadium back then.
It’s a meeting between two teams that have lost a combined eight straight games, wallowing in unsuccessful seasons, but it’s also a matchup between friends — Narduzzi and Babers.
“Since we’ve been in the ACC, at different meetings that we’d get to, somehow, some way, whether it’s at the AFCA convention, we always find a way to sit down and have lunch or dinner or something together and just talk,” Narduzzi said. “Him and his wife. My wife is good friends with his wife, as well. So, it’s just something that we’ve spent a lot of time together, somehow, some way. Maybe it’s the rivalry.”
Kickoff is set for 3:30 p.m. Saturday, and for those who cannot make it out to Yankee Stadium, the ACC Network will be on the call.
