Pitt may have been blown out by then-No. 20 SMU Saturday night, but the AP voters still have the Panthers as one of the top 25 teams in college football.
Pitt fell five spots in the AP Poll following a 48-25 loss to the Mustangs, sitting at No. 23. The Panthers fell six spots in the Coaches Poll, dropping to No. 23.
The AP Poll has Miami as the highest-ranked ACC school, rising to No. 4. SMU (13th), Clemson (19th), Pitt (23rd) and Louisville (25th) are also ranked.
The Coaches Poll also ranks Miami as the top school in the ACC, sitting at No. 4, and SMU (14th), Clemson (17th) and Pitt (23rd) are also ranked. Louisville and Syracuse received votes.
Pitt suffered its first loss of the season on the road against SMU, now a top 15 team in the country, and it wasn’t a particularly good performance by the Panthers. But there’s still four games left this season — and a lot of hopes and dreams still alive.
“The message is it’s one game,” Pat Narduzzi said after the loss. “And like I kind of started off at the beginning, it’s hard to win every week. It’s hard to be on every week. And maybe as a team and a staff, we didn’t handle success. I always say the hardest thing is to handle success. Our guys will handle adversity, and this is adversity, and our guys will bounce back.
“You could see it in the locker room, they’re not discouraged. I told them I loved them, and I love them as much or more as game 1 or game 7, and we win as a team and we lose as a team.”
Pitt is back in action this weekend against Virginia, an 8 p.m. kickoff at Acrisure Stadium, and there are two ranked matchups left this season against Clemson and Louisville.
Sounds like a fair ranking to me given the circumstances.
Let’s look at it this way. We have a rivalry with Syracuse and everyone here that’s honest knows that Syracuse football team and Kyle McCord are better than what they showed here versus Pitt. Pitt had it’s bad game in that same type of fashion against SMU. Sometimes it happens. Momentum is hard to grab back at times.
I think Cal did us no favors a month ago. They showed everyone how to defend a Cade Bell offense and since then Bell has not been able to adapt. Didn’t help that Holstein was coming out of concussion protocol.