The ESPN Football Power Index hasn’t favored Pitt all season, so it’s no surprise that a loss has knocked the Panthers back a few spots.
The FPI is a predictive tool to measure how a team is projected to perform throughout the remainder of the season.
Pitt has a 7.8 Football Power Index score, which is 35th-best in college football (a 3-spot drop from last week) and seventh-best in the ACC. The first loss for the Panthers has hurt their postseason hopes.
The Index predicts Pitt will finish 9-3 (9.0-3.1) this season (with a 100% chance to hit the 6-win mark, as the Panthers sit at 7-1), and despite the loss, the Panthers still have legitimate postseason aspirations.
Pitt has a 0.7% chance to win the ACC outright, an 11.4% chance to make the College Football Playoff and a 0.2% chance to make the national championship game.
Miami remains in the FPI top 10, the lone ACC school in the top 10, if only just barely, and Clemson, Lousiville, SMU and Virginia Tech are lurking.
Miami (19.5, ninth), Clemson (14.9, 13th), Louisville (14.8, 14th) and SMU (14.1, 16th) pace the ACC in the FPI, and Virginia Tech, Cal, Pitt, Georgia Tech and North Carolina are all within the top 50 nationally.
Pitt is back in action this weekend against Virginia, following the tough result against the Mustangs.
It’s a bounce-back opportunity for the Panthers, following the first loss of the season — in devastating fashion. A loss is one thing, and the season certainly isn’t over, but SMU beat the brakes off the Panthers. It wasn’t close.
If Pitt is truly rebound this season, with four games remaining on the schedule, it will start against Virginia.
Virginia is 4-4 (2-3 ACC), and the Cavaliers have lost three straight games — 24-20 against Louisville, 48-31 against Clemson and 41-14 against North Carolina. UVA is one of the weaker teams in the conference, but it’s still a game that Pitt needs to win. It’s just the next game for Pat Narduzzi.
“The message is it’s one game,” Narduzzi said Saturday night. “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.”
Kickoff against Virginia is set for 8 p.m. at Acrisure Stadium, and there are two ranked matchups left this season against Clemson and Louisville.
They didn’t look very powerful in any phase of the game!