You honestly think Pitt and Miami are in comparable situations? Looking back to the history of Pitt football neglects to take into account the changes that have taken place. All things have not remained the same. You honestly don't believe that playing on campus is better than off? Prior to '97 the Pitt administration actually fought against tailgating and did next to nothing to promote game day atmosphere in Oakland. By the way, there actually was a great atmosphere in Oakland and around the stadium in the 80's....I know, I was actually there. Whether Minnesota can capitalize on the investment they made will take a bit of time to tell...it is way too early to know for sure [and that assumes they have good fundraising and alumni staffs, which I suspect you have no idea]. It takes years to change the attitude and culture of an institution. But you are ultimately right...nothing we say today will change history. Hail to Pitt!
Again dodging your original misguided point with strawman arguments. Good job.
Since I attended both Miami and Pitt, I am quite familiar with how they are comparable. Pitt was more comparable to Miami in the 70s when Western PA actually was still stocked with talent. Pitt also actually draws better when Miami isn't winning, although general alumni support at Miami is superior even though they've never played a single football game on campus.
Minnesota, on the other hand, is a fairly good comparison to Pitt in many regards. A urban, research school that won 6 national titles before WWII and had a brief resurgence with a national championship 16 years before Pitt's last. It's recent years have been peppered with 6 to 8 win seasons, and like Pitt, has had exactly one 10 win season in the last 30 years. It has about the same endowment and is a school located in a city where professional sports teams dominate. Where it differs is where Minneapolis is a larger metro area than Pittsburgh, one that actually grew from the last two censuses, and about 10K more undergrads, 100K more alumni, almost twice the operating budget, and about 20X more land in its city. It is also is the state flagship with no other competing colleges with major athletics and brings in over 2X the amount of athletic revenue. It also gets 4.3X the amount of state appropriations as does Pitt even though it only is 68% larger. Those are all things in its favor to support the moves that it made. Surprisingly, however, Pitt actually does a significantly better job in fundraising than does Minnesota.
Now, I know you are not arguing to move football back on campus or hold a new stadium up as some signpost of an appropriate level of commitment from Pitt's administration as many delusional people on here do, so I don't expect you to comment on this, but it is instructive to look at a school that was off campus and see how their $340+ million facilities investment (in 2017 dollars, half of which was picked up by its state) to bring it on campus paid off in attendance and results. Those results can be observed for impact of the move and those results have already been described. Now you did state that a school couldn't successfully compete on a national level playing off campus, which I've already cited examples of, but you did not state that playing on-campus actually guaranteed a better odds at being nationally competitive. Clearly the myriad of schools playing on-campus shows that there is no such guarantee, nor even greater probability of such as the Minnesota example would suggest. Further, you stated fundraising for the university at large would be better playing on-campus, for which there is actually no evidence of, and also not seen in the Minnesota example. So what you have is your opinion, and nothing more.
BTW, I too was around Pitt Stadium in the 80s, and actual tailgating was near absent and the atmosphere paled in comparison to any stadium set up with adequate surface parking. This is true for any stadium shoehorned into a street grid that I've been around. Unless, I guess, if you mean people crammed into CJ's, Peters, Calicos, or the Sanctuary. Yeah, the 80s atmosphere was better than the 90s, primarily because Pitt actually expected to win in the 80s, not because the game-day party scene was better than the tailgating at Heinz, because it wasn't.
