Pitt does a fair amount of stacking the cards against itself as well. Let’s be 100% honest, Pitt de-prioritized football in the late 90’s early 2000’s. This was dumb for multiple reasons, and really set the stage for Pitt to be an athletic department with no identity. I mean, God only knows where the football program would be if Michael Haywood didn’t beat up his wife. He was hired based on 1 good year at Miami OH, and was miserably poor once he got back into coaching. Add to that, once the basketball program took a nosedive when Stallings came aboard, Pitt athletics became completely irrelevant. You can blame roadblocks Pitt faces all you want. A lot of their warts are self inflicted.
It was the early to mid 80s (and before that the 30s) that the most harmful scorched earth deephasizing occurred, but otherwise it’s right on.
Boosters had the program among the top programs of the nation a couple different times in our history, but were given the toilet lid slam each time, because the dweebs, eggheads, flitters and flouncers got p1ssed by it.
That’s not exactly happening now, Pitt pays its HC adequately as some admin apologists pointed out; but basically it is still true; or more accurately, those success killing efforts of the 80s (that were mostly continued into these years) are bearing their most harsh impact just now, with the emergence of open pay for play.
Now, Pitt’s effete admin likely wouldn’t allow the degree of player acquisition that the top programs do; the optics would be too horrifying to the flowerbuds running the school. But it really doesn’t matter, because their predecessors chased off the benefactors with the really serious difference maker money, decades before.
We have a couple well-meaning nouveau riche younger dudes valiantly trying to raise the bar, but Pitt fiercely keeps them at arms length.
The bell will soon toll for all of us, the program, the fans, the non-rev sports that leech off football, when the serious programs separate from the chaff eventually (2030 give or take) and the big conference money is gone.
But it’s already having impact; we came off some moderately successful seasons but are finding it harder than ever to get meaningful prep recruits, and even the better skilled transfers, especially WR, won’t sniff at us. E we can mourn Jurkovec playing, but the bigger lament should be that he was our best option in the first place, two years after having a Heisman finalist QB.