Pitt-Penn State say goodbye to legendary rivalry — for now
Fans hope teams will one day meet again
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A funeral was rained on Saturday.
Mourners braving the precipitation arrived in various shades of blue. Few people were crying because the death wasn’t sudden. They had known it was coming for several years, long enough that a certain begrudging acceptance took hold and numbed the once raw emotions. For the older attendees who filed into Beaver Stadium, they were there to pay final respects to something they had grown to love over decades. For the younger contingent, it was akin to seeing something in a diminished state, but after hearing enough stories through the years, they understood what it once was and what it once meant.
Pitt and Penn State — two schools separated by just 135 miles and bound by 126 years of passion and animosity — played a football game Saturday that doubled as a goodbye. With the Nittany Lions’ 17-10 victory engraved in the series’ history, there’s no other meeting scheduled between the longtime foes, with a potential rematch so far in the future that someone as young as 53-year-old Pat Narduzzi is pondering his own mortality.
“I’m either going to be in a coffin or retired,” the Panthers’ coach said earlier in the week, something that would have been a quip were it not as probable as it is.
For many of the 108,661 who witnessed the 100th game between the schools, there were any number of emotions that surfaced. There was sadness over what is being lost, for however long it may be. There was disappointment, frustration and even a small dose of anger.
With that finality came a certain level of anticipation for fans like Sam and Joanne Patterson, of Pittsburgh, who pulled into the stadium’s south lot at 6:20 a.m. for the noon kickoff, the first time in their 20 years attending games together that they arrived before the sun rose.
The Pattersons, who both graduated from Penn State in the 1980s, saw the rivalry at its zenith. It was then, every year from 1974-82, that two ranked teams faced one another in the final week of the regular season. The Panthers and Nittany Lions were simultaneously at the epicenter of the sport. Their matchups secured bragging rights, forged important recruiting advantages, created legends and helped crown national champions.
That the programs found themselves in the position they did Saturday — mired in a stalemate, with no solution in sight — would have once been unimaginable.
“It’s a shame,” Mr. Patterson said. “But what are you going to do?”
Where it is now
How it got to this point is an ongoing story that has spanned players, coaches, administrators and even generations.
Most recently, in April 2018, Pitt athletic director Heather Lyke told reporters she proposed a four-year contract with Penn State that would begin in 2026, but she hadn’t received a response. Weeks later, while speaking at an event, her Penn State counterpart, Sandy Barbour, countered that the series might be revisited at some point after 2030.
“We’re going to wait a tad more patiently, but not much,” Ms. Lyke said in 2018. “We can’t. We have people who want to play us and good opportunities to play what would be a very attractive game. But I think out of the respect for Penn State and the opportunity within the commonwealth, we want to play Penn State. If they don’t, we will obviously shift gears.”
Ms. Lyke and Ms. Barbour, through respective athletic department officials, declined to comment this week on any future scheduling questions.
The Nittany Lions’ hesitancy is multi-faceted. As members of the Big Ten — a league they joined in 1993, after which they have only played Pitt eight times (after playing them 92 times in the 100 years before that) — they have only three nonconference games with which to work annually. With Michigan, Ohio State and Michigan State awaiting it in league play, Penn State doesn’t have multiple majorconference opponents on any of its future nonleague slates. Instead of using that one slot every year on Pitt, it has opted for games against the likes of Auburn, West Virginia and Virginia Tech.
Maximizing home games is also a priority in a town of barely 40,000, where football is the biggest economic engine. Something as seemingly small as a three-hour football game turns Beaver Stadium into what would be the fourth-biggest city in Pennsylvania and, from a pricing standpoint, transforms a Days Inn in State College into a Ritz Carlton in midtown Manhattan.
The forces that will keep Pitt and Penn State apart are larger than that, though.
College football has changed since the rivalry’s halcyon days of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Conferences — and the undying thirst for television revenue that molded them — have torn apart programs that were once fixtures on each other’s schedules. The Panthers and Nittany Lions are far from the only casualties of that broader shift. Texas and Texas A&M no longer play. Nor do Oklahoma and Nebraska.
Demographics have changed, too. Pittsburgh’s population has fallen by more than 100,000 since 1980. With that, football participation in the area has fallen, as have the number of top prospects it produces, meaning that the territory over which Pitt and Penn State once fought for recruiting superiority is no longer as fertile or important as it used to be.
Yet for all the region and the programs as a whole have lost, they still resonate with one another.
There’s some hope
Though not as vicious as it was years ago, the four-game series between the schools from 2016-19 came to embody elements of the social media-centric era in which it was played — which is to say it was petty. There were allegations of defensive players clapping to throw off the offense’s cadence. Final scores were put on commemorative key chains. Fumble calls were challenged in the waning minutes of a 45-point rout. As recently as this week, signals were changed because a player who didn’t even travel with the team Saturday transferred to Pitt from Penn State last month, to which Mr. Narduzzi responded by saying, “Usually the people who are paranoid are the people stealing [signals].”
The recent meetings re-energized parts of what was previously dormant. The 69,983 who watched Pitt beat Penn State, 42-39, at Heinz Field in 2016 were the most to ever watch a sporting event in Pittsburgh. The crowd for the Nittany Lions’ 2017 win against the Panthers was, at the time, the seventhlargest in Beaver Stadium history. The younger generation of fans may have not grown up with the fabled late November matchups featuring the likes of Tony Dorsett, Franco Harris and Dan Marino, but they took a liking to what they saw over those four games.
“I was used to hearing their stories,” said Kayla Kneasel, a 2019 Penn State graduate whose parents also attended the university. “You could feel the atmosphere. You could feel this was a rivalry people spent years focusing on. When they decided to start playing Pitt again, you just knew that this was something.”
While the days leading up to Saturday’s game were infused with a sense of resignation about the rivalry’s end, there is some hope about a potential return. Ms. Barbour’s 2030 statement looms large, but circumstances can evolve. When the rivalry’s revival was announced in 2011, only eight years ago, Pitt and Penn State’s coaches were Todd Graham and Joe Paterno, respectively, showing just how much and how quickly things can change.
“You could see the atmosphere today; it’s a rivalry game,” Pitt quarterback Kenny Pickett said. “It was a chippy game. The crowd was yelling stuff, and we’re yelling back, and we’re going at it with the players on the field. I think it’s a great game. It was an entertaining game today. Somewhere down the road, I’m sure they’re going to bring it back. I feel like there’s no other reason not to.”
But with that optimism comes fear. There have been gaps between games before — from 1993-96 and 2001-15 — with another one about to begin. In each instance, the rivalry has lost things it can’t easily regain.
“When you don’t play every year, the memories are forgotten, little by little,” Pitt graduate Vince Bosso said. “When you come to a game every year, you continue to talk about those memories. But when you have 10-, 12- or 15-year breaks, it just kind of goes away.”