Rivalry could be replaced by another
Pitt, WVU could play beyond 2025
The days leading up to the 100th and, for the foreseeable future, final football game between Pitt and Penn State have been ones of lamentations.
After the matchup Saturday in University Park, Pa., the two schools representing the two largest athletic departments in one of the country’s largest states have no scheduled meetings. For Pitt, it’s an absence that comes with more than just lost memories, excitement and ticket sales. With the current four-game series ending and no tangible progress between the two sides in negotiations, the Panthers schedules for the majority of the next decade won’t include a game against a traditional rival.
What, at first glance, seems like an existential crisis has a solution that’s as simple as a 65-mile drive south on I-79.
For all the emotional resonance that Penn State carries for a large segment of Panthers fans — particularly for those alive during their storied matchups in the 1970s and 1980s — West Virginia could very well be categorized as the program’s biggest rival, with 104 games between the two sides, making it Pitt’s most frequently played opponent.
In sharp contrast to the situation with Penn State, Pitt has games scheduled against the Mountaineers, with a fourgame series that will be played annually from 2022-25, breaking what will, at that point, be an 11-year gap. Beyond that, though, West Virginia represents the Panthers’ best chance at consistently having a rival on their schedules, even if it’s not necessarily on an annual basis.
“[Pitt athletic director] Heather [Lyke] and I will have to look at future schedules and sit down,” West Virginia athletic director Shane Lyons said late last month in an interview with the Pittsburgh PostGazette. “We did a four-game series this time. Next time, it may just be a homeand-home with another break. It’s a matter of what works for their schedule and what works for our schedule. I think it’s extremely important that we keep this game going at some pace rather than having a 10-year gap of not playing.”
It’s a rivalry dating more 120 years with an importance that still can be felt numerically (with the number of times the two have played and the small distance separating the two campuses) and anecdotally (see what happens during the chorus of Neil Diamond’s ‘Sweet Caroline’ whenever it’s played in the Mountain State).
With that passion is a relatively feasible path to renewing the rivalry, which was halted and made all the more complicated when Pitt and West Virginia left the Big East Conference to join the ACC and Big 12, respectively. Lyons said he and Lyke have had informal discussions about the possibility of scheduling more games beyond the upcoming current fourgame series. In contrast to the stalemate between Pitt and Penn State, there is at least a desire on West Virginia’s end to have the rivalry continue.
What that renewed series would look like likely wouldn’t be what fans of both programs became accustomed to for so long, when they played annually from 1943-2011.
“By all means, we both know the importance of this moving forward in the future with these games,” Lyons said. “But I don’t think it’s going to be continuous, year after year. After the four years, there may be a several-year gap. Heather and I will look at filling in the late ’20s and early ’30s, hopefully, if the schedules work out, to be able to do something in the future, as well.”
There are barriers to bringing back the Backyard Brawl.
West Virginia has a nine-game conference schedule meaning, like Penn State, it
has only three non-conference games with which it can work every year. Though it has two non-conference games against power five opponents this year and each of the next five, making it one of the few major-conference programs to do so, Lyons said his ideal non-conference schedule would feature one power five opponent, one group of five foe and one game against a team from Football Championship Subdivision.
The Mountaineers have a home-andhome series scheduled with Alabama from 2026-27, which, if Lyons’ preferences are strictly adhered to, would seemingly eliminate a Pitt game in those years and create the gap he referenced. West Virginia also has other schools it would like to play with whom it has an extensive history — programs such as Penn State, Virginia Tech and Maryland that Lyons wants to “sprinkle” in its schedules.
Even among that group, there’s still one opponent that looms larger than others.
“I think it makes sense for our fans to play a natural rival, and the most natural rival for us would be Pitt,” first-year West Virginia coach Neal Brown said Monday. “I think our fan base agrees with that.”
With four non-conference games, Pitt has more flexibility with adding rivals to its schedule, though after 2025, it already has dates set with Wisconsin in 2026-27, as well as Notre Dame in 2028, 2031, 2033, 2034 and 2036. When asked Monday about adding more rivals to its schedule after this season, Panthers coach Pat Narduzzi mentioned the West Virginia series and noted that he considers ACC counterpart Syracuse, which Pitt has played every year since 1955, a rival. Aside from those two, there’s room to get creative.
“We’ll make one if we have to,” Narduzzi said. “Shoot, we made one back in the day when I was at Cincinnati. The River City Rivalry [between Pitt and Cincinnati, who will play again in 2023 and 2024], wasn’t that what it was called? Something like the River City Rivalry? We’ll make one up.”
Lyke, who is out of town this week, was unavailable for a comment.
Scheduling, as any athletic administrator is quick to note, is an inexact and often difficult science. A downtrodden opponent you schedule years earlier could be a powerhouse by the time you play it, a lesson Pitt learned with its current homeand-home against Central Florida.
Between Pitt and West Virginia, though, there is a vested interest to play again. A Parkersburg, W.Va., native and a West Virginia graduate, Lyons has a deeply personal connection to the series, having seen the fervor it generated and what it meant to those in the state and at the school for so long. He didn’t need Mountaineers fans to tell him about how they wanted Pitt back on the schedule when he took over as athletic director in 2015 because, even as he lived elsewhere, he knew that yearning was always there back home.
To him, the importance of Pitt and West Virginia goes well beyond his own experiences.
“Hopefully, we can continue these, even past the four years,” Lyons said. “They may not be continuous years. You may have some gaps in there, but you’ll play again after that. It’s not only good for our two programs, but I also think it’s good for college football. We’re missing those longtime rivalries we had and the close proximities. That’s why it was important to bring it back.”