Nov 11, 2017 5 min read

Maybe the Pitt football team should play only away games. The game Thursday night was another huge embarrassment. The big question is what was more embarrassing: the loss to a 1-8 team or the ridiculous number of empty seats?

The official attendance was 34,056 but I have a feeling Pitt counts its football attendance using the Bob Drew method. Bob was my boss when I worked as a play-by-play announcer for the Lafayette Drillers, a minor league baseball team in Lafayette, Louisiana. In between the 7th and 8th innings he would ask me what I thought the attendance was at Clark Field. I would scan the crowd and say, thirty-two, seventy-three.

The box score in the Lafayette paper the next day would show an attendance of 3,273.

Playing on national TV should not be an embarrassment. It should be a valuable recruiting tool. It’s the opposite for Pitt.

Heather Lyke is in her first year as Pitt’s athletic director. Monday morning would be a good time for her to start (if she hasn’t already) finding some people who are serious about building a nice 42,000-45,000 seat stadium somewhere on the Pitt campus.

She should also nip the tarp talk in the bud.

The idea of covering a third of the seats at Heinz Field gained some talk show traction on the days leading up to Thursday night’s game on ESPN and there were some reports that she was considering it.

The Pirates, who played in a stadium that was too big for them for 30 years, tried that for a few years at Three Rivers Stadium.

It didn’t work.

The idea was to make small crowds look and feel bigger but what they ended up with was a huge stadium filled with small numbers of people and really large, really ugly tarps.

The next thing Lyke should do tomorrow morning is readjust everybody’s expectations for Pitt football.

Pitt is never going to be Ohio State. It won’t be Penn State, either. Those are programs that have, you know, a statewide following.

Do you think the University of Columbus would draw 100,000 fans for a game against the University of Detroit? Ohio State does that every time against the University of Michigan.

Anybody out there have the football attendance figures for the University of Cleveland?

How about the University of Dallas?

University of Philadelphia?

University of Atlanta?

University of Oklahoma City?

What kind of a crowd would show up for the University of San Antonio against the University of Birmingham?

The only programs in the AP Top 25 that do not have a satewide following are Notre Dame (No. 3), Miami (7), Memphis (22) and Northwestern (25).

Notre Dame has a national following, Miami has always had attendance issues and has only succeeded because of spectacular cheating. Memphis’ attendance figures look a lot like Pitt’s and may also be recorded using the Bob Drew method. I have no explanation for Northwestern, but it averaged about 34,000 per game last season.

How much longer should Pitt shoot at a target it’s never going to hit? The only solution to the embarrassing crowds is to require smaller ones and more tickets will be sold for the attractive opponents when a limited amount of seats creates a sense of urgency.

Lyke has only been Pitt’s athletic director since March, so it should be easy for her to dismiss the old-timers who still think Pitt can become a big enough deal around here to fill a 65,000-seat stadium for any team other than Penn State or Notre Dame.

She needs to accept the fact that she’s not on a level playing field with the Ohio States and Penn States when it comes to drawing fans. And she sure doesn’t need a half-empty 65,000 seat stadium for recruiting players. Trying to become the best major college football program not representing an entire state would be a realistic goal.

Being better at football than Memphis and Louisville would be a good start.

Jackie Sherrill left Pitt for Texas A&M in 1982 after three consecutive 11-1 seasons, not because the offer in Texas was too good to turn down. He left because Pitt had made it clear to him that it was going to be tougher to get marginally qualified students into the football program.

His successor, Foge Fazio, never had a chance because of expectations created by Sherrill and his predecessor, Johnny Majors, who also was given a lot of academic leeway.

Pitt has had one nine-year window of greatness in the last 50 years. Unless the new AD decides to ignore academics and allow a good bit of cheating, it will never happen again.

She needs to accept that and start setting realistic goals for the football program. Her first goal should be getting out of Heinz Field so she doesn’t have to hide her football program’s problems under a tarp.