The city is Pittsburgh, but the program is affectionately known as Pitt — to the point that “Script Pitt” on Dan Marino’s helmet became a cherished college football look.
(Why it had to be abandoned is beyond me. I digress…)
Thursday night, the Steel City hosts both a game and a visiting team which bring back memories of the time when Pitt football was a very big deal in college football…
… and North Carolina also attained one of the few prime periods in its largely snake-bitten football history.
Thursday is therefore a time for sweet nostalgia and the stomach-churning nerves which accompany main-event excitement. It’s a chemical cocktail of surging optimism and the raging primal fear that everything’s going to fall to pieces, just as it has for the third of a century since these programs were both good at the same time. It wasn’t easy to forecast this before the season, but here we are: North Carolina at Pitt, in prime time, is the biggest game of the ACC Coastal Division’s season to date, and it could launch the winner to a very special season.
*
In order to appreciate how special this Thursday night fight really is, you must first appreciate how difficult life has been for these programs over the past third of a century.
Since 1981, Pitt and North Carolina have won nine or more games in a season exactly four times apiece. That equates to a rate slightly worse than one-eighth of the time. These are not small schools; they have access to talent; and their better coaches have shown that you can win big in Southwest Pennsylvania and Chapel Hill. Yet, sustained success has eluded each school since an early-1980s heyday. It’s mystifying, but college football can be that way (often).
The best coach North Carolina has had over the past 25 years is Mack Brown — mostly because Brown excelled, but also because there’s no other possible answer. Brown won nine games in 1992, and then posted a 10-spot in 1993, 1996 and 1997. Since 1997, no coach has won nine games in a season. That’s what Larry Fedora is trying to do, with the help of the man who helped Mack Brown win a national title at Texas in 2005: Gene Chizik, himself a national championship head coach at Auburn. Chizik couldn’t maintain a foothold as a head coach, but as a defensive coordinator, he hasn’t lost the mustard on his fastball. As a result, the Tar Heels enter week nine of a college football season with the ability to dream legitimately big dreams.
Before Mack Brown came to Chapel Hill, the Tar Heels were led by one of the best coaches fans under 35 years of age have never heard of: Dick Crum, who piloted the Tar Heels through the back end of a highly prosperous period begun by predecessor Bill Dooley. Under Crum from 1979 through 1983, Carolina — at a time when making a bowl was a million times harder to do than it is today — never missed a postseason event. The Tar Heels won four of them, and registered a perfect ACC record in a 1980 championship season. In 1981, UNC went 10-2, losing only once in the conference, but that one loss was to Danny Ford’s national championship team at Clemson.
Crum authored one of the proudest periods in UNC football history, but since his career stalled in the mid-1980s, only Brown has been able to revive the program. Fedora’s on the doorstep, but if his team gets whacked on Thursday and loses steam in November, the “Same Ol’ Carolina” football refrain will reverberate throughout the ACC’s expanded geographical footprint.
North Carolina’s Dick Crum, one of many “great coaches college football fans under 35 years of age probably haven’t heard of.”
*
When North Carolina excelled at football in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it prevented its Thursday night opponent from winning a national championship.
North Carolina and Pitt both enjoyed their best days at the same time. From the mid-1970s through the early 1980s, both programs remained at the center of the conversation in college football. They both possessed transcendent stars. Tony Dorsett won the Heisman at Pitt in 1976, and many feel Hugh Green should have won it (as a defensive player — he was Charles Woodson before Charles Woodson…) in 1980. Dan Marino was a pretty fair player himself. North Carolina produced a fella named Lawrence Taylor. He was okay, to put it mildly. These programs glistened for a brief period of time, and so as they prepare for Thursday’s big game, it’s worth recalling the most important contest from their shared histories.
When Pittsburgh visited North Carolina in week two of the 1979 season, no one could have known how important that game would become. UNC went 5-6 under Crum in 1978, his first season as the Tar Heels’ head coach. Pittsburgh went 8-4 in 1978 under Jackie Sherrill, who took over for Johnny Majors after he left for Tennessee following Pitt’s national title season in 1976.
This 1979 encounter is an example of a game which grew in importance as the rest of the season unfolded. North Carolina shut down Pitt’s offense in a 17-7 victory. The result didn’t send shockwaves through the rest of college football because Pitt’s second ascendancy after the 1976 national title (and a 9-2-1 campaign in 1977) had not yet begun.
In time, though, the 1979 Panthers developed into a fearsome force. Following the loss to UNC, they squeaked by the last great Temple team before this year’s group, 10-9. Liberated by that escape, they began to find themselves on offense, drilling six opponents by 12 points or more. After clocking Penn State in Happy Valley, 29-14, the Panthers stood at 10-1.
North Carolina was the only team to beat them in the 1979 regular season. The Tar Heels had prevented the Panthers from (in all likelihood) facing Alabama in the 1980 Sugar Bowl.
The only other teams to defeat Pitt from 1979 through 1981: Florida State (1980) and Penn State (1981).
*
Sometimes, two teams play a meaningful game and then plummet in subsequent years. For UNC and Pitt, that 1979 game was something of a catalyst. It was a powerful indicator that UNC was in good hands under Crum after the Dooley years. On the other side of the divide, it served as a wake-up call for a Pitt team which had the ability to be great, and just had to emerge from a September slumber.
In 1980, both teams went 11-1, and in 1981, they both won at least 10, with Pitt capturing 11 victories, including a Sugar Bowl win which knocked Georgia out of the running for the national title. The national championship went to Clemson, the one ACC team which managed to eclipse the Tar Heels in a 1981 season which is recalled fondly in that corner of the United States.
Now, over a third of a century after the golden years for these programs came to an end, North Carolina and Pittsburgh are trying to create a new dawn of excellence — UNC under Fedora and Chizik, Pittsburgh under Pat Narduzzi, who breathes complete competence in everything he does.
*
UNC, as said above, has begun to make strides because of the work Chizik has done as defensive coordinator. Pittsburgh’s rise — we’ll see if it sticks — is due to the man who has taken over the program.
Panther fans can see how much Narduzzi has improved upon Paul Chryst, who might very well flourish at Wisconsin (he’s recruiting well), but has a lot to prove in terms of gameday coaching chops. For national football writers, the value of Narduzzi to Pitt isn’t found solely in what he’s done to bring the Panthers to this Thursday night game with an umblemished ACC record. Michigan State has struggled on defense in ways it might not have done under Narduzzi. Chryst’s tentative first few steps at Wisconsin suggest that the man Narduzzi replaced wasn’t as skilled.
It’s true that we’re only two months into Narduzzi’s tenure at Pitt. More precisely, it’s necessary to say that much as struggling coaches deserve time and space in which to figure things out when they take over a program, the opposite is also true: Coaches who immediately succeed at a program shouldn’t be hailed as geniuses. Maybe they won with the previous coach’s players. Gene Chizik, now back in his comfort zone as a defensive coordinator with the Tar Heels, could tell you all about that story at Auburn, where Gus Malzahn won big in 2013 with a lot of Chizik’s recruits… and has failed to do anything since.
Yet, if you were to look at the past eight weeks — realizing that Pitt would be unbeaten had Iowa not made a 57-yard field goal — it’s pretty hard to be a Narduzzi doubter. The culture he helped bring to Michigan State alongside Mark Dantonio was impossible to ignore. His attention to detail and his fearlessness as a risk-taker make him a clear upgrade over the one Pitt coach to win 10 games in a season since 1981: Dave Wannstedt. (Walt Harris won nine games twice, and Sherrill successor Foge Fazio won nine in 1982. Sherrill had left for Texas A&M.)
*
Pitt. North Carolina. Two programs soared for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, only to fall upon hard times for the next third of a century, with very few interruptions (and eruptions) of joy.
UNC has a better defensive coordinator, Pittsburgh an improved head coach. Both teams won at preseason ACC Coastal favorite Georgia Tech. Neither team has yet managed to make an ACC Championship Game appearance.
No, a national championship run won’t be halted on Thursday night, but the Tar Heels and Panthers are playing the most significant game in their shared histories since 1979, a year when Pittsburgh was the most prosperous sports city in the nation with the World Series champion Pirates and the back-to-back Super Bowl champion Steelers.
Will Pittsburgh begin a new Pax Pantherana on Thursday, or will North Carolina gain more than a bread Crum of success and respect in a year when the usual doubts about Larry Fedora might give way to a transformed view of the Tar Heels’ sideline sultan?
Are you ready for some Thursday Night Football? The ACC Coastal game of the year awaits.
