A fitting way to clinch the division

If there has been a them in Pitt’s turnaround this season, a common thread through the Panthers’ rebound from starting the year 2-3 to posting a 5-1 mark over the last six, it might be comeback wins.

Not every game in that stretch has been a comeback - Pitt simply blew out Virginia Tech last week - but there have been more than a few.

There was the Virginia game two weeks ago. The Cavaliers were ahead 10-7 at halftime and maintained that lead until the end of the third quarter, when Pitt took over and held control through the final 15 minutes.

A week earlier, Pitt trailed at halftime again. Duke was up 21-17 and then made it 28-17 early in the third. Pitt scored two touchdowns and a field goal in the third quarter, but the Blue Devils kept scoring, too, and the Panthers went into the fourth quarter trailing 42-35 but outscored Duke 19-3 to pull out a win.

And two weeks before the Duke game, with Pitt reeling from back-to-back losses to North Carolina and Central Florida, the Panthers trailed Syracuse 34-27 in the fourth quarter, having blown a 27-17 third-quarter lead. But a long field goal and overtime heroics brought Pitt back in that one.

So when the Panthers went into halftime at Wake Forest on Saturday looking at a 10-6 scoreboard that favored the Deacons, they weren’t too concerned. They’d been here before, looking at halftime and fourth-quarter deficits and then overcoming them.

And that’s exactly what they did, outscoring Wake Forest 28-3 in the final two quarters to take a convincing 34-13 win and the ACC Coastal Division trophy back to Pittsburgh.

“I think at that moment, I had the biggest feeling of confidence in my heart for the team,” redshirt senior linebacker Seun Idowu said after the game. “I really wasn’t that worried.”

“It’s just another day,” sophomore quarterback Kenny Pickett said of the team’s attitude at halftime. “We’ve been through it all. We’ve been through terrible weather, we’ve been through comeback wins, last-second touchdowns, overtime wins, we’ve been through it all so nothing fazes us right now.

“We came in at halftime, we all looked at each other; no one was screaming and yelling. It was just, ‘Alright, let’s go. It’s a game now. We have to go finish this thing.’ And we went out there and did it.”

Pickett certainly went out and did it. In the second half, he completed 9-of-12 passes for 169 yards and three touchdowns, including a four-yard fade to Rafael Araujo-Lopes that put Pitt ahead, a post bomb to Taysir Mack, who scored after stiff-arming a defender, and a 20-yard strike to Maurice Ffrench to make sure the game stayed out of reach for Wake Forest.

That passing performance was needed, as Pitt’ prolific running game, which amassed more than 1,200 yards in the previous three games, was decidedly less so on Saturday. The Panthers had just 58 rushing yards in the first half against Wake, so the offense needed another answer and got one from the passing attack.

“We find a different way every week to do it,” head coach Pat Narduzzi. “It wasn’t a great first half but our guys find a way to get it done. It says a lot about the character and persistence. We’ve talked a lot about that and our guys got it done.”

“It’s just been like that all year,” said redshirt senior running back Qadree Ollison. “Like I said, keep swinging - swinging for the first quarter, swinging for the second quarter and just wearing teams down, seeing if they’re going to keep swinging back at us through the third and fourth quarter. That’s just Pitt football. It’s blue-collar. That’s just a reflection of how we were raised or trained, to just keep swinging and swinging until you have no more swings left. And if you do that, you should be satisfied with the results.”

Pitt has been more than satisfied with the results of late. After that 2-3 start to the season, the Panthers have won five of the last six with all five wins coming against ACC opponents en route to the program’s first division title since joining the ACC in 2013. And with the way they’ve won those games, it was fitting that Saturday’s game, when the Panthers could finally clinch the division, would call for one more second-half comeback.

The players were certainly prepared for it.

“Our kids had a lot of faith in the second half,” Narduzzi said, “when a lot of teams might panic on the road and go, ‘Oh gosh, we’re in a tight situation.’ But we had faith in there and said, ‘Hey guys, we didn’t play very good in the first half we’re going to go out and knock them out in the second half.’ And that’s what our kids do. They just do what they do.”