In a new week, Pitt focuses on the task at hand
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There won’t be many days with more emotional punch than Saturday had for the Pitt football team.
It was Senior Day for 19 players. It was the last game at Heinz Field this season for the whole squad. There was a revenge factor at play after last season’s close loss to Virginia Tech. Bowl eligibility was one the line, as was a chance to move one step closer to a potential Coastal Division championship.
The Panthers responded to an emotionally-charged day by putting in their most dominant performance in a long time. Now they get to travel to Winston-Salem to face Wake Forest on Saturday, where they can clinch the division title - as long as they don’t have a letdown.
So how can Pitt match the energy it had at Heinz Field on Saturday? According to the players, the answer is one they already know well.
“Our coaches will do a great job when we go in tomorrow of, ‘Hey, it’s over with, we have Wake Forest on the clock, we have to get this one,’” senior running back Darrin Hall said after Saturday’s 52-22 win over Virginia Tech. “So really, the leadership mixed with the great coaches, we’re going to be focused and we’re not going to let this one slip away.”
The coaches will obviously do everything they can to make sure the players are focused on Wake Forest, but the players believe they have a key element working in their favor, too. Redshirt senior linebacker Elijah Zeise said Saturday that this year’s Pitt team is “closer than a lot of teams that I’ve been a part of in the past.”
That’s important, because it helped guide the Panthers through some tough times this season, chiefly the blowout losses to Penn State and Central Florida and a loss at North Carolina - “That one hurt,” Zeise conceded - but that togetherness, the maturity of the team and the leadership kept the ship afloat during those tough times.
“There were a lot of times, like when we played UCF and got blown out, there were a lot of times when it would have been easy (to say), ‘Oh, this is going to be like last season again,’” Zeise said. “But I think, again, it’s a testament to the maturity. I think at that point we were 1-1 or 2-1 in the ACC and everyone kept saying, ‘Alright, our goals are still there; we just have to keep going back to work every day and doing what we have to do.’ And this is where we are now.”
Where Pitt is now is No. 1 in the Coastal with two games left, and the Panthers only need to win one of them to clinch the division. Just like the togetherness and maturity and leadership carried the team through the challenges early in the season, so will it also be expected to keep the team focused on the task at hand.
Call it the “1-0 mentality;” the coaches tell the players to simply be 1-0 each week as a way of emphasizing the current opponent, and it seems to have worked.
“It just means that we’re trying to take every game one at a time,” Zeise said. “I think, especially with how well we’ve been doing, it’s easy to get caught looking ahead at different teams, so I think this ‘1-0 in the ACC every week’ - I think that is the mentality that we need to keep. And we’ve done a pretty good job of it, just focusing in on the task at hand and what we need to get done.”