Pitt gets set for a challenge in ACC tournament
After being one of the ACC’s best teams for the better part of the 2021 season, Pitt will enter the conference baseball tournament as the bottom seed in its pool with a tough path to the semifinals and beyond.
The Panthers (22-19 overall, 16-17 ACC) will enter the ACC Baseball Championship as the No. 10 seed, and they will be in Pool C along with No. 3 N.C. State and No. 6 North Carolina.
Pitt will open play on Tuesday with a 7 p.m. game against UNC at Truist Field in Charlotte. The Panthers will then face N.C. State at 7 p.m. on Thursday, and pool play will conclude when the Tar Heels and Wolfpack meet on Friday night.
Pitt will be the road team against UNC and the home team when it takes on N.C. State.
The team with the best record in the pool will advance to the semifinals on Saturday, but if there is a tie, the advantage goes to the team with the highest seed. That means Pitt, as the low seed, would need to win both games to advance.
That’s a far fall from where Pitt was just a few weeks ago. After being picked to finish dead last in the conference, the Panthers opened ACC play with a surprise sweep of Florida State in Tallahassee. After a 1-2 stumble at Duke, Pitt took two out of three at Georgia Tech and then did the same thing a week later at Virginia to post an impressive 8-4 conference record.
Home series against Virginia Tech and Notre Dame proved to be trouble, as the Panthers were swept by the Hokies and went 1-2 against the Irish, but the rebounded to take five out of six against North Carolina and Miami.
Things went haywire after that. Following the UNC series, Pitt had six consecutive games canceled due to COVID-19 and went more than two weeks without a game. When the Panthers finally got back on the field against an ACC opponent, they took two out of three against Boston College, but they dropped the last game in that series, and that was the start of a seven-game losing streak to end the regular season.
That streak left Pitt with a losing record in conference games. Even worse, it included a home sweep at the hands of N.C. State, who the Panthers will have to beat on Thursday night if they want to advance in the conference tournament.
If Pitt can beat UNC and N.C. State this week, the Panthers will face the winner of Pool B, which is led by No. 2 seed Georgia Tech, No. 7 Louisville and No. 11 Clemson. The Panthers swept Georgia Tech but did not face Louisville (the series was canceled) or Clemson (the Tigers weren’t on the Panthers’ schedule) this season.
Pitt’s success this season drew national notice. Baseball America gave Pitt its highest ranking this season, listing the Panthers at No. 14 in the final poll of April. Pitt was ranked for nine consecutive weeks in that poll. The National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association and D1Baseball also ranked the Panthers for nine consecutive weeks, while Collegiate Baseball had Pitt in its rankings for eight consecutive weeks.
The Panthers also showed up in the Perfect Game top 25 as well as the USA Today Coaches Poll, where Pitt debuted at No. 15 in mid-March and then fell out of the poll the next two weeks before showing up in the top 20 for five consecutive weeks.
Despite Pitt’s late-season swoon, the Panthers still posted their best record as a member of the ACC. Since joining the conference for the 2014 season, Pitt has never won more than 11 games against ACC opponents, and the Panthers’ .484 win percentage in conference games surpasses the .367 they posted when they went 11-19 in 2014 and 2018.
This season is also the second time Pitt has qualified for the ACC Baseball Championship tournament. The last time the Panthers made the tournament was 2018, when they beat UNC and Georgia Tech to win their pool before bowing out in a semifinal loss to Louisville.