The ignominy of 0-18
As time ran out on Pitt’s regular season in the finale at Notre Dame Wednesday night, the word “ignominious” seemed a little too gentle.
With a 73-56 loss to the Irish, the Panthers concluded what was, without question, the program’s worst conference season in history, a minor distinction that will be amended to simply “the worst season in history” or at least “the worst season in 50 years” after the team most likely bows out of the ACC Tournament early next week.
If you dig back into the record books, there are teams that won fewer games than Pitt has this season. In 1968-69, the Panthers won four games in a 24-game schedule, and that came after a four-year stretch in which they won less than eight each season.
There were five seasons in the 1950’s with less than eight wins, as well. And that’s the kind of reference point Pitt is dealing with here: To find another season like this one, you have to go back 50+ years. To find another season with a losing streak of at least 10 games, you have to go back to the late 1960’, when Buzz Ridl’s 1968-69 team lost 10 in a row en route to its 4-20 record.
That was the only losing streak of 10 or more games in Pitt history - until this year.
Barring a winning streak in the ACC Tournament next week, Pitt will finish with single-digit wins for the first time in more than 40 years. Back in the 1976-77 season, the Panthers went 6-21 in Tim Grgurich’s second season as head coach.
But even that team, which played in the Eastern Collegiate Basketball League managed to win one conference game, knocking off Duquesne in the regular-season finale. This year’s team, of course, failed to reach even the one-win mark, despite having more opportunities than the 76-77 Panthers did, as the ECBL played just 10 conference games that season.
Through eventual moves to the Big East and eventually the ACC, Pitt won at least five conference games each season for nearly 40 years. That streak, of course, ended last year when the Panthers went 4-14 in Kevin Stallings’ first go-round.
This year, bottom was truly and brutally hit when Pitt went wire-to-wire with zero ACC wins. It’s been more than one full calendar year since the Panthers won a regular-season conference game: they beat Georgia Tech in the ACC Tournament, but they entered the postseason on a four-game losing streak after beating Florida State on Feb. 18, 2017.
Ultimately, all of the historical context and mind-numbing perspective are but unfortunate elaborations on a simple point:
Pitt had 18 opportunities to win a game against ACC competition this season, and in all 18, the Panthers fell short (often by a lot). 18 times this season, Pitt was inferior to a conference opponent.
0-18 is such a stark, cold and unfeeling number that it will likely haunt Pitt fans for quite some time. Even if a coaching change is made and a new coach comes in with hype and excitement and success, it’s going to be awhile before the program is far enough removed from 0-18 to not be reminded of 0-18.
It’s a sports cliché to say that you are what your record says you are, but when you’re 0-18…you’re 0-18. And that seems to say it all.