What a disappointing end to a disappointing season for the PITT football program. I’ll do a more in-depth final post when I can find some time but here’s a few thoughts after this abhorrent bowl game.
What I saw was a group of players that finally realized all that had transpired this season was real and it would be best to get the game over with as quickly as possible to put the whole 2011 mess behind them. The fire needed for a win and desire to get one just wasn’t there yesterday at all.
I’m not saying that critically either because I understand exactly why they felt that way. As Chas said earlier this was very much an exhibition game and literally meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. That is a strong opinion but after watching the Mustangs bend our OL and DL to their wills in the first quarter I knew that we weren’t seeing their best efforts out there.
SMU didn’t have the best lineman we played all year but we made them look like NFL types out there. They held us to 30 rushing yards. 30! That’s 110 yards below our season average. They literally manhandled our OL.
On defense we played the “Hot knife through Butter” scheme in the first quarter and that was enough to not only give SMU a 21-0 lead going into the second quarter but allowed SMU to put the rest of the game into cruise control knowing that with Sunseri behind center there was no way in hell we were going to close that gap, and we didn’t.
Look, this really wasn’t that unexpected, was it? After all the crap that happened over the last three weeks, on top of a disappointing regular season, the Football Gods were not happy with us.
