Kaback: Graham’s departure won’t undermine our football obsession

We Pittsburghers don’t have the tallest skyscraper or a beachfront boardwalk, but we have… We Pittsburghers don’t have the tallest skyscraper or a beachfront boardwalk, but we have football.

Few words could be written about our city without remarking on the unique love affair between its inhabitants and the game. Somewhere amid the decaying industrial smoke stacks and dwindling population is a pride that maybe shouldn’t be there. In the wake of former head football coach Todd Graham’s departure from Pitt, I wonder if he even noticed.

By all accounts, Pittsburgh should be a ghost town, replete with lifeless souls that missed the last train out of a desolate place. After all, this is a city built on steel. Its heroes — Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon — persist only on street signs and building facades, relegated otherwise to the history books.

A city with a population that has fallen to just under half its previous high and a namesake industry that moved on decades ago is not supposed to be proud. Politicians have even tried to tell us so, promising either free trade or union protectionism: both options implying that there is something fundamentally wrong with the work we do. But when I enrolled at Pitt, I became part of a city that had completely transformed itself. The G-20 Summit that descended on our home in 2009 shined a spotlight on the turnaround of a community that overcame economic depression and rebuilt its name. And although some will attribute this to the steel that flows through the veins of this city and the blue-collar work ethic that forged a home out of three rivers and a couple of hills, the real glue that has held this place together is football. Rational or not, we commit ourselves to our teams. There may be doubts about the effect that one man’s hurdle or firm catch can have on ensuring the survival of our home, but I don’t ask science to explain the Immaculate Reception.

It’s the ethos of Pittsburgh that football embodies: Throw everything at us; we welcome it. The Steel Curtain was no mere football unit, but an inspiration to those who had fallen on hard times, to a city that needed to fight back. It represented all those who wondered what a future without factories and smoke meant and decided that they could take it, that they could stop the oncoming economic blow.

I didn’t grow up a Pitt fan, and I didn’t know this was a football school. I’d heard the names Dan Marino, Tony Dorsett and Larry Fitzgerald, but I didn’t know they were connected to Pitt — that they had once walked the same halls as me and lived on the same grounds.

I didn’t know that we once had one of the fiercest rivalries in the country with Penn State. I didn’t know there was once a Pitt Stadium that stood within walking distance of the Cathedral. In fact, I didn’t even know that Pitt had ever won a national championship. I learned to love the history of our football team and the traditions of our school. I discovered the pride of this city.

Enter former head football coach Todd Graham. Exciting? Yes. We were ready for a new brand of football. Just as the grit and muscle of the steel industry is now overshadowed, so too did we hope that Pitt would rise to top of college football with a new approach to the game.

He spoke like a visionary with his “my-way-or-the-highway” attitude, but it concealed something else. Some may claim they always found him suspicious, but the truth is we’ll maybe never know what really compelled him to abandon our school after only one season. Like the star-crossed lovers that football and Pittsburgh are, emotions don’t always make sense.

Maybe he never understood what football truly means to this city. Or maybe he understood that Pitt’s blue and gold are more than just colors on a uniform, that they’re a symbol of pride that shouldn’t logically be there, and that’s why he left. Regardless, I bid him good riddance.

The Appalachian hills have borne silent witness to Pittsburgh for hundreds of years. They’ve felt the agony of war in Pontiac’s Rebellion. They’ve seen the billowing dark clouds of steel. They’ve heard the cheers rise from football stadiums. They’ve experienced the love story that rivals those taught in our academic buildings. I just hope new head coach Paul Chryst can understand.

Contact Andrew at AAK47@pitt.edu