Football: Panthers look to bounce back from tough loss to Irish

This is not the way the Pitt football team envisioned its season starting.

Now at 2-3, after… This is not the way the Pitt football team envisioned its season starting.

Now at 2-3, after losing 23-17 at Notre Dame on Saturday, the Panthers, who were ranked No. 15 in the preseason, must prepare for Big East play.

Head coach Dave Wannstedt’s team came out of the gate looking strong on Saturday.  The defense forced a three and out series and turned the ball over to the offense. Quarterback Tino Sunseri led his offense down the field, but Pitt was forced to settle for a Dan Hutchins 26-yard field goal.

“We’ve got to finish. We’re moving the ball, but we’re just killing ourselves,” running back Dion Lewis said. “When we get down there we’ve got to get hungry and just want to score touchdowns instead of settling for field goals.”

Lewis ran for 63 yards on 13 attempts while fellow running back Ray Graham gained 44 yards on eight carries.

“You want to score every time. Sometimes you come up short,” receiver Jon Baldwin said. “You’ve got to keep working hard at it and maybe next time we’ll connect on those touchdowns.”

Baldwin had one of his best games of the season, catching nine balls for 111 yards and a big fourth quarter touchdown.

The Panthers’ biggest troubles fell into the field goal unit’s lap on Saturday. Dan Hutchins converted one of two field goal attempts. He converted the early attempt from 26 yards out but missed a second-quarter try from one yard deeper before a bad hold caused another botched field goal attempt.

“On one our holder dropped the ball. He spun the ball and he lost control of it. [Hutchins] is as good a dependable kicker as we’ve got and he just pushed it to the right,” Wannstedt said. “Bad day; bad day kicking field goals.”

Pitt was trailing 17-3 at the half but Pitt defensive coordinator Phil Bennett made some good adjustments to help his unit for the second half. The Panthers only let up six more points after halftime.

“We weren’t going to let that happen again,” linebacker Max Gruder said. “We played horribly in the first half, but to come back in the second half it shows flashes, but it all doesn’t really matter if you let up points like that in the first half.”

Pitt scored late in the third quarter on a gutsy 4-yard run by Sunseri, who completed 27 of 39 passes for 272 yards with an interception and two total touchdowns.

Wannstedt continued to explain that Sunseri’s maturation will be a process, but he feels that he made good decisions throughout the game, evidenced by when he connected with Jon Baldwin for a big 56-yard touchdown.

“We talked about that probably day one of training camp — scrambles. Baldwin is a smart guy, as soon as he saw me break contain then he understood that he needed to run the go route, and he did that, and he was open and I just wanted to be sure that he got the ball,” Sunseri said.

The Panthers got the ball back late in the fourth quarter but weren’t able to sustain a drive.  The Irish secondary broke up Sunseri’s fourth down throw to Baldwin.

Pitt will not be able to hang its head, as conference play starts this week.  The team travels to Syracuse, N.Y., to take on the surprising 4-1 (1-0) Syracuse Orange at noon  Saturday.