Pitt looks to fix mistakes that led to Rutgers loss

After being physically overmatched against Rutgers Saturday night in a 20-10 loss, the Pitt… After being physically overmatched against Rutgers Saturday night in a 20-10 loss, the Pitt football team has a week off to recover.

The week off will serve well for both lines because Rutgers dominated the line of scrimmage on both offense and defense.

The Panthers’ defensive line got ran all over by Rutgers’ Ray Rice, who put up an impressive 225 yards rushing on 39 carries. The offensive line only helped Pitt gain 67 yards on 26 carries and allowed four sacks and left quarterback Tyler Palko scrambling for his life.

“They played a great game and they really took it to us,” Pitt center Joe Villani said after the game. “They were faster than anyone we had faced, but I think we made a lot of mental mistakes that hurt us, too. I didn’t feel like we were being physically overmatched, we just didn’t execute, we didn’t do things well enough.”

While Rutgers did dictate much of the tempo, Pitt hung with the No. 19 team in the nation for 60 minutes. Pitt will need that experience because two out of the four games remaining are against top-10 opponents (No. 4 WVU and No. 6 Louisville).

The Panthers know that while they have a lot to improve upon from Saturday’s game, they have a lot to build on as well. “The good thing for us is we have some big games left and we still have a lot to play for,” Villani added after the game.

A “lot to play for” seems to be a bit of an understatement considering what’s at stake for the Panthers.

After the bye week this week, Pitt will travel to Florida to take on South Florida and then up to Connecticut for a matchup against UConn. After that the Panthers are back home for the Backyard Brawl against WVU and then close out their season with Louisville.

While the games against USF and UConn should end up as victories, the Panthers will take the same approach to not get “trapped” by these two road contests before they finish the season with two huge home games in terms of shaking out the Big East standings.

If the Panthers can win both of those games, they will be 8-2 overall and 4-1 in the conference with a great opportunity to upset superb seasons by the Mountaineers and Cardinals when they pay a visit to Heinz Field.

But they can’t do that until they can improve on some things. The Panthers entered the game against Rutgers as the least penalized team in the Big East, but they had an uncharacteristic eight penalties that cost them 53 yards.

Head coach Dave Wannstedt knows that those kinds of mistakes are ones that keep teams from winning, but he wasn’t ready to place full blame on his players.

At the weekly Big East coaches teleconference, Wannstedt said that “there were some real questionable [penalties].”

“We had eight penalties Saturday, we had only two last week [in a win against Central Florida].” Wannstedt continued. “Of the eight, I think half of them were very questionable to be quite honest with you. We’ll address them because we know how important penalties are, but sometimes things happen that are out of your control.”

One thing that is not out of the Panthers control is their own destiny. With the way the schedule is set up, Pitt has a chance to make a national statement if it can win its next two road games (they’ll be unbeaten on the road for the year) and then upset either one of those top-10 foes.

None of that will happen unless the Panthers can look past their mistakes against Rutgers and move on.