So after being thoroughly embarrassed in the GT homecoming game, it appears Pitt and Pitt fans will be doing some soul searching in the coming week.

Where is this team going to go from here? I've been thinking a lot about that since the game ended on Saturday.

I took two three things away from the game on Saturday that I thought were pretty important:

1. The start was horrific. I don't think I've ever seen a football game start so badly for one team. I felt like Voytik was down and that shouldn't have been a fumble. I thought it was questionable whether Boyd fumbled, but I could see the referee's point in not overturning the ruling on the field. I'd like to think that Connor just ran out of steam and wasn't purposefully slowing down on his run but either way he should have been protecting the ball better. Bennett's fumble was awful and he just looked unprepared on the play. Voytik and Officer have been having trouble with the exchanges since Officer has been playing. They really need to get that down.

No team has any business coming back after that type of start.

2. Even so, this team was still in the game. It's hard to believe, but this was only a 2 score game at halftime. I thought that the team played with heart. I really feel as though Chryst's teams have more heart than any other team I've seen from Pitt. I hate to see them down in these circumstances but I at least admire that they continue to scrap when times get tough.

3. Even if we didn't have the fumbles, I think we would have had a really tough time stopping the option. We just did not have the ability to stop GT's A backs on the edge. Our defense is just not very good and our offense is not yet good enough to carry this team.

It's really hard to pinpoint what went wrong in this game because it was so wrong right from the start. There just weren't many bright spots.

That was the most bizarre 1st Q I have ever watched!

To me, I'm most certainly in the minority but I'll be honest and say that I didn't have a problem with Chryst punting on that 4th and 3 at the GT 44 with about 2:30 min to go in the 2nd Q. Winslow was having a good year punting and pinning teams back, the defense rebounded nicely after a rough start forcing GT on the previous two or three(?) possesions to 3 and outs (IIRC), they had three timeouts. Indeed, they had GT where they wanted them on third and long after punting but then gave up that first third down.

Anyway, I'm taking a wait and see approach to these last four games. This team is very frustrating to watch and reading the comments after the game by some of the players was headscratching. Let's see if Pitt can rally and win against Duke. It's hard to believe they are actually favored.