Anytime a Pitt team loses, pretty much any sport -- football, basketball, intramural frisbee golf on Flagstaff Hill -- there's this public rush to pull down the bright red lever and let the sirens wail.
Sorry, not feeling it.
Not on this sunny Saturday afternoon at Heinz Field, anyway.
"This hurts," James Conner was speaking in the softest of tones shortly after the Panthers flopped in the second half, fell hard to Iowa, 24-20, and failed to open the season 4-0. "And now we know this feeling. We don't want to feel it anymore. We want to change this program."
I think they will. Call me crazy or burn a couch in my front lawn -- oh, wait, that's another school -- but what I witnessed over the course of this game was what should have been been expected of an undefeated team that also had gone mostly unchallenged to this point: Their strengths remained strengths, right up until the opponent wised up, sharpened up and attacked the weaknesses.
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