USA Today picks Pitt! (As 84th best team)

More college football countdowns as USA Today weighed in. If you haven't seen it yet, the site/paper/whatever is doing a countdown of all D-I football teams. Needless to say, Pitt didn't fare very well, checking in at No. 84 overall.

Yikes.

Things weren't all bad, though. At least they linked Cardiac Hill and Pitt Blather as blogs to track. But yeah, other than that, it was all bad:

My general feeling is that this isn't a bowl team. There are winnable games, however, and then there's this: Pitt's defense is good enough to carry this team. But to say that the Panthers can win six or more games without a strong offense would be misleading – and this offense has some major holes to address before getting started against Florida State in early September.

Really hard to disagree with a lot of that. I'll say this, though - I do expect this team to make a bowl game. Call it homerism, which this blog tries to steer clear of. Call it stupidity. Call it whatever. But the point about winnable games is too much for me to overlook. New Mexico, Duke, Virginia, ODU, Navy, Syracuse ... I'm not saying Pitt will win all of those games. If they did, it would be a fairly sizable feat, actually. But man, between those games and getting up for one or two others, if this team can't win six games, that'd be borderline embarrassing.

Yeah, there are lots of question marks. I even said recently that there are maybe more questions than I've seen around the team in a while. Still ... plenty of games Pitt should be in.

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