Rutgers' pressure too much for Panthers, Sunseri in showdown
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Pitt running back Ray Graham tries to jump over Rutgers defensive back Brandon Jones in the first half Saturday in Piscataway, N.J. Graham finished with 165 yards, but it wasn't enough to stop the Scarlet Knights.
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PISCATAWAY, N.J. -- Ugly. Awful. Embarrassingly bad.
These are all words which could accurately describe the way Pitt played Saturday against Rutgers, but those words would not give enough credit to the Scarlet Knights, who had a large hand in the way the Panthers played.
That's why Pitt coach Todd Graham didn't mince any words when he described the Panthers' 34-10 trouncing at the hands of Rutgers in a Big East Conference game in front of a crowd of 46,079 at High Point Solutions Stadium.
"We absolutely played our worst game of the season," Graham said. "You have to give Rutgers a lot of credit, they played extremely hard and I don't want to say one word to take away from the job that Rutgers did. First and foremost, it is my job to get our guys ready and we didn't have the team prepared to play.
"It is very disappointing and unacceptable how we played. But give Rutgers an awful lot of credit, there are no excuses. That is embarrassing to me. Personally, the difference in the game was Rutgers' defense -- their pressure. They came out and whipped our tail."
The Scarlet Knights (4-1, 2-0) defense clearly was too much to handle for the Panthers (3-3, 1-1) as it brought pressure from every angle and clearly was able to disrupt the flow of Pitt's offense.
Rutgers pressure forced four Pitt turnovers and netted six sacks. The Panthers also had nine penalties.
Pitt center Ryan Turnley said the offensive line had its worst game of the season, but it wasn't as much what Rutgers did schematically, it was just that the Scarlet Knights whipped the Panthers up front for the entire game.
"I don't think we made a lot of the right calls and things like that -- we just got beat," Turnley said. "We battled the whole game but we just go beat. There was nothing that surprised us with their defensive package, we just have to be able to pick it up and we didn't. No excuses, that was our job."
The sacks and pressure clearly got to Pitt quarterback Tino Sunseri as he was knocked around for most of the first half and took some huge hits early just as he released the ball.
Sunseri, who was hobbled several times, threw two first-half interceptions. Drives that weren't killed by turnovers were stalled by a sequence of penalties and protection issues that led to sacks and other mishaps that buried the Panthers drive after drive.
First Published October 9, 2011 12:00 am
