The Panthers continued their snowball-like slide down the mountain that once was their 2024 campaign by getting shellacked, 37-9, by the Louisville Cardinals Saturday evening at L&N Credit Union Stadium.

That’s the who, what, when, where and why of Saturday’s festivities. As for the run-down of the game? I don’t feel like it’s necessary. I will say that the Cardinals jumped out to a 34-0 lead before Pitt rallied with nine points to make the score not seem as bad as it actually was.

So what happened to these 2024 Pitt Panthers? How do you go from a 7-0 start, the best for the program since 1982, to completely falling apart? How do you go from actually dreaming about an ACC title AND a spot in the first-ever 12-team college football national championship playoff to dreading an invitation to the Pinstripe Bowl in New York City?

They’re the Panthers, that’s how. I don’t think any diehard fan of the football program is surprised by this fall from grace. I’m sure they’re depressed and disappointed, but they’re certainly not surprised. This has been their (our, I’m a Pitt fan, too) reality since the moment Dan Marino won the 1982 Sugar Bowl with a last-minute touchdown pass. Television enthusiasts talk about when a show jumped the shark; you can point directly to that moment on New Year’s Day 1982 as the time Pitt’s football program, one that won a national title and was a perennial top-five team for close to a decade, jumped over that shark.

Things just haven’t been the same since. Pitt fans have been stuck in this cycle of mediocre-to-worse football. The program has only played in two premium bowl games–the Fiesta Bowl and the Peach Bowl–since January of 1984. The top 10 is such rarefied air for us that if the Panthers were ever ranked that high again, we might need oxygen to get through it. I think this is why we are so disappointed if not surprised. We were dreaming of the good old days again. We could be proud and boastful. For two months, we could look at a rival like Penn State and say, “See? We’re on your level again.”

But Pitt isn’t on the level of the Nittany Lions–and even they’ve been a level below the national championship scene for decades.

Maybe we should have seen the cracks in the Panthers’ armor during their 7-0 start. They had to rally from three touchdowns down to defeat Cincinnati in Week 2. They were trailing WVU by 10 points with just minutes left in the fourth quarter before roaring back to win that game. The 17-15 win over Cal was about as ugly as a game could be.

Perhaps we should be lucky that Pitt won enough games early to survive this collapse and still be eligible for a lower-tier bowl game.

Maybe Pitt can defeat Boston College in the regular-season finale and earn a spot in the Holiday Bowl. At least that would be a warm climate, right?