Thoughts on the City Game

As you know from a previous post, I attended the Pitt-Duquesne basketball game this past weekend, aka, The City Game, and I found it to be a bit of a lackluster event in spite of the best efforts of the schools' respective pep bands, cheerleaders, dance teams, and, oh yeah, the basketball teams.

Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that on Thanksgiving Weekend, neither school was in session so the student sections on both sides were virtually empty, and that the Consol Energy Center was only half filled.  Mainly, however, I think that this stems from the one sided nature of what this "rivalry" has become.  Pitt has now won this game thirteen years in a row, and 31 of the past 35 times it has been played.

This year, Pitt was tired, I believe, from two tough games earlier in the week in Brooklyn, and allowed the Dukes to make a game of it for awhile...

...but in the end, overall talent prevailed, and a 17 point Pitt victory was the result.

I have opined on this subject in the past ( http://www.grandstander.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-city-game-steel-bowl-and-special.html ), but this game just does not have the significance that it once held in this town.  Pitt upped its ante as a basketball school decades ago when it joined the Big East, and now the ACC, and somewhere along the way, Duquesne made the choice that they were not going to make the "All In" commitment needed to compete in the elite circles of college basketball, or even in the top echelon of the Atlantic 10.  Duquesne shouldn't be criticized if this is the direction they wish to take, and, in fact, perhaps they are placing athletics in the priority that people often SAY that they should be (except, of course, when your school loses all the time), so perhaps they should also consider stepping down, perhaps to the Northeast Conference, and compete with schools, such as Robert Morris and St. Francis, to name two local institutions, who seem to place athletics in a similar perspective.

Jamie Dixon and Jim Ferry can say all they want about how much this "rivalry game" means, but if they were REALLY honest, I am guessing the neither school would be too upset of this game was no longer scheduled.

As far as the Event went this past Saturday, my vote for most outstanding performance goes to this guy:

Yep.  The kid who played the bass drum in the Pitt Pep Band was more enthusiastic than any player on the court.  He would actually leave his feet and jump into the air as he beat hell out of that drum when the band played, and his spiked Mohawk hair style only added to his panache. Loved him!