Oct 29, 2016 4 min read

Most of the guys who played for the last Pitt football team to win a mythical national championship are grandpas.

It was 40 years ago.

Tony Dorsett is 62 years old.

There hasn’t been a Pitt football team with less than three losses in a season since 1981. Thirty-five years ago, coach Jackie Sherrill, who took an amazing amount of criticism, finished 11-1 for the third year in a row.

I hosted “Pitt Hotline” on WTAE Radio back then and most of my time was spent defending Sherrill from callers who didn’t think the victory margin was big enough.

He was 33-3 for those three years.

Pitt’s going to lose at least three games this season since loss No. 3 came against Virginia Tech Thursday night at Heinz Field.

After the game, there was as much, if not more, talk about the attendance than there was about the loss.

The crowd was listed at 40,000 and change but nobody was buying that figure. Most realistic estimates were well below 40,000.

The consensus seemed to be that Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania, Pitt or all of the above should be embarrassed by all the empty seats.

Why?

How many should have shown up?

Pitt was 5-2 and so was Virginia Tech, who came in ranked 25th in the country.

It was Thursday night. That might be a good night for watching a game on TV but it’s not so good if you’re a Pitt alum who lives 50 or 60 miles away and has to work Friday.

But forget all the legitimate reasons and the lame excuses for not showing up, Pitt got the crowd that it deserved.

Mediocrity has never been a big seller in the Pittsburgh market. Not because it’s a bad sports market, but because it’s a small sports market.

While Pitt was playing Virginia Tech, there was a Stanley Cup champion hockey team playing across town.

Nobody who went to the game at Heinz Field could have felt cheated. It was an entertaining game that was still up for grabs in the last three minutes. In case you haven’t noticed, Pitt games have been a lot more entertaining than Steelers (or most NFL) games this year.

Pitt is going to have to do a lot more winning to make those empty seats at Heinz Field disappear.

It’s a classic chicken-or-the-egg situation. The crowds won’t be there without more wins, and more wins won’t come unless recruits who like/want to play in front of big crowds start signing up.

The crowd Thursday was actually a little better than Pitt deserves and the good news is it was proof there is a good-sized core of college football fans out there reserving seats on the inevitable bandwagon.

• With all the attention that Wrigley Field is getting from the World Series finally making a stop there, I think it’s my duty to point out again that Forbes Field was nicer. Much nicer.

• Do you realize there’s a good chance that you’re paying $30 a year for NBA games? Based on what ESPN and Turner Television charge cable and satellite customers, that’s what it comes to. And according to a a jaw-dropping story by Outkick the Coverage, ESPN is in big, big trouble after losing over 600,000 subscribers this month. That’s double the number of losses per month over the past couple of years.

Who knew ESPN has been losing 300,000 subscribers per month? As OTC points out, that, coupled with a 24 percent drop in Monday Night Football ratings, is making for a bad year for the top sports network.

Did you know that if your cable or satellite carries ESPN, then you pay $21.50 per year for Monday Night Football?

If you had the ability to pay only for the Monday Night Football games you were interested in watching, at $1.50 apiece, how many would you watch?

ESPN is into the NFL, NBA, MLB and NCAA for billions in rights fees. When they made those deals they weren’t anticipating losing millions of subscribers at seven bucks a pop.

OTC calls it a dead network walking.

Ouch!

I wonder how much I’m paying for each WNBA game or the Spelling Bee.

John Steigerwald writes a Sunday column for the Observer-Reporter.