Pittsburgh Panthers Tickets

About The Pittsburgh Panthers

Once it relocated to its current campus in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood in 1908, the school got its current name, the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt was a private school for most of its history until it became a part of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education in 1966. Pitt is recognized for its National Landmark centerpiece building, the Cathedral of Learning, its central role in developing the first polio vaccine and fielding nationally competitive NCAA Division 1 athletic programs.

The Pitt Panthers are the athletic teams at the University of Pittsburgh. Recently, an all-sports ranking was done by Sports Illustrated on Campus and Pitt was ranked 17th among all of the US’s universities in terms of the overall strength of its athletic program. It’s one of just 5 current NCAA Division 1A schools to have won numerous national championships in both football and basketball. Football, played at Heinz Field, is traditionally the most popular sport at the University of Pittsburgh and has been played at the highest levels there since 1889. Over the more than 100 years of competitive football at Pitt, the University helped pioneer the sport by establishing the use of numbers on jerseys and desegregating the Sugar Bowl, among other things. Some of football’s all-time greatest coaches and players have played at Pitt, like Pop Warner, Jock Sutherland, Marshall Goldberg, Joe Schmidt, Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett, Hugh Green, Mark May, Dan Marino, Bill Fralic and Larry Fitzgerald. Pitt is among the top schools in terms of all-time wins and can claim 9 national championships and boast 86 players that have been chosen as first-team All-Americans.

Pitt’s largest rivalry is with West Virginia University; it started with football games dating back to 1895. The annual contest, called the Backyard Brawl, is due to the closeness of the 2 schools’ main campuses and the shared boundary between western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. This game is played on Thanksgiving weekend, traditionally. In 2007, the schools played the 100th game of the Backyard Brawl. Their biggest former rival was Penn State University; it’s still a heated rivalry among some fans, though. It began in 1905 and ended in 2000 with Penn State leading the series. The teams stopped play because of long standing feuding between coaches and administrators. In 2005, Pitt started a rivalry with the University of Cincinnati Bearcats; it’s called the River City Rivalry. The annual Big East Conference game comes from the fact that both cities are on the Ohio River and includes a trophy of a riverboat telegraph.