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Why do people hate Pitt so much?

Since I only started following Penn State in 1975, was the rivalry with Pitt that strong before then, say in the 1960's or early 70's? I know that Pitt was their main rival in the mid to late 70's and into the 80's, but I seem to remember that wins over OSU and ND being bigger than wins over Pitt back then.
 
Hailpitt said:
No rivalry here;) ! By the way every single PSU fan I have had the privilege to meet have been beautiful and saintly people. What is PSU's secret to producing such wonderful folks?
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Well, since you asked....
 
LukeIamYourFather said:
It all boils down to inferiority.
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Bingo. Apparently it is passed down through each graduating class as a rite of passage. Pitt football was becoming irrelevant when I attended PSU in the late 80s and we ran off a bunch of wins against them, but that didn't humble their fan base. To the contrary, for a decade starting in my mid 20s, I often traveled to Pittsburgh doing IT consulting work and frequently socialized with Pitt grads and was amazed, stunned frankly, by their vitriol of PSU. Bottom line, they simply could not acknowledge that Joe Paterno had built a better program in State College. My guess is that's still true.

Ironically, I really like the city and I have nothing against the University of Pittsburgh aside from their fan base. I did a lot of consulting work for them and my best friend did his orthopedics surgery fellowship at UPMC, so I've had a lot of good times in the city. But I can't imagine what it would be like to live there now as a PSU alumnus. Put me firmly in the "I don't want anything to do them category".
 
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Two instances for me. Soph year in engineering at PSU and head home for a weekend in SWPA with some friends. End up at Pitt partying with some HS buddies. One is a Mech Eng major in his jr year. We're hanging out in his room pregaming and I see his course load. Three of them I was currently in or taken as a soph . I had to help him with his homework in one of the classes and make a comment about no wonder PSU is rated highly for most engineering disciplines. His friends came back with some school rankings, SAT and acceptance rate, etc about the two schools. Sorry but I witnessed myself and didnt need made up stats.

Second was after the news broke in 2011, I was at the gym here at home near Annapolis and had a PSU shirt on. A man with a Pitt shirt came up to me in the gym and said loud enough for lots to hear, "are you a little boy fu$k*r like everyone else there?" At that point I began to hate all things pitt related.
 
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Personally: It's not hate. It is the fun of having that younger brother who you are stronger and wiser, in comparison. Not knocking my younger brother, G-d knows we're no better or worse than anyone. It's just a whole lot of fun explaining to Pitt folk why we are a tad more successful in the football arena than they are.
 
zzangeneh said:
They're terrible and only occasionally pick off quality recruits of ours. Why does everyone hate them so much?
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I've been to every @Pitt game since the mid 60s. Going there has been the most consistently terrible away game experience period. Cardiac Hill and old Pitt stadium aside, car trashed while parked, foul-mouthed fans, obscene signs and banners, physical threats to my wife by drunk sPitters.... Honestly I have no clue why we want to become involved with them again. What do we gain by playing them? Of course from what I heard about the last @ Rutgers game I could be in for a similar experience there next fall.
 
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In all honesty I don't see that much hate for sPitt.... OSU and Michie are much bigger rivalries for PSU and it's actually more a curiosity why the sPitt fans are so obsessed with PSU. It's like they cannot move on and focus on the ACC... They seem to be truly like the red headed step child and it's kind of weird actually their infatuation with everything PSU. It's almost as if they are angry and can't figure out how Joe built a powerhouse in the beautiful countryside and college town and sPitt has just continued to sink further into the abyss... Well no worries I don't hate sPitt but kind feel sorry for them and their fans. Guess it hurts not having a big football game to be excited about and a totally lackluster fan base.
 
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Mr. Potter said:
wiser, in comparison. Not knocking my younger brother, G-d knows we're no better or worse than anyone. It's just a whole lot of fun explaining to Pitt folk why we are a tad more successful in the football arena than they are.
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That was meant to address the Pitt post of why we bother with them.

Sorry
 
Big 0 said:
Since I only started following Penn State in 1975, was the rivalry with Pitt that strong before then, say in the 1960's or early 70's? I know that Pitt was their main rival in the mid to late 70's and into the 80's, but I seem to remember that wins over OSU and ND being bigger than wins over Pitt back then.
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That's because when you have a record of 23-7-1 against a team, it's hard to consider that a "rivalry."
 
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It is a reciprocal hate, that seems to perpetuate especially if you live in the Pittsburgh region - ground zero. The Pitt marketing against Penn State runs rampant on sports talk, the TV news and the papers. They are sure to make a big story about any student trouble at Penn State while gloss over anything positive. Woe to any media outlet too if they take a jab at Pitt in a public forum or if they write a PSU story without including a Pitt story as the yinzers go ballistic.

The analysis....Pitt fans have such a jealousy and inferiority complex of all things Penn State that they trip over themselves trying to beat PSU down. Penn Staters are everywhere in Pittsburgh and lets face it, we carry a lot of pride for our school even in the wake of all the Sandusky blowup. This infuriates a few Pitters. Penn State envy and the perceived arrogance of the Penn Stater sends some Pitters over the edge and they grab ahold of every possible PSU negative as a way to gain some ground and counter the successes of their "rival" school. I have respect for them as a school and their athletes, but the large portion of their fan base is warped and is a continual pissing contest with all things Penn State. So what was never intended to be hate has evolved to the point where if you are around it long enough you can't help it. Juvenile and vile comments about Paterno burning in hell is more than just a sick attempt at humor, it is a mindset derived from their hate of PSU. I am happy to reciprocate so long as they remain delusional and worry more about what Penn State is doing than what Pitt is doing.
 
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fairgambit said:
Yep. If we don't win this board will be awash with trolls for months.
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They don't understand that this game doesn't mean anything. Nothing will change based on the outcome other than the OOC records of the teams. Pitt will not suddenly become a recruiting juggernaut based on the outcome of one game if they beat a team still effected by the unjust sanctions. If PSU wins as they should, nothing changes because they are expected to win.

Pitt fans want to win because it's all they have. There is no National title, or ACC title in their future. They likely will never win the coastal division. Their coach will be gone in the near future and the next guy... he will be the one to take them to the promised land... until he leaves too. Beating PSU is ALL they have. They went to an inferior school in every way, campus, athletics, and academics. I understand why they would cling to a victory over a team still effected by unjust sanctions.

PSU fans want to win this game because they don't want to deal with the juvenile Pitt fan base pounding their chest about a meaningless win, just like they've done with the 2000 game, while ignoring the 7 losses in a row before that game. That's a sad statement about the Pitt fan base.
 
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9nationalchampionships said:
Every time I stop over there is a PITT thread here and the same with PSU on PITT’s board. No rivalry though….haha
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Pitt playbook:
1) Start Pitt related thread,
2) Let PSU fans make fun of Pitt for a page or two,
3) Stop by and say "no rivalry here",
4) Pretend that being made fun of makes Pitt relevant,
5) Reference often obsessed about game in September,
6) Report back to the other 17 fans on the lair,
7) Feel Validated,
8) Don't realize that all PSU threads on the lair are also started by Pitt fans since nearly all PSU fans are banned,
9) Repeat.
 
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I don't hate Pitt the university. It's a fine university. Anyone who would argue otherwise is foolish.

Their football fans are some of the worst people, though. I grew up in western Pa but I have no lived in western Pa for over a decade now. The longer I'm away the more I hate yinzers, which make up the bulk of the Pitt fan base. Yinzers lack a perspective people who leave western gain when they are away because those yinzers have never been outside their small town.
 
The "rivalry" is kept alive by keyboard warriors who act as if they are tough as nails because they can hide behind the monitor and talk about how much we all hate each other then there are those who insist that there has to be a lingering adversarial relationship because they played a personal part of it at some point in the last 40 years.

Once upon a time Pitt vs. Penn State was a game to look forward to but as a lot of you guys suggested that mystique is gone because the landscape of CFB has changed drastically. As far as which fans suck, there are some of you guys I'd have a beer with and others not so much.
 
If I understand Pitt's history correctly, it was founded as a private university and was called the Western University of Pennsylvania so people would think they were somehow affiliated with UPenn. Eventually they changed the name to the Univ. of Pittsburgh. In the 60s they were in a tough financial situation so the state agreed to bail them out by creating the state-related university model we have today. Welfare U. (Pitt) needed a state bailout in the 60s and to this day they're screwing the state. Their events center cost triple what they said it would and the PA taxpayers were stuck paying the bill. Medical school aside, Pitt is a regional university with little appeal outside SWPA yet they think the world revolves around them. Oh, and they also have those 88 national championships.
 
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The problem with Pitters is their lying, they know they are lying, the fantastic Paterno stories that are lies, and the twisted made up spins that are false and often make no sense.
 
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Little J said:
It is a reciprocal hate, that seems to perpetuate especially if you live in the Pittsburgh region - ground zero. The Pitt marketing against Penn State runs rampant on sports talk, the TV news and the papers. They are sure to make a big story about any student trouble at Penn State while gloss over anything positive. Woe to any media outlet too if they take a jab at Pitt in a public forum or if they write a PSU story without including a Pitt story as the yinzers go ballistic.

The analysis....Pitt fans have such a jealousy and inferiority complex of all things Penn State that they trip over themselves trying to beat PSU down. Penn Staters are everywhere in Pittsburgh and lets face it, we carry a lot of pride for our school even in the wake of all the Sandusky blowup. This infuriates a few Pitters. Penn State envy and the perceived arrogance of the Penn Stater sends some Pitters over the edge and they grab ahold of every possible PSU negative as a way to gain some ground and counter the successes of their "rival" school. I have respect for them as a school and their athletes, but the large portion of their fan base is warped and is a continual pissing contest with all things Penn State. So what was never intended to be hate has evolved to the point where if you are around it long enough you can't help it. Juvenile and vile comments about Paterno burning in hell is more than just a sick attempt at humor, it is a mindset derived from their hate of PSU. I am happy to reciprocate so long as they remain delusional and worry more about what Penn State is doing than what Pitt is doing.
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This has been going on for many decades and really escalated when Paterno wanted to form an "All Sport Major Conference" in the Northeast which had traditionally been "Independent" in football, but Conference-Affiliated in basketball. The Big East was the most powerful basketball conference, but it was not an "All Sport Major Conference" like the other Major regionally-based conferences - the ACC, the SEC, the b1g 10 (at the time), the Big 8 (at the time), the Southwest Conference (at the time) and the Pac10 (at the time). The vast majority of the Big East members either didn't play football at all, or played at a Non-Major level and the Big East did not sponsor Football as a sport -- actually at the time (late 1970s), I think the only sport the Big East sponsored was basketball. As a result, the Big East Athletic Departments saw PSU, Paterno and his ideas for an "All Sport" Major Conference in the Northeast as a big-time threat and were extremely hostile towards it as the "Majors" that were in the Big East at the time (Syracuse and BC) were not the powerful and influential political members of the Original Big East. Almost immediately, the Big East added ASWP to further stymie Paterno & PSU's "ideas" and "visions" for a Northeast-based Major College "All Sport" Conference - the yinzers drank the Big East's Koole-Aide just as they hoped they would and began pounding their chests about how this showed that they were the most powerful Athletic Department in Pennsylvania.....blah, blah, blah. It showed nothing of the kind as PSU simply went to the b1g making it clearly the most powerful Major College "All Sport" Conference in terms of "media reach" and power - essentially PSU returned the favor of the middle-finger to the SorryExcuse, ASWP and BC who had been leaching off of PSU regarding football for decades (and football commands much higher gross revenues and therefore bottom-lines at the Major College level than basketball).

ASWP's massive inferiority and "penis-envy" continues to this day as they are stuck in the ACC barely surviving on the revenue-sharing of the ACC while PSU is getting many multiples of what ASWP does in its current home (but what the idiot yinzers miss is that PSU CONTRIBUTES crap-loads more to the revenues of the b1g than ASWP does to ACC on an absolute and relative basis).
 
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Thorndike2012 said:
Win or lose this board will be awash with trolls for months. Hell, this board has been awash with trolls for YEARS already.
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I guess you're right. The only thing that can control them is the mods and, for better or worse, they seem to allow them a lot of leeway.
 
pandaczar12 said:
They don't understand that this game doesn't mean anything. Nothing will change based on the outcome other than the OOC records of the teams. Pitt will not suddenly become a recruiting juggernaut based on the outcome of one game if they beat a team still effected by the unjust sanctions. If PSU wins as they should, nothing changes because they are expected to win.
Pitt fans want to win because it's all they have. There is no National title, or ACC title in their future. They likely will never win the coastal division. Their coach will be gone in the near future and the next guy... he will be the one to take them to the promised land... until he leaves too. Beating PSU is ALL they have. They went to an inferior school in every way, campus, athletics, and academics. I understand why they would cling to a victory over a team still effected by unjust sanctions.
PSU fans want to win this game because they don't want to deal with the juvenile Pitt fan base pounding their chest about a meaningless win, just like they've done with the 2000 game, while ignoring the 7 losses in a row before that game. That's a sad statement about the Pitt fan base.
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It may be all they have, but for most of them, it's enough. I have no doubt they would rather beat us than win an ACC title.
 
fairgambit said:
It may be all they have, but for most of them, it's enough. I have no doubt they would rather beat us than win an ACC title.
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That's really sad.

I couldn't imagine cheering for a team in that situation. Where beating one opponent is more important than winning a championship. If I had the choice of PSU going 11-1 with a loss to Pitt, or simply beating Pitt, that choice is easy. Pitt is a meaningless OOC game against a regional specialty interest school that isn't really a threat. Occasionally those schools win, those aberrations are a fact of life. Much like Temple did last year thanks to the unjust sanctions. It's pathetic when the fans of those school LIVE for those aberrations.
 
tOSU, Michigan, Michigan State are the teams I can bring myself to care about and dislike the most
then the rest of the B1G
then some of the big teams in other conferences
Pitt went off the radar years ago
 
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