Backyard Brawl Football Game – West Virginia University (WVU) vs. University of Pittsburgh (Pitt)
While Backyard Brawl may sound like a professional wrestling pay-per-view event, it is actually the name given to the annual football game that takes place each season between the West Virginia University (WVU) Mountaineers. ) and the Panthers from the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt). The historic rivalry between these two close college football programs traces its roots to the first meeting which occurred on October 26, 1895. The opening game was played in Wheeling, West Virginia, a neutral site, and the final result of that The The day left the West Virginia Mountaineers victorious over the Pittsburgh Panthers by a score of 8-0 in what would turn out to be the first of more than a hundred meetings between these two college football programs.
The phrase Backyard Brawl is hyperbole stemming from the physical proximity the two campuses have to each other. The University of Pittsburgh is not surprisingly located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia University is based in Morgantown, West Virginia. The two schools are about 75 miles apart. The relatively short distance between the two Big East Conference schools makes the approximately one and a half hour drive along Interstate 79 from one university to the other very easy for students and alumni who make the trek for football games away from home.
The popularity of the name Backyard Brawl has become so great in the area that it has more recently spread from iron grill to hardwood as basketball programs have adopted the moniker for their biannual Big East Conference meetings. After 102 football games between them and 180 basketball games, it’s fair to say that the two schools know each other intimately. The regional rivalry that began simply as a soccer-focused affair has evolved to encompass all aspects in which the two respected higher education institutions can compete.
When it comes to football specifically, the University of Pittsburgh leads the overall series by a pretty hefty margin. Through 2009, the tally is 68 head-to-head wins for Pitt and just 38 wins for WVU (there were also 3 ties along the way in 1909, 1985, and 1989). Although the University of Pittsburgh enjoys its current series lead in part due to a dominant 15-game winning streak from 1929 to 1946, the competition has been very even over the past decade. In fact, in the last ten years the series is split with five wins for each of the story shows.