They'll go to a bowl game, just not a particularly nice one.

Any WAC sycophant with an ax to grind should just re-watch last year's Sugar Bowl.

No, we can't just get along. This is PITT we're talking about. A crappy school in the middle of a crappy city. I should know - I graduated from there.

Pitt's just better at claiming meaningless championships than other offenders (I'm looking at you Michigan and Notre Dame!).

http://www.ncaa.org/champadmin/ia_football_past_champs.html
Here - count them up yourself. I seem to see Pitt listed quite a few times, including many years Pitt does not even recognize (1980 and 1981 are the first two). It's OK though, trust some hack writer over the NCAA organization's website - wouldn't want our anti-Big East bias get in the way of facts...

Agreed that the ADT Trophy pictures are misleading, however, the rest of the article could use some fact checking. Pitt claims 9 national championships based on a 1970 Sports Illustrated study (the 9th was won after the study, in 1976).
Regardless of Pitt's claims, the NCAA recognizes the following championships (11):
1910, 1915, 1916, 1918, 1929, 1931, 1936, 1937, 1976, 1980, 1981
http://www.ncaa.org/champadmin/ia_football_past_champs.html

Yeah, we are definitely completely imagining your bias - you have a grand total of 3 Big East articles of your last 35, and they all have a negative tone. Aside from the gem above (truly a literary work of genius, in which you avoid all fact to call the Panthers' NCAA-recognized titles "extremely mythical championships"), you had an article about Shady deciding to stay, which has to be a positive piece, right? After all, he is one of the best running backs in the country and Pitt will be a top 10-15 team pre-season next year. You analysis consists of this tidbit: "That gives the Panthers a good excuse to continue avoiding the slow death of the vaguely West Coast-ish stylings of Dave Wannstedt and Matt Cavanaugh." How is it a slow death when he has shown marked improvement over time? How can it be they were ranked higher this season than last and will be ranked even higher next? If that is a slow death, I'll have two. Next article - your analysis of Shady's beastly performance at the end of the WVU game. Again, you criticize his decision, stating "hooray for ol' Pitt and education and all that." Very insightful! Then you take on Cincy in the same article (how do you have time for all of the tremendous analysis?), contemplating an imaginary potential loss to Syracuse, stating every negative fact you could find (or imagine), and then proceed to degrade the entire conference. I don't read a lot of your blog, but please be sure to degrade the other extremely mediocre conferences in the ACC and the Big Ten, who are both equally as bad. In fact, while the Big East has won their last 3 BCS bowls (against the SEC [Georgia], the Big 12 [Oklahoma], and the ACC), the ACC has lost their last 8 BCS bowls while the Big 10 just plain sucks. Please write a post about the Big 10's out-of-conference scheduling the last two years and let me know what you find.

they just put them to make people feel goooood xD

The first actual vote for a national championship occurred in 1936 by the AP. Prior to that there, was no such thing as a national championship in college football and any team that claims one before that time simply making it up. I know that some computer "gurus" have gone back and fed information from 100 years ago into a computer to come up with their "National Champion" based on some computer formula thay came up with, but if you want, just pick a team and I can come up with a formula to give them a bunch of championships in my "computer poll". Nothing before 1936 is a legitimate championship (actually nothing since then is actually a championship either, because in there is no playoff, but that's a different arguement).

pitt is a pathetic wannabe school. is this a surprise . one trophy for every fan that attends their games

Who the hell is Matt Hinton?

While the ADT trophy montage may be misleading as to the timeline of the national championship wins, this blogger obviously has not taken the time to investigate the historical concept of college football national championships, for which no unified or official selection has ever existed. It’s fair if you want to criticize Pitt for its lack of successes since its 1976 championship, but if you are going to criticize a university’s claims prior to the two-poll era, which began with the introduction of the Coaches’ Poll in 1950 that originated the concept of “consensus”, then one needs to equally criticize the official claims of Notre Dame, Michigan, USC, Cal, Illinois, Georgia Tech, etc, etc.; not to mention Alabama who bases its claims on the same Sports Illustrated study that Pitt has used since 1970. (for a partial list from this study that does not include Pitt’s Pop Warner years see: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1080269/index.htm).
Like many of schools with more modern traditions, this blogger has made the fatal mistake of asserting that meaningful football suddenly started in 1936 when the AP first decided to conduct a poll of its sportswriters. However, without a viable competition from a professional league, college football was perhaps even more popular in this era, and arguments about the season’s best team or “national champion” were just as rampant. In fact, the first naming of a national champion can be traced not to the AP, but to Casper Whitney’s selection of Yale in 1905, a selection that was not retroactive. Later in 1926, Frank Dickinson created a mathematical system that ranked schools during each season, and, upon the encouragement of Knute Rockne, Dickinson’s system was also applied retroactively. It should also be noted that the vaunted AP and Coaches’ polls, with one exception, released their final poll prior to bowl season, thereby excluding those games’ results from consideration. This policy did not change until 1968 for the AP and, unbelievably, not until 1974 for the Coaches’ Poll. Awareness of such facts can certainly put into better light the seemingly unassailable authority that those polls are assigned by the blogger compared to the historical selections that are belittled despite the blogger’s apparent lack of awareness of how those retroactive selections were made.
In any case, regarding Pitt’s claims on nine championships, the fact is that contemporaneous selections are actually the basis for four of them: 1934 (Parke Davis from the SI study), 1936 (Boand and Houlgate), 1937 (AP and others), 1976 (AP/Coaches). It might also be noted that the school does not claim a title from the undefeated and unscored-upon 1910 team that appears in most championship lists because that championship did not appear in the SI study. Likewise, Pitt does not claim eight of the seasons that it has been selected as a national champion according to data compiled by College Football Data Warehouse (http://www.cfbdatawarehouse.com/data/div_ia/bigeast/pittsburgh/all_national_champs.php), in part contributed to by noted historian Tex Noel. If nothing else, for forty years Pitt has shown consistency with the sources and presentation of how it indentifies some of its most notable football seasons, even if it has recently chosen to visually represent that history on game day signage with a more modern and recognizable symbolism.
For more information and a relatively concise history of Pitt football, I would suggest visiting the related article at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitt_football).

I wish Mr. Hinton would post his email address so that people could respond to his blogs. You see, Mr. Hinton criticizes Pitt for claiming national championships that were given to them by sketchy organizations that have nothing to do with football... similar to the AP poll or the BCS. I would agree with Mr. Hinton if he did not give credit to these incredibly stupid organizations that also have nothing to do with football. Example? Oregon 7-2 overall, 5-1 in conference; USC 7-2 overall, 4-2 in conference; Oregon vs. USC 10/31/09, Oregon 40, USC 20. National rankings according to the completely reliable and valid BCS: USC 9, Oregon 13. You see, claiming to be a college football national champion is absurd for any school ever. Because there isn't now, nor has there ever been a legitimate system to determine a national champion in college football.

Don't you think that Pitt claiming 9 national championships in football is just a great poke in the eye to the NCAA, which doesn't have the b@lls to implement a real playoff???????