Chippewas Fall to Quick-Striking Panthers

PITTSBURGH – Week two of the college football season.

No time to panic, but, rather, make adjustments within the framework of the master plan and move on.

Quick-striking Pitt built an early lead and then responded again in the second half on Saturday in handing Central Michigan a 45-17 nonconference loss at Acrisure Stadium.

It was Matt Drinkall's first loss as the Chippewas' coach after he guided Central Michigan to a 16-14 win at San Jose State last week in the season opener. Central Michigan goes to 15^th-ranked Michigan on Saturday, Sept. 13 (noon).

"I'm as excited as I've been because there's still an element of unknown," Drinkall said after his Chippewas surrendered 464 yards, 340 of them through the air, to the Panthers (2-0). "I'm still learning a lot about our guys, but I'm really, really encouraged about where we're at, I'm excited about where we're at.

"I told our players, the issues that we had in the game today, a lot of things are things that we need to coach better and we have a very good history of fixing the things that we need to fix quickly."

Pitt quarterback Eli Holstein threw for 304 yards and four touchdowns on 21-of-28 passing. Three of his TD passes came in the first half as Pitt built a 24-3 lead.

CMU showed some life when Jordan Kwiatkowski returned an interception 18 yards to set up a Jadyn Glasser 2-yard TD run with 9 seconds to play in the first half, and then the Chippewas got a Joe Labas-to-DeCorion Temple TD pass to cut Pitt's lead to 24-17 with 3:01 to play in the third.

It looked, at that point, as if the Chippewas -- three-touchdown underdogs -- were going to give themselves a legitimate shot in the fourth quarter.

"It felt like, on the sideline, 'OK, this is working, we're going OK,'" Drinkall said. "You can win a couple rounds in a UFC heavyweight match, and then you come out and you let your guard down for one punch, the whole fight changes and that's unfortunately kind of what we did."

Less than a minute after Temple's TD, Holstein connected with Raphael Williams on a 48-yard TD pass play, re-upping Pitt's lead to two touchdowns, 31-17.

Less than five minutes into the fourth quarter, Juelz Goff capped a quick 54-yard Pitt drive with a 2-yard TD run and the Panthers added an insurance score with just over two minutes remaining.

"Kind of took the wind out of our sails and after that we just kind of had a hard time rebounding," Drinkall said. "Once it becomes a two- and three-score game you have to become one dimensional and that put us in a little bit tougher spot than we wanted to be in."

None of Pitt's six touchdown drives took longer than three minutes of game time.

"Defensively we played better than what the score indicates," Drinkall said. "The major concerns are four of the touchdowns that they scored, nobody was near those guys. So those are like catastrophic errors where we didn't force them to earn it and that's upsetting to see.

"Undisciplined mistakes against talented, disciplined teams, there will be a consequence for that. So that was good for us to learn."

The Panther defense, which frequently loaded the box with nine defenders, held CMU to just 7 rushing yards in the first half and 40 for the game. The Chippewas produced just one running play of more than 10 yards.

Three CMU quarterbacks – Labas, Glasser and Angel Flores – combined to throw for 127 yards on 20-of-27 passing.

"It's only week two," said Kwiatkowski, who made a team-high eight tackles. "We don't like losing, nobody likes losing, and we've got a bad taste in our mouths, but I feel like we've seen some good things on both sides of the ball.

"Do I think it's where we want to be? No. And the guys know that as well. We've definitely shown some good flashes; it's really about diving into what we need to fix for next week and get ready for a really good opponent."

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Team Stats

Joe Labas

Jadyn Glasser

Angel Flores

Players Mentioned

Angel Flores

Jadyn Glasser

Jordan Kwiatkowski

Joe Labas

DeCorion Temple