ESPN Gives West Virginia No Chance in the Backyard Brawl Tonight

Morgantown, West Virginia – The West Virginia Mountaineers have been underdogs many times in the past and have oftentimes played their best football when no one else believed in them.

Today, the Mountaineers go into Pitt as 7.5 underdogs.

In addition, ESPN‘s Football Power Index, a measure of team strength that is meant to be the best predictor of a team’s performance going forward for the rest of the season, gives the Mountaineers almost no chance at all of beating Pitt tonight.

ESPN’s FPI currently gives West Virginia only a 21.9% chance of winning the game and Pitt a 78.1% chance of winning.

Although the FPI has been wrong in the past, it has been remarkably accurate in previous seasons. Last season, it predicted 70.4% of the games correctly and 73.5% right the season before that.

Last season, Pitt was 11-3 overall and won the ACC Conference. West Virginia is coming off a 6-7 record, but the Mountaineers hired a new, experienced offensive coordinator and finally added a competent quarterback.