Syracuse football: Let’s turn back the clock to the last time the Orange beat Pitt on the road

It’s been a while since the Orange have won in Pittsburgh

From the ‘Salt City’ to the ‘Steel City!’ The Syracuse Orange (5-1, 2-1) continue its stretch of games away from the JMA Wireless Dome this Thursday for a conference matchup against an undefeated Pitt (6-0, 2-0) team ranked 19th in the country.

The year was 2001 when Syracuse last defeated Pitt at Acrisure Stadium, formerly known as Heinz Field, and since that game, the Panthers have certainly had the Orange’s number, winning 18 of the last 21 matchups — if you exclude SU’s win vacated in 2004 due to an athletic scandal.

After receiving positive feedback from the last ‘look back,’ highlighting what was happening in Syracuse when SU last won at NC State, our TNIAAM staff thought it’d be fun to run it back and do something similar for the last time the Orange beat the Panthers on the road:

Syracuse University’s Athletic Success:

After starting the 2001 season 0-2, the Syracuse Orange football team won nine of its last 10 regular season games, including two ranked wins against No. 5 Virginia Tech and No. 25 Boston College, to finish second in the BIG EAST behind Miami (FL). SU played in the Insight.com Bowl against Kansas State in Phoenix, Arizona, where it won handily 26-3. The Orange ended their season with a 10-3 record, ranked 18th in the AP poll, and All-American DL Dwight Freeney was named the BIG EAST conference’s co-Defensive Player of the Year alongside Miami CB Ed Reed.

Photo by George Gojkovich/Getty Images

Syracuse Men’s basketball earned a bid to the NCAA tournament in 2001, where it later lost to fourth-seeded Kansas 87-58 in the Round of 32. The Orange ended the season with a 25-9 record (including a 15-1 start), ranked 17th in the AP poll. SF Preston Shumpert had a terrific season in the Orange uniform in 2001. The Florida native led the BIG EAST in scoring and landed on the All-BIG EAST First-Team — Shumpert also earned a share of the BIG EAST Conference Most Improved Player Award with West Virginia’s Calvin Bowman. Shumpert PF Damone Brown was another key contributor for the Orange in 2001. Brown led the conference in offensive rebounds (3.2 per game) and earned All-BIG EAST Second-Team.

Syracuse Men’s Lacrosse had a phenomenal season in 2001, almost historic. The Orange earned the top seed in the NCAA tournament that year but fell short to second-seeded Princeton in the national championship game 10-9 (OT). The Orange finished the season as the national runner-up with a 13-3 record. Michael Powell became the first freshman in Syracuse Men’s Lacrosse history to be named a First Team All-American. He was also awarded the Jack Turnbull Award as the nation’s top attackman and was a finalist for the inaugural Tewaaraton Trophy.

Carousel Center Expansion:

Plans were made to expand the Carousel Center in 2001, the major shopping mall in Syracuse, which would eventually become what everyone in Central New York knows as Destiny USA, one of the largest shopping malls in the United States.

Other fun notes from 2001:

Warner Brothers Discovery debuted the Harry Potter franchise in 2001. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the film based on J.K. Rowling’s first book in the popular series, was released on November 16, 2001, and quickly became a box office phenomenon. At the time, it was the top-grossing movie of 2001, making over $974 million worldwide.

The top song of 2001 was “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse. The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart for two weeks in early 2001 and became one of the defining hits of the year, catapulting Lifehouse into mainstream music.

2001 saw the release of the GameCube and Game Boy Advance by Nintendo, the Xbox by Microsoft, and the iPod by Apple.

Several memorable video games were released in 2001, including the first-person shooter game Halo: Combat Evolved and the open-world action-adventure game Grand Theft Auto III, which is regarded as an industry-defining work.