Eastern Michigan 'fired up' to meet Pitt in Quick Lane Bowl

Chris Creighton, the football coach at Eastern Michigan, was speaking to about 300 people at his team’s banquet Sunday night when the words “Quick Lane Bowl” appeared on his phone.

When he relayed the good news to the crowd, “The place went nuts,” he said. “I mean, it went nuts.”

Of course, it did.

Eastern Michigan, which was 7-41 from 2012-15, is bowl-bound for the second consecutive year for the first time in school history. EMU will play Pitt at 8 p.m. Dec. 26 at Ford Field in Detroit.

Never mind the 6-6 record or that EMU made it to a bowl “by the skin of our teeth,” Creighton said.

“We’re well aware of that. You just need to know that’s it’s an absolute big deal for us to be here,” he said Wednesday at a news conference in Detroit to promote the game. “We are absolutely fired up.”

Pitt fans reacted with less enthusiasm, however. Their team’s 7-3 start raised expectations beyond what the team eventually delivered when it lost the last two games of the regular season.

quick lane huh?

— George Abraham (@CoachesCornerGA) December 9, 2019

But if coach Pat Narduzzi is underwhelmed by Pitt’s bowl invitation, he didn’t let it show while appearing with Creighton.

In fact, he used the occasion to make a vow that seems difficult to keep on the surface but was delivered nonetheless with enthusiasm and sincerity, if a bit of bombast.

He did the same before the 2018 season when he promised Pitt would play in the ACC championship game, which came to pass three months later.

Considering Clemson’s dominance in the ACC and its ability to recruit the nation’s top players, this promise will be more difficult for Narduzzi to keep. But he said the Pitt program is pointed in the right direction.

“I’m happy where our program is going,” he said. “We continue to compete. We’re looking at a benchmark (in the ACC) in a Clemson football team. They’ve won a national championship. That’s the benchmark. That’s what we’re trying to strive for.

“We’ve reached an ACC championship (game). Our goal is not to just get there. Our goal is to get there and win the thing.

“In the next couple years, we’re going to win one. I guarantee you that. It’s just a matter of time, and things have to go right.

“We have a good enough football team. We’re talented enough. We’re well-coached, and our kids will play for each other.”

First, Pitt needs to win its eighth game of the season — it would be the third time Narduzzi has done that in five years — by defeating Eastern Michigan, a team that tied for last place in the West Division of the Mid-American Conference.

There is precedent. Pitt’s most recent bowl victory was in the 2013 Little Caesars Pizza Bowl against Bowling Green, also of the MAC and also at Ford Field.

Narduzzi will need all of his best players to beat Eastern Michigan, which will have a home-field advantage. Ypsilanti, Mich., is only 36 miles from Detroit.

He said he doesn’t expect any players with NFL hopes to bow out of the game to jump-start preparations for the 2020 draft, even though that has become a growing trend in college football.

“You know, I really haven’t (had those conversations with his players),” he said. “That’s not something, I think really needs to be talked about.

“The one thing about our football team is they’re together. They haven’t said anything to me. I don’t have to ask that question.

“I know they’re going to play for each other. We haven’t had that problem in the past, and I don’t expect to have it this year. But you never know.

“It’s something you’ll have to deal with. I think it happens around the country, and I think this game of football is a team sport and our kids talk about brotherhood all the time and playing for their brother.

“And I don’t think there’s one of those guys on our football team, senior, junior, that wouldn’t come out and give it their all on a Saturday (or) in a bowl game.”

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