Pitt football added a 21st player to its 2025 recruiting class last week, when Latrobe native John Wetzel gave Pat Narduzzi and Co. his verbal pledge and put a bow on the recruiting cycle for the Panthers. All around the country, programs are starting to do the same, and everyone is turning their eyes toward the start of the 2025 season in late August.

Kickoff in Week 1 is still more than three months away, but with the benefit of spring practices and some mostly settled rosters, it is easier to make some more serious predictions about the coming year of college football. Odds for who will capture the national championship, conference titles and playoff bids are available to bettors, and so, too, are win total lines, the first indicators about what oddsmakers make of the greater college football landscape.

And the early returns aren’t promising for Pitt, which, after hitting the highest of highs and lowest of lows in 2024, is projected to be battling for mere bowl eligibility once again in 2025 for a few key reasons.

Pessimistic projections

It certainly felt like last season was a disappointment when the sixth overtime of the GameAbove Sports Bowl ended, but relative to preseason expectations, Pitt did good work last fall. It took just seven weeks for the 2024 team to clear its projected win total of 6.5 in 2024, but that’s as far as they got. Still, the timing of their seven wins and six losses dominated the narrative around that team in the latter half of the season and into the winter and spring.

The 2024 campaign represented a four-win improvement from 2023 and a return to relative normalcy for this program as a whole. During Narduzzi’s tenure as coach, the Panthers have a .563 winning percentage, which translates to an average of 6.756 wins and 5.244 losses in a 12-game season. So 7-6 is, for better or worse, par for the course, and most don’t expect the Panthers to improve dramatically, if at all, in 2025.

Of the four sportsbooks with win totals available for the Panthers, three have their line at 5.5 wins. ESPN data savant Bill Connelly’s SP+ model, a catch-all formula that accounts for a variety of factors like recruiting and returning production, is slightly more optimistic, predicting 6.1 wins. He ranks the Panthers offense as the 45th-best unit in the FBS, defense 56th and special teams 17th.

Pitt is not getting the benefit of the doubt from oddsmakers and analysts after limping to the finish of the 2024 season with six consecutive losses. The projections follow recent history, which says, more often than not, the Panthers will be bowl eligible and not much more.

Offense stays steady, defense reloads

Part of Pitt’s lowly preseason expectations is tied to key losses, primarily to the NFL draft and graduation. Ten starters on offense and defense departed since the end of the 2024 season, including the leading tackler and receiver, plus the team’s best offensive lineman (although the Panthers played the final seven games of the year without that lineman, Branson Taylor). Continuity can be so valuable in college football, and Pitt did not retain enough of that to swing offseason evaluations.

But the Panthers did a commendable job retaining some critical pieces from the 2024 team. The leading passer (Eli Holstein) and rusher (Desmond Reid) are back. Three of the four leading receivers and four of the top six tacklers — including the outstanding linebacking corps of Kyle Louis, Rasheem Biles and Braylan Lovelace — will return for the 2025 season, as well.

They were even able to fend off more lucrative NIL offers from schools attempting to pull leading returning pass catcher Kenny Johnson into the transfer portal. Few of their transfer losses were devastating, and still, Pitt will be breaking in more than a few new starters at guard, offensive tackle, wide receiver, tight end, cornerback, safety, middle linebacker, defensive end and kicker while also trying to rebuild depth.

Certainly, some of the players who will need to scale their roles up have promise — Lovelace, Rashan Murray, Jeff Persi and Cruce Brookins chief among them — but even in the transfer portal era, it’s a lot of holes to fill while staring down a more quality slate of opponents.

Schedule gets steeper

It’s fair to say the 2024 schedule, especially out of conference, was not a gauntlet for the Panthers. Surrounding an always tough rivalry game against West Virginia was an FCS team in Youngstown State, a Kent State squad that was worse than most FCS teams and the bowl game-less Cincinnati Bearcats.

Taking nothing away from all it took for them to pull off dramatic comebacks against the Mountaineers and Bearcats and run up a plus-87 point differential against the Penguins and Golden Flashes, it was as mild a nonconference slate as the Panthers have played in Narduzzi’s 10 seasons at the helm.

That won’t be the case again this season, primarily because of one major addition.

The Panthers will swap out Cincinnati for Notre Dame, the national runner-up that has reloaded and is expected to contend for the national title again, in this year’s nonconference slate. They have two likely wins in Duquesne and Central Michigan at home to kick off the year, but factor in a visit to hostile territory in Morgantown, W.Va., and a visit from the Fighting Irish, and the nonconference slate becomes decidedly more difficult.

If that wasn’t enough, the ACC slate is more challenging, as well. Miami, fresh off of a 10-win season, and Georgia Tech, resurgent with coach Brent Key and returning tons of production, are new additions. So is Florida State, which is almost certain to improve on its stunning 2-10 record from a year ago. Louisville and Syracuse, winners of nine and 10 games, respectively, last year, are back on the conference schedule.

Just five of the Panthers’ 11 FBS opponents are ranked below them in SP+. (In 2024, the Panthers ranked ahead of six opponents at the end of the season.) They played just three teams that ended 2024 ranked among the top 40 in SP+ and stand to face six such teams in 2025. On average, the quality of each individual opponent has been raised, and there is more top-tier talent standing in front of Pitt in 2025.

It’s always possible Narduzzi and Co. will pull a stunning upset out of their hats somewhere, but Duquesne, Central Michigan, Boston College and Stanford represent the only games in which Pitt can reasonably expect to be favored (and the Panthers are just 1-2 against Boston College during the Narduzzi era). There are few “gimmes” on this new, more difficult schedule.

So, with the benefit of some more experience for some of its young stars and reinforcements up front from the transfer portal, the Panthers are expected to be slightly better in a vacuum, at least according to Connelly (48th in the 2025 preseason rankings vs. 51st in the 2024 postseason). But the uptick in strength of schedule (68th nationally in 2024 vs. 48th in 2025) has capped how high the predictions have climbed.

Projections aren’t guarantees, and Pitt certainly has the talent to defy expectations like it did early last year. But improvement from a year ago would involve outperforming most preseason projections.