The Pittsburgh Steelers and Pitt Panthers Have A Really Unique Partnership
The last couple weekends have gone very poorly for the football crazed citizens of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Two Sunday nights ago, the Pittsburgh Steelers made history upon blowing a 16-point lead, in what turned out to be a 33-30 loss to the now 10-3 Los Angeles Chargers. Never in the history of the iconic Steelers franchise has the team squandered a lead of this size on their home field. In fact, prior to the December 2 debacle, Pittsburgh had posted a 174-0-1 record during such situations. All told, the six-time Super Bowl champions had not given up a 16-point advantage in a loss, dating back a whopping 37 years.
Mike Tomlin's team followed up the Chargers disaster by traveling out to Oakland and losing to the lowly Raiders 24-21, after kicker Chris Boswell missed a 40-yard field goal, amid losing his footing on the awful Oakland Coliseum turf.
The Steelers now sit at 7-5-1, a mere 0.5 games ahead of their archrival Baltimore Ravens for first place in the AFC North, heading into Sunday's matchup with the Patriots.
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The Pitt Panthers regular season ended after being on the receiving end of a 42-10 beatdown, courtesy of the Clemson Tigers, at the ACC Championship Game in Charlotte.
In the wake of the 32-point defeat, the Panthers finished with a 7-6 record, which included a strong 6-2 effort against ACC opponents. Pitt will battle the Stanford Cardinal, December 31, in the Hyundai Sun Bowl, which is played annually in El Paso, Texas.
The Steelers and Panthers each get their game preparation work in at the UPMC Rooney Sports Complex, located on Pittsburgh’s South Side, along Water Street, immediately across from the shores of the Monongahela River. The complex sits two miles south of the Pitt campus, four miles southeast of Heinz Field and three miles southeast of downtown Pittsburgh. This highly unique series of buildings is the only NFL/NCAA shared practice facility in the country.
The UPMC Rooney Sports Complex is made up of a 100,000-square-foot, two-story shared training center, a shared 125,000-square-foot indoor practice field (pictured upper right), along with the 40,000-square-foot UPMC Center for Sports Medicine.
The 100,000-square-foot structure includes locker, weight, training, rehab, film, meeting, lounge, dining and media spaces for each team, along with coaches and administrative offices and in the Steelers case, the franchise’s football operations staff.
The Panthers side of the building is known as the Duratz Athletic Complex.
Four practice fields (three natural grass and one artificial surface) sit immediately to the south of the training center that officially opened its doors in 2000.
