Halftime thoughts: Pittsburgh 17, Iowa 7

PITTSBURGH — It's no mystery what Iowa has to do to win this game, or have a chance to win it.

Either it contains Pitt's rushing game much better than it has in the first half, or it goes home with a bruising loss.

James Conner had 17 carries for 100 first-half yards, and Pitt gained another 32 on the ground. With a 17-7 halftime lead, if Pitt peels off just one more drive similar to its 75-yarder that consumed 9:42 and produced seven points, the Hawkeyes are as good as cooked.

The yards are Pitt 262, Iowa 128. The Panthers have five plays of 18 yards or more. Iowa has one, a 44-yard beauty of a pass from Jake Rudock to Matt VandeBerg. Pitt's offense went from looking one-dimensional in the first quarter to something else.

After a hideous first pass for an incompletion, Chad Voytik has completed 12 of 13 for 132 yards. Which means the half was a defensive nightmare for Iowa.

If Conner is healthy — and how can you ever tell with football players? — don't look for him to wear down in the fourth quarter. He had 67 carries in his previous two games, and was just as strong at the end as the start.

Damond Powell's mishandling of a well-thrown bomb from Rudock, and the freakish deflection directly into the hands of Pitt cornerback Lafayette Pitts for a gift-wrapped interception? That was flat-out weird. If Powell had caught that pass, this is such a different game. Iowa probably ends up with points on its first drive, a world of confidence, and away you go.

Iowa going for it on 4th-and-2 at the Pitt 13 and getting a touchdown pass from Rudock to Henry Krieger Coble was just so typically gambler-ish on Kirk Ferentz's part that it was utterly predictable. I'm kidding. But Rudock sized things up perfectly on the play.

Krieger Coble, from Mount Pleasant, has Hawkeye blood throughout his body. He is related to former Iowa athletes Bruce Kittle (football) and Jess Settles (basketball), two were quite accomplished Hawkeyes. And his mom, Amy Krieger, played softball at Iowa.

Iowa safety John Lowdermilk has nine tackles. That's too many for a safety in a half.

Here's how you know when you're in a pro sports market: The cover of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Saturday section had just one mention of the Iowa-Pitt game, and that was at the bottom of the page where it was mentioned with four other games on today's schedule.

The others were UMass-Penn State, Oklahoma-West Virginia, Monmouth-Duquesne and Robert Morris-Dayton.

The stories on the sports cover were about the Pirates, Steelers, Roger Goodell, and Friday night's 14-7 high school win by Seton-LaSalle over Steel Valley.

The Iowa-Pitt game warranted one story (on page 2) in the 10-page section.

Robert Morris, by the way, is coming off a 50-3 loss to Lafayette.

Last night, the Gazette sportswriting crew went to PNC Park to watch the Pirates play Milwaukee. We were guests of Pirates vice president/general counsel Bryan Stroh, a Cedar Rapids Washington graduate.

It's been a heady week for Stroh and the Pirates. Pittsburgh has moved 4.5 games in front of Milwaukee for the second National League wild-card berth, and has a magic number of 5 for a second-straight postseason berth following two decades of frustration.

The game was a sellout. When we were here six years ago for the Iowa-Pitt game, the Pirates also played here the night before. You wanted a ticket. Pick a section, any section. Elbow room was abundant.

I've lost some of my taste for baseball, but being in a great ballpark in a city that's energized by its team reminded me of what I've always liked about the game. No offense to my Cardinal and Brewer friends, but I'd like to see the Bucs go deep into the NL playoffs.