West Virginia Not Including Backyard Brawl Among Single-Game Tickets

You will need to look elsewhere right now for single-game tickets to the Backyard Brawl this season.

West Virginia Athletics released its single-game tickets Tuesday morning for every home against except the Pitt contest on Sept. 16. The only way to buy tickets for the Pitt-WVU game at this point in time is through season tickets or a mini-package.

WVU Athletics offers a Gold package, which includes Pitt, Oklahoma State and Cincinnati, and a Blue package, which includes Pitt, Texas Tech and BYU. Both packages begin at $205 dollars.

Single-game tickets for the Backyard Brawl will likely be released at a later date.

It’s not uncommon for marquee matchups to feature single-game tickets being sold at a later date, one closer to the event’s date and at a higher cost. It happened for the Backyard Brawl in Pittsburgh last season.

Regardless, it will be the first Backyard Brawl in Morgantown, West Virginia since WVU won the 2011 edition of the Brawl 21-20. And the expectation for the renewal of the Brawl in Morgantown is already high.

The 2023 Backyard Brawl won’t be the season opener, instead coming as a Week 3 matchup for both squads, but WVU head coach Neal Brown already sees the matchup as a key point in the season.

“They took advantage of some of our mistakes, and now we’ve got a chance at our home stadium, and this place is gonna be rocking and rolling,” Brown told WV Sports Now’s Mike Asti. “It’s gonna be a night game, I know our fans are gonna be supercharged, and it’s important.

“We need to win the game. We need to win the game. It’s important where it falls in our schedule, it’s the game before we play our Big 12 opener … It’s important and it matters and it’s a game from a rivalry perspective, we don’t try to undersell it.”

The Brawl this year will be played at Milan Puskar Stadium in Morgantown on Sept. 16, with a 7:30 p.m. kickoff scheduled, and it will come after the season opener against Wofford and a home matchup against new Big 12 squad Cincinnati. And it certainly will be different than playing in Pittsburgh.

“That was a great atmosphere,” Brown said. “It was a great atmosphere. They’re gonna argue that they had all the people there, our people are gonna argue it was half, I don’t know. I don’t really know, but I know it was a damn good football atmosphere.

Pat Narduzzi weighed in on the difference between playing in Pittsburgh and West Virginia earlier this month during a surprise appearance on 93.7 the Fan’s morning show with former Pitt star Dorin Dickerson and WVU alum Adam Crowley.

“I’m really excited about that 7:30 night game, couldn’t be more excited,” Narduzzi said. “I mean, hey, 7:30 night game in Pittsburgh a year ago, and we’ll take another 7:30. It’ll be a great atmosphere down there, wear your hard hats and be ready to go. It’ll be a little different style than the clash in Pittsburgh.

“I don’t think we’ll travel as well down to Morgantown because of the smaller stadium size, and the way they treat fans down there, I think there’s a lot of Pitt fans — obviously they’ve got the money to do it, but I wonder what that will be like. From all the stories I’ve heard, there’s a lot of older Pitt fans that are like, I’m not going down to that place. I’d rather go to the zoo.”