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WVU, Pitt to renew Backyard Brawl football series

Charleston Gazette-Mail file photo by The Associated Press West Virginia’s Devon Brown looks to avoid Pittsburgh’s Antwuan Reed during the teams’ last meeting in 2011 in Morgantown.
Charleston Gazette-Mail file photo by The Associated Press
West Virginia’s Devon Brown looks to avoid Pittsburgh’s Antwuan Reed during the teams’ last meeting in 2011 in Morgantown.

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — If not for Twitter, there might be no Backyard Brawl.

West Virginia Athletic Director Shane Lyons fashioned a quizzical tweet at 2:47 p.m. Thursday promising an “exciting announcement” was coming at 3 p.m. Thirteen people retweeted it and 22 clicked to add it to their favorites.

At the top of the hour, Lyons kept his appointment and revived the football series between Pitt and West Virginia. “The Backyard Brawl is returning,” he wrote. The message included a link to an athletic department press release. Within 90 minutes, 677 people retweeted and 356 favorited the news the two will play a four-game series from 2022-25.

“The plan was two-fold,” Lyons said. “We wanted to drive traffic to WVUSports.com, but social media, that’s something a lot of people are using to get their news these days. We felt like if we got it out to our followers and out there and to people looking for news and information, we’d have an opportunity to get people excited and tuned in about the announcement.”

Lyons, hired in January to succeed Oliver Luck, has accumulated more than 4,250 followers since the first of his 61 tweets on April 13. Luck wasn’t on Twitter and made most of his news in more traditional manners.

“We didn’t feel like this wasn’t something we had to do in person with a press conference, or with a press release,” he said. “It’s another avenue we’re making use of.”

The rivalry with 104 prior meeting resumes at Heinz Field in 2022 and alternates sites with Mountaineer Field over the next three years…

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