[2] The football series was first played in 1895, and the game has historically been one of the more intense rivalries in the eastern United States.

WVU's campus in Morgantown, West Virginia, is only about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh (via Interstate 79), and the two schools often compete for the same recruits.

The 1921 edition of the Backyard Brawl was the first college football game broadcast on the radio when Harold W. Arlin announced the 21–13 Pittsburgh victory on KDKA.

[6] The trio played annually until West Virginia won its second outright title in 1984 and Penn State was unable to locate the trophy.

With the loss of the trophy and deregionalization of college football, the three-team rivalry increasingly became three distinct head-to-head matchups with little to no connection.

According to the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, West Virginia wore a shade of white "that looks as if it has a fine layer of dust on the jersey" and has accents in university gold that "references the canaries used long ago to test toxicity in mines."

The helmet has a thin yellow line, designed to look like "the beam of light emitted by a miner's headlamp."

Meanwhile, Pitt wore smoky college navy and black jerseys and pants with metallic team gold numerals "to represent the brilliant glow of a blast furnace," according to a Nike website, and matching helmets with a gold stripe and logo "evocative of steel I-beams" and resembling a hard hat.

On September 18, 2011, Pittsburgh announced its departure from the Big East and was introduced as a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).

The series was held here for eight of the next nine years, until the opening of Pitt Stadium in 1925 on the opposite end of the University of Pittsburgh campus.

Pitt Stadium hosted 5 straight games, until in 1930, the Backyard Brawl found itself at yet another new location, Mountaineer Field, which had opened in 1924 on the campus of West Virginia University.

The most recent change took place in 2002, when the Backyard Brawl was played for the first time at Heinz Field (now called Acrisure Stadium), the new, full-time home of the Panthers, a year after it was opened.

Additionally, West Virginia vowed to address security, as the incident closing followed similar occurrences in games against Syracuse and Ohio State.

The rivalry was dormant for a few years as WVU began playing in the Big 12 in 2012, while Pitt moved to the ACC in 2013.

In 2021, West Virginia sold out the WVU Coliseum for the first time ever in the month of November when it hosted the matchup, on its way to reaching 100 wins in the series.

In 2021, West Virginia left the SELC to become a founding member of the Atlantic Lacrosse Conference (ALC), they were followed by Pittsburgh in 2022.