PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh coach Paul Chryst spent a week watching his team practice following a disappointing loss to Iowa and believed the Panthers were mature enough to move on.

Didn’t quite look like it Saturday against Akron.

Their physical running game stuck in neutral and their erratic defense unable to get off the field at crucial times, the Panthers fell 21-10 that brought any early momentum generated by a 3-0 start to a complete and sudden stop.

“Football tests a lot of things and we’re at a point right now where we’ve got to tighten up the reins a little bit,” Chryst said. “We’ve got to learn from this one no doubt.”

The unheralded Zips (2-2) held Pitt star running back James Conner to a season-low 92 yards on 25 carries. The nation’s leading rusher never got going. Facing a defense that often had eight or nine players at the line of scrimmage geared to stop him, Conner couldn’t find the open space he ran to with ease during the season’s first four weeks.

“I knew everybody was going to stack the box and key on me,” Conner said. “I know it’s coming and I do what I can to break tackles but it wasn’t enough today. They wrapped up. They were hitting low at the legs, gang tackling. It was good play by them.”

And frustrating play by the Panthers (3-2), who committed seven penalties — including one that wiped out a touchdown that would have tied the score in the third quarter — and turned it over twice.

Akron outgained the Panthers 382-349 and kept Conner in check to give coach Terry Bowden the biggest victory of his three-year tenure. Conor Hundley one-upped the nation’s leading rusher, gaining 148 yards on 19 carries as Akron beat a team from a power conference for the first time since 2008.

Kyle Pohl passed for 193 yards with a touchdown and an interception and defensive lineman Cody Grice — moonlighting at fullback — put together a pair of short scoring runs on a day the Zips hardly looked like a team that had been outscored 69-20 in consecutive losses to Penn State and Marshall.

“Last week was not one of our best games at all, but we went back to the drawing board all this week in practice and went back to the basics,” Hundley said. “We went back to our roots, and we came out playing tough, hard-nosed football. And that helped us out in this game.”

The Panthers blew a 10-point halftime lead to Iowa last week .