At least with respect to the Pitt football program, yes they obviously do have to keep attempting new gimmicks as obviously they need to do all they can to try to sell their product. In case you hadn’t noticed, there are quite a lot of college teams playing packed stadiums nearly twice the size of Heinz field every week with plenty more fans eager to get their hands on tickets. These same fans buy up tons of merchandise and also watch the games on TV, which produces better ratings and brings in higher advertising dollars for the networks, which in turn leads to the games getting placed in more prominent places on the television schedules. Pitt plays to a partially filled stadium and when televised the games are generally on local broadcasts at odd times due to the low demand for the product.
Ticket sales and television deals are nedded to bring in the huge money needed to keep up with the support facilities for the sports programs to entice new recruits. Pitt does have it good that they are paired up with the Steelers so they are not necessarily needing to be self sufficient in that regard and still have very nice facilities (although a small stadium). However, huge crowds and prime time nationally televised games are just as much if not more of an attraction for new recruits which Pitt is lacking compared to many other schools.