Your sidebar says you have 1179 posts, so I'd guess probably 1778 of them qualify as hype.
Pat Forde weighs in on the Stallings hire, and it's not good
- Thread starter Fredact
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Your sidebar says you have 1179 posts, so I'd guess probably 1778 of them qualify as hype.
And here we stand two weeks later... with Kevin Stallings, A 55 year old sopping wet fart. No need to rehash the resume... it's been beaten to death.
For the record, I will never accept the premise that Pitt can't be a top job in both basketball and football. These things aren't ordained by God. You make good hires, excite the fan base, spend well, and work your ass off to figure out what formula will win for your school.
And PS... there's no reason Wake can't be great again either, at least in hoops.. that's for sure.
I didn't say it was impossible, but given the expectation that a coach will come in and turn a program around in 2-3 years is very hard. Buzz Williams is a great example of someone who made an immediate, big improvement, but that's rare.
Antigua joined a terrible team, and has somehow made it worse. Even if he's a reasonably good coach, he might win a couple extra games in a year or two and still get fired. After that, who is going to want to hire him? It's no different than the Pirates hiring Lloyd McClendon or John Russel. Those guys had no chance of ever winning, so taking that job is not a particularly good idea.
Maybe Danny Manning is a great coach, but he's got a couple more years to really win, or else he's out.
Idiot, I moved out of Pittsburgh 20 years ago, I laugh at yinzer's just like you. Sad part is, you don't even know it or understand.
Glad they did, dude been failing for 5 years and counting. I don't believe that's why he left, but glad the heat was on the over paid coach
Three years is enough time for any coach worth his salt to begin showing an upward trend. South Florida might be worse because, unfortunately for the Pitt pipeline, Antigua might not be a good coach. They won 20+ games twice during peak Big East just a few short years before he got there. What gives?
Anyway.. are we really entering a world where all the best young coaches bide their time for 15+ years at Wichita State while they wait for Roy Williams to retire? Is this really the future of college basketball?
No, I don't think so. Pitt should always be able to grab a talented young coach for the right price.
If Barnes subscribes to this pathetic vision of Pitt's future, he needs to get his ass out of town. Yesterday.
What pathetic vision are you referencing? The strawman one you made up out of whole cloth?
Just to clear it up for you... the "strawman" version isn't mine. I'm not the one arguing Pitt can't do better than Stallings and shouldn't ever expect to. Others are clearly arguing that "strawman" in defense of the Stallings hire.
I think we can do better and should have this time around.
i predict, in all of my infinite wisdom, the kevin stalling's regime will be a short one.. I give it 3 years then we will make a terrific hire who will lead us to the promised land. So let it be done. I will be back here to accept all praise once this comes to fruition..
Exactly. A narrative. Just like the hard working blue collar Steel City.
More or less, this is where my opinion has ended up on the matter.
The only point of yours I wish to question is this: "He was the 7th highest paid coach in the NCAA we couldn't justify paying him anymore."
Did you mean "any more" or "anymore" as it is written? If it's the former, than I do indeed agree.
I thought he did well on the beat, yes. A little bit undecided on his opinion pieces and I absolutely loathe his baseball takes. I have to mute him on Twitter during non-CBB months.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sport...eason-usa-today-sports-coaches-poll/73977288/
For a third consecutive year, the Kentucky men’s basketball team enters the season with a No. 1 before its name. But this time, the Wildcats have company.
Not much to glean from Pat Forde's Article, he could have lifted the Pitt and TCU comments right from this Blog. Perhaps Pat Forde should spend some quality reporting time digging into facts about his hometown cesspool rather than merely giving passing comments about six coaching hires. I wonder how much of his 2008 book on Rick Pitino he would now recant?
No, because each coach is in a different situation currently. If Marshall suddenly wasn't enjoying his job at WSU, he'd leave. As long as schools like WSU or Gonzaga can pay their coaches enough, keep them happy enough, and continue to give them what they need to make the tournament every year, those guys don't have much incentive to leave. Mark Few probably gets better support at Gonzaga than a coach will at Rutgers.
Brian Gregory was a pretty decent coach at Dayton, no Miller though. He couldn't get it done at GT, and now he's probably never going to be a tier 1 HC.
Exactly what I expect. Maybe miss it or maybe get a little higher seed like a 7, but likely in between. And then likely be really bad in 2017-18.
It's a two-way street. The upside is just as great as the downside. Howland jumped from NAU to a P5 bottom-feeder and, within 4 years, had two sweet 16's, a BET championship and the keys to Pauley Pavilion. Confident young guns will always be willing to take their shot.
The other side of the equation is this: schools like Duke aren't guaranteed to stay on top of the college hoops world after their HOF coaches retire, just like Pitt isn't destined for mediocrity, 10 seeds and flame-outs for the rest of history. Times change, the coaching carousel turns, programs rise and fall, and college basketball refreshes itself.
As an AD, you have to give your school a chance to participate in that.
There are no guarantees, of course, but the best way to increase the odds of mediocrity into perpetuity in this day and age is to hire a wet fart retread like Stallings.
Exactly--this is the sentence in the piece that everyone in this thread conveniently ignored. And it supports my hypothetical theory that this is exactly what preceded Barnes' testy presser--that he had reached out to his top prospects and they all gave him/Pitt the middle finger, leaving him to make an uninspired hire that he himself wasn't real excited about. He certainly seemed enthusiastic about the opportunity to make the hire at the first presser announcing that JD was leaving. When he took the microphone to announce Stallings, his demeanor was considerably less enthusiastic than it had been at the prior presser, even before the local "press" started hurling grenades at him.
Exactly. Barnes' biggest fault was talking about not caring about whether or not he won the press conference, and then trying to win the press conference by hyping up the candidate he would get. He clearly thought he was going to have access to some impressive names.
Based on the names that surfaced -- and then either totally disappeared or were rumored to have flat out said "no" -- he was basically picking between someone like Stallings and coaches like Beard, Dooley, etc..
Pitt isn't in a place where they can be taking a flyer on some guy who's never come close to running a P5 program. It's already viewed as a wasteland of a job whose successes are solely tied to Dixon -- if they grab some low-major guy with helium and he falls flat on his face (a VERY real possibility) then every bit of improvement this job has seen over the past decade is gone.
Stallings compared to a low-major shot in the dark is a no-brainer, IMO.
Low-major coaches are like hotshot A-ball prospects in baseball or freshmen in college basketball. Their flaws and shortcomings haven't been exposed on the biggest stage yet, so they're viewed as guys having limitless potential who just need a chance.
I'm not ignoring it. I'm challenging it's relevance.
A) It's not news to anybody that we whiffed on Sean Miller. It was also highly publicized that Howland turned us down, though some, including Ziese argued that there was never any confirmed contact between them and that Howland's "no" might have been overblown. The fact that a few "lofty" targets publicly shot us down is not some amazing revelation. Forde is just regurgitating that as far as I can tell.
B) It's the not-so-lofty but very solid candidates that I'm grinding my ax over. Go back and review the timeline. Stallings' name surfaced too soon... as preposterous as it seemed at the time. Matt and others would say only days later that Stallings' name seemed like nonsense until it turned out shockingly that he was the guy. There wasn't enough time for Keattes, Wade and Enfield to each have been given more than a superficial sniff before "rejecting" us.
I see what's happening here in the realm of public perception. The narrative is forming that Pitt couldn't land any one of the myriad of quality guys it wanted... and oddly enough, that somehow justifies Stallings. No and No.
He contacted Stallings on the day Jamie Dixon left, setting his interview. I'm not sure this was an exhaustive search after Miller said "I don't have any interest in going to Pitt." It was basically Stallings and Enfield (who supposedly asked for Dixon money and was rebuffed, right or wrong), with guys like Lonergan and Drew in the periphery from what was reported.
Whether Stallings was his main target or not, as Barnes stated he was, it was a really uninspiring hire and use of a search firm. I get these schools use search firms to reach out and do background on candidates, but if you spend a quarter of a million dollars to use a search firm that comes to the conclusion that a guy about to be fired from a P5 school in a lesser conference is your guy (with a huge "coincidence" of ties between Barnes-Turner-Stallings), then perhaps you should look to spend your money a little more wisely.
If this is true, my friend, then taking a flyer on a guy with helium is our best and only option.
But even if not, it's still not a bad option.
A guy like Stallings locks in the "wasteland" status... considering he came here from Vandy to pasture.
It's a horrible option. The notion of needing to take risks to win is incredibly stupid. You're looking at taking a shot on a guy whose best case realistic scenario is Kevin Stallings or Jamie Dixon. Again, a lack of exposed flaws does not equal a lack of flaws. It just means they haven't been victimized 10x a year by Pitino, Williams, Krzyzewski, Bennett, and Boeheim.
Stallings should be moderately successful here. That should hopefully be enough to boost the job's appeal up a bit to the next guy.
They are much closer to being Wake Forest, Boston College, and Georgia Tech than they are to being anybody in the upper tier of the ACC. They can't afford for the coach immediately succeeding Dixon to see the whole thing implode.
The notion that we need a "bridge" hire seems incredibly stupid to me.
It's a "wasteland" today. But after a few years of Stallings, oh boy.. we'll have proven to the world that Pitt is truly special.
Here's a bridge I say we should build... how about we just bridge straight from January to September and eliminate the wait for the one Pitt revenue sport that hired correctly... the risky, up-and-comer Pat Narduzzi.
And PS.. the whole thing was imploding. Beginning with Dixon's disaster of a 2011 recruiting class.
He is clueless on baseball. Last year he was praising the Padres for trying to win...the Padres are going to be bad for at least 5 years because of the idiotic moves they made.
Lol lol lol. Yes, Pat Narduzzi -- the college equivalent of Jeff Capel -- was the epitome of risky. Definitely in line with hiring the coach of Little Rock who was a D2 coach just las season.
Pitt needs some coach to come in and have relatively comparable success to Dixon, otherwise the perception that Pitt only had sustained success because of Dixon will persist.
Bringing on a guy like Keatts or Beard or Dooley would be a complete and total coin flip as to whether they can come close to comparing to Dixon's success -- let alone surpassing him.
Their floor is EXTREMELY low.
Ummmm Dixon had been to the Tourney 3 of the last 4 years, averaged a 10-8 record in-conference, and was returning almost his entire team.
What are you talking about other than cherry picking the one timeframe that makes it look like he was even moderately struggling here?
Why not point out his last 6 years? It's a larger sample, after all.
But... when the 2 of 3 preceding years were #1 seeds with an elite 8
...and your roster turnover is spinning out of control
...and you're whiffing on plan B recruits
...and you can't keep a decent staff together
...and attendance is falling because you refuse to schedule better
...and you score 43 points on the way to losing a game you once led by doubt digits
...it looks more like imploding.
No, it isn't. Imploding would be missing the tourney 4 of 5 years. Going on sanctions. Losing 18 games consistently.
Saying they have imploded is dumb.
