Have to start to wonder if that run with Pitt Hoops will be like Pitt Football and will Pitt always be chasing that level and never obtain it again consistently or at all?
Pitt Hoops 2001-13 = Pitt Football 1976-82
- Thread starter tylersmyth
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It could easily happen. We witnessed how the job was perceived when Dixon left. I thought a good coach would look at the 13 tourneys in 15 seasons and tell his agent to get him the job. All it took was one and there was no one.
What a kick in the stomach.
What a kick in the stomach.
The parallels are there between football and basketball.
I hope and pray that Pitt has enough institutional knowledge of the collapse of football to avoid a repeat in hoops. But all of the key decisionmakers are different now. The only constant is the University's DNA, which contains a self-destructive gene.
In football Pitt had a powerhouse with a powerhouse coach. Misstep 1: They allowed Jackie Sherrill to leave town and handed the keys to an affable, beloved man who was not equal to the job. Misstep 2: After fixing the Foge problem, they blew it with Gottfried -- a capable coach who went 2-2 vs Paterno -- and replaced him with a guy worse than Fazio. Who drove the program off a cliff. Misstep 3: Majors II..... and since then it's been one second-tier hire after another punctuated by the occasional exhilarating highs and head-scratching lows. Pitt has taken half-steps up the stairs ever since.
Failure to acknowledge the quicksand is just so...Pitt. And we could be headed in the same direction with basketball. I don't know for sure about Capel. The pandemic created an abnormal situation, but all schools are in that boat.
I compare Pitt to Carnegie Mellon, my alma mater. Up the street, varsity sports are barely above a student activity. Sports are taken in stride and are far, far down the Tartan totem pole. Winning is great but participating and competing are the point of it all. Students and alums know and accept that fact. I always envied the elevated stature of sports on the campus west of Craig Street. Success mattered. But these days I wonder if winning still matters to the people in the Cathedral.
I hope and pray that Pitt has enough institutional knowledge of the collapse of football to avoid a repeat in hoops. But all of the key decisionmakers are different now. The only constant is the University's DNA, which contains a self-destructive gene.
In football Pitt had a powerhouse with a powerhouse coach. Misstep 1: They allowed Jackie Sherrill to leave town and handed the keys to an affable, beloved man who was not equal to the job. Misstep 2: After fixing the Foge problem, they blew it with Gottfried -- a capable coach who went 2-2 vs Paterno -- and replaced him with a guy worse than Fazio. Who drove the program off a cliff. Misstep 3: Majors II..... and since then it's been one second-tier hire after another punctuated by the occasional exhilarating highs and head-scratching lows. Pitt has taken half-steps up the stairs ever since.
Failure to acknowledge the quicksand is just so...Pitt. And we could be headed in the same direction with basketball. I don't know for sure about Capel. The pandemic created an abnormal situation, but all schools are in that boat.
I compare Pitt to Carnegie Mellon, my alma mater. Up the street, varsity sports are barely above a student activity. Sports are taken in stride and are far, far down the Tartan totem pole. Winning is great but participating and competing are the point of it all. Students and alums know and accept that fact. I always envied the elevated stature of sports on the campus west of Craig Street. Success mattered. But these days I wonder if winning still matters to the people in the Cathedral.
I think winning matters. I think this admin is putting the investment in. For all sports. I think it's ridiculous when people say that the admin "doesn't care about winning". Winning is difficult, especially when you aren't a huge school with a huge donor base. I think Pitt, at least since 2000, and especially now, care about winning. It doesn't mean you will always win, but it doesn't mean you don't care.
Our coaching salaries are above most schools with our revenue. We've made significant upgrades to our facilities, with a $300M project in the works.
I think one of the issues is, everyone wants Pitt to be the Bama of football or the UNC or Kentucky of basketball, and are baffled when outside of the Pitt bubble, we aren't even in those conversations, as is about 80% of all P5 programs.
Are there going to be peaks and valleys, sure. The title of this thread listed the peaks of the program. The vast majority of other programs will go through it as well.
When we do hit one of those peaks though, we get greedy and want more and end up trying to push out someone that is successful for more. Wanny and Dixon are 2 examples. Did they fall short from where we wanted to be. Sure. But they had the team at least competitive and gave us a chance to have a magical season.
Also, most are looking for the quick fix. Unfortunately that is extremely difficult to do as well. They see it happen at one school, even though that school lprobably struck out a million times as well to get there. And just lose patience. If you want the quick fix, be prepared to strike out more often than not.
But again, I'm going on a tangent, but to say the university doesn't care about winning is just baffling IMO.
Good points. The bizarre thing about Pitt is its double-barreled ability to self immolate by driving off successful coaches and replacing them with duds.
I think this is quite possible - mostly because what PItt basketball did from 2001-13 is truly remarkable — even for so called ‘blue bloods.’ I don’t think PItt will ever achieve thst kind of sustained success again — mostly because it’s just so hard to do for any school .
Stallings was basically Foge.
I’m not sure if the job was unattractive after Dixon left because the media treated a legendary coach like shit or because they all saw the cupboard was pretty empty. Or if Barnes/Turner nepotism limited the candidate pool and we turned away some really good names.
Who was even considered other than Stallings? I can’t remember.
I’m not sure if the job was unattractive after Dixon left because the media treated a legendary coach like shit or because they all saw the cupboard was pretty empty. Or if Barnes/Turner nepotism limited the candidate pool and we turned away some really good names.
Who was even considered other than Stallings? I can’t remember.
I think there’s certainly more hope for Pitt basketball than there is Pitt football. Basketball is fundamentally cheaper to operate than football, meaning it’s easier to invest enough to build a winner. There’s also less players on a basketball roster; having the basketball equivalents of Aaron Donald, Tyler Boyd, and James Conner on one roster would most certainly have a better result than a 7-6-esque season because individual players have a bigger impact.
There’s also the double-edge sword of being in (arguably) a basketball-first conference. Northeast football was never that competitive outside of us, Penn State, and the occasional WVU/Syracuse/Boston College, so we didn’t need to invest as much into it to reach our desired result. ACC basketball is a whole separate animal. We’ve seen what lackluster play/coaching will get you: a spot in the basement. The constant pressure of keeping up with the pack could help us out. On the flip side, being in such a competitive conference could also simply hamper our chances of returning to where we once were. All things to consider...
There’s also the double-edge sword of being in (arguably) a basketball-first conference. Northeast football was never that competitive outside of us, Penn State, and the occasional WVU/Syracuse/Boston College, so we didn’t need to invest as much into it to reach our desired result. ACC basketball is a whole separate animal. We’ve seen what lackluster play/coaching will get you: a spot in the basement. The constant pressure of keeping up with the pack could help us out. On the flip side, being in such a competitive conference could also simply hamper our chances of returning to where we once were. All things to consider...
Believe it or not, we played NC State three times in his four seasons. The first game was a 14-14 tie, the second game was a 34-0 Pitt win, the third game was a 14-3 Pitt loss.
Must have been a four game series, because we beat NC State in Foge's last season, 24-10.
No, no way.
Foge 25-18-3 Stallings 24-41
But more importantly,
Foge gave all he had to Pitt.
Stallings took all he could from Pitt.
Agreed. The difference between building a winner then and now, IMO, is that we didn’t have to start at “ground zero” in the Big East like Capel did after Stallings.
People seem to forget that sports is a zero sum situation. Every school in the ACC wants to win, but that is not possible. For every good team, there is a bad team.
We'll never have a 15-year stretch that successful again, but even our most successful years only resulted in two Big East tournament championships, some Sweet 16s, and one Elite 8. We could catch a good rising coach who is able to match that success in a relatively short period of time. That's way different than measuring against the 76 championship team, because Pitt will almost assuredly never get anywhere close to a title ever again.
Miami was pretty mediocre before Larranaga was hired and he managed two Sweet 16s in his first five seasons.
Miami was pretty mediocre before Larranaga was hired and he managed two Sweet 16s in his first five seasons.
