So bb recruiting and now attendance have tanked?
- Thread starter TIGER-PAUL
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Pitt's fanbase and administration suck. Next question.
Product that Pitt is putting on the court . I guess Pitt expects fans need to spend their hard earned money on an overpriced ticket no matter how bad the product is . Winning gets you fans and those fans will pay the price it's not rocket science !
Dixon had a done a very good job over his tenure, he has a couple down years for him, and the rats jump ship.
As I've said many times, the comfort blanket of selling MSG and playing road games near family in NY/NJ was taken from Jamie at the same time when top assistants were leaving and he simply was not a good enough recruiter to sell the program for what it was without relying on "you can in the best conference at MSG."
The Big East masked what a bad recruiter he was.
The carnage of Jamie's last 2-3 classes put us in the position we are now and Stallings hasn't recruited any better. The program is in the worst shape its been in in a generation and obviously attendance has taken a hit. No surprise there.
The Big East masked what a bad recruiter he was.
The carnage of Jamie's last 2-3 classes put us in the position we are now and Stallings hasn't recruited any better. The program is in the worst shape its been in in a generation and obviously attendance has taken a hit. No surprise there.
Stop it, with the fans. It all begins and ends with a brain dead administration which has been intermittently indifferent and incompetent. You can kick your fans in the groin only so many times before they say "see ya, you're not fooling me again."
He plateaued and slipped badly...you're rationalizing away his clear shortcomings and the absolute failure by him and Pitt to capitalize on his success. He ended being a dud. People jumped ship because of the way the program was neglected and the ensuing bumbling search and selection of a successor, a hiring which was reminiscent of previous bumbling coaching searches for which Pitt has become famous.
Dixon (with Howland's help) built the program. Then Dixon poured gasoline on it. Barnes lit the match, and Stallings threw it on.
The program is in literally the worst shape a major D1 program can be in and a lot, a whole lot of that is on Jamie Dixon and is beyond horrible recruiting.
I love the visual analogy in your post...it's spot on. Your post also quite accurately reflects that the root cause of the downfall of Pitt BB traces its way inevitably to Dixon, Petersen and Nordenberg. Sure Stallings is responsible for righting the ship; no debating that. But Stalling's responsibility to right the ship shouldn't exonerate those responsible for the current plight of Pitt BB and once again the responsibility for this mess can be tied, to a significant degree to the Pitt admin,. who coddled Dixon, unjustifiably extended his contract and cast a blind eye to the fact that the program was crumbling before everyone's eyes. The admin. also conducted another half-a$$ coaching search which only compounded the entire mess.
Being that alot of these same issues resides in the football program also, I would think Del is correct. The problem is with Pitt's Administration. Always has been.
Dixon came out of the gate winning at TCU, and has been recruiting well. Dixon was not the problem. The Howland/Dixon Era was the best we have ever seen in Pitt basketball, but yet that was not good enough. Pitt fans are like anchors.
He was absolutely the problem...could give a $hit what' he's doing or will do at TCU. Sometimes a guy wakes up when he's shaken out of his comfort zone. He has much better assistants at TCU than he had at Pitt-are the Pitt fans responsible for this? He destroyed what he built at Pitt. All you have to do is follow the path of his recruiting. Some Pitt fans refuse to hold coaches and administrators responsible for their obvious shortcomings. You sound like a member of the Pitt administration!
People stopped attending games, less $ coming into the program, therefore less $ to spend on assistants. Certain Top boosters thought they could do better, and were wrong.
That's pure and simple unadulterated nonsense! Pitt had the ACC money which would have more than made up for a slip in attendance due to a deteriorating on the floor product. Keep "manufacturing" nonsense blaming the fans which won't hold up under scrutiny which, in the end, will only result in holding the Pitt administration responsible for the plight of Pitt BB and Fb for that matter too.
Dixon is a very good coach and inherited a veteran-laden team and got a package deal big-time FR PG by hiring his previous recruiter.
If you give Dixon talent, he can win, but his recruiting was getting so bad, he couldn't coach his way out of it.
What he does at TCU means very little. We know the guy can coach and we know that when he has 1 or 2 good recruiters (like he has at TCU), that he can get decent players.
Saying he's a very good coach even though he can't recruit is like saying a guy is a great CFO even though he doesn't understand how to read an income statement. Coaching requires a mastery of a number of disciplines or which at least requires a HC to construct a staff which covers all the disciplines.
I think the problem was that any astute fan could see that he couldn't recruit the talent needed to continue his success in the ACC . Style is a factor , but winning fills seats and Pitt just wasn't winning like they were in the BE . The price of the tickets only becomes an issue when your not winning .
Yea but I mean in just the actual coaching of basketball minus the recruiting aspect, he's pretty good. I'd take him back in a second if he brought that TCU assistant with him.
If it makes you feel better.
Literally 2 players remaining.
And Luther may be our best one.
Luther will be our best player next year, regardless of who else is on the team or who the coach is. Besides Luther, there is no one that is an ACC-level player that can compete.
I love how the same losers keep bringing up our former coach and continue to place the blame of the abortion of a season we had last year, as well as the worse season we will have this year, as totally on his shoulders. They don't know he's not here, unfortunately. He was the best coach we've had in many decades and a small group of big mouth, numbnuts boosters decided to get in Barnes' ear and "push" him out. And since Barnes is basically braindead, he listened to them. Pitt boosters and the loser fans who keep blaming him deserve what's going to happen this year at Pitt. And if you think this year is going to be bad in terms of record and attendance, wait until next year if Stallings is still here.
I love how the same losers keep bringing up our former coach and continue to place the blame of the abortion of a season we had last year, as well as the worse season we will have this year, as totally on his shoulders. They don't know he's not here, unfortunately. He was the best coach we've had in many decades and a small group of big mouth, numbnuts boosters decided to get in Barnes' ear and "push" him out. And since Barnes is basically braindead, he listened to them. Pitt boosters and the loser fans who keep blaming him deserve what's going to happen this year at Pitt. And if you think this year is going to be bad in terms of record and attendance, wait until next year if Stallings is still here.
Er, don't forget to add that he jumped ship too.
Let me close with a simple but true statement that we should all agree on.
There is plenty of blame to go around for the current state of Pitt BB. Time to move on and support our Team/program.
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The program needs to win back fans.
Don't hold your breath with our dead man walking coach
Del I know you're an anti-Dixon guy but what went on behind the scenes in regards to the aforementioned incompetent and unbelievably cheap Pitt Admin and Jamie was some of the most petty and unprofessional behavior I've witnessed in my 40+ years as a Pitt fan. Jamie and us as Pitt fans deserved better and IMO the Pitt Admin is getting everything they deserve and more for the absolute circus they allowed Barnes to run before he pulled his golden ripcord out to Corvallis.
Zeke, what I will readily acknowledge is that I don't know to what degree, if any, the Pitt administration restricted Dixon financially as regards his staff budget. What I do know is that: Pitt treated Dixon himself more than fairly in terms of his own financial package; and second, Dixon fought Pedersen as regards changing his staff so while I can't guarantee it to be the case, I don't believe money was at the root of Dixon's staff issues. I would also add I don't know what the dynamic was between Dixon and Barnes. What I agree with wholeheartedly is that the search for a Dixon successor was a sloppy, poorly run search executed as poorly as most Pitt coaching searches over the last 40 years. Yes, we deserved much better from the Pitt admin.
True. Most on here have no idea what happened between Jamie and the Pitt administration, even before he was gently shoved out the door by Barnes and the big mouth boosters. It was going on for a while and it wasn't the best of circumstances. Jamie made the best decision he could make when he was able to land at TCU as he did and leave this incompetent Pitt administration behind him. Nothing has changed since he left and he's in a much better situation where he is.
Nothing novel or unreasonable about an underperforming, highly paid coach being nudged by the AD to rethink some thimgs about his recruiting and the makeup of his staff. Dixon wasn't delivering the level of results the last 5-7 years which made him bullet proof or at least beyond the point of being urged to change some things. The trajectory of the Pitt program under Dixon was clearly negative. He needed to change some things and if he couldn't reconcile himself to making changes, then he was an egotistical twit I'm glad we are rid of!
So now we have a new underperforming and overpaid head coach...
Yet, you keep living in the past
Sadly what you are missing is the "egotistical twit" is up in Corvallis with a fat new contract & his plan to hoodwink the Pitt Admin and line his cronies pockets with $ succeeded while our once nationally respected Hoops program sinks to the basement of the ACC while Pitt becomes the laughingstock of college hoops - again.
Yep - Worst fit @ Pitt since Left Lane, Hammer Down.
I'm not disputing that Barnes was a dope but what I am not discounting completely but which I think you are to a degree, Zeke, is the prospect that Dixon contributed to some degree to the friction that paved the way for his departure. We will never know precisely what happened.
Don't like the new HC but a discussion one year into his tenure of the state of the program inevitably involves a discussion of those accountable for what he inherited. It's inescapable assuming you want to be fair which, of course, you don't want to be.
Yet the same posters keep bringing up the previous coach, while all the while not knowing much about how his departure took place or the circumstances leading up to his departure. If only they knew, they wouldn't be saying what they are saying. What happened behind the scenes is no one's business, so I can completely blame them for being ignorant of the entire set of circumstances.
I'm not disagreeing that Dixon could have been a better recruiter. He is not and was not an ace recruiter because he chose not to play in the mud with the slime. But this constant bad-mouthing of what he did here is old now and needs to stop. We have what we have and I doubt we will ever again have the level of excellence in coaching we had under Howland-Dixon. And that's for more reasons than just money, or coaches that want to coach at Pitt. I'm 100% sure that this Stallings guy is not a coach that will return us to any level of excellence beyond mediocre, if he's lucky.
I'm not disagreeing that Dixon could have been a better recruiter. He is not and was not an ace recruiter because he chose not to play in the mud with the slime. But this constant bad-mouthing of what he did here is old now and needs to stop. We have what we have and I doubt we will ever again have the level of excellence in coaching we had under Howland-Dixon. And that's for more reasons than just money, or coaches that want to coach at Pitt. I'm 100% sure that this Stallings guy is not a coach that will return us to any level of excellence beyond mediocre, if he's lucky.
This is all drivel. Given your love affair with Dixon, if you had any conclusive evidence, that he was forced out or treated unfairly you would have spilled the beans a long time ago if you knew anything. Instead we get the same biased and unsubstantiated innuendo from you over and over. Pitt can do better than Dixon!
I agree. After all, in the 110-ish years of Pitt basketball Pitt has done better than Dixon.
Twice, probably. And certainly no more than that.
Dixon was coach for 13 years.
His peak success was with his own players
His worst stretch- still has us in the dance more than not
His peak success was with his own players
His worst stretch- still has us in the dance more than not
Denying the success that Pitt bb had under JD is ludicrous . Pitt under JD were no longer a top team in their conference let alone in the nation and denying that is ludicrous also . There's no way of telling if JD could've revitalized the program ( I think his time had passed here at Pitt ) , however I doubt that the current coach will succeed . In ten yrs from now when Pitt bb is still struggling to be a .500 team in conference play and there's been two or three HC those still denying JDs excellence might gain an appreciation for his coaching excellence .
This is a reasonable post....I would add, however, the JD of 2015 was not the JD of 2003. I'd be happy with the latter but not the former.
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