If we oversimplify it, lets go back to Year 2. 2019-20. Pitt was expected to make great strides with The 3 being sophomores. We started the year with a massive win over FSU in a throbbing Petersen Events Center. It seemed like old times and many of us thought we were back. I honestly thought we could be an NCAAT team. OK, we lose to Nicholls and WVU. It sucked but was forgiveable. We proceed to beat KSt, NW, and a Rutgers team which would have made the NCAAT if there was one. We win the rest of the non-con but start slow in the ACC. Still, we are 6-7 with faint NCAAT hopes but the NIT looked like a great possibility and in Year 2, would have been like a dream. We proceed to lose the final 7, McGowens transfers, and the freshman class (besides Champagnie) was a complete bust so there's no depth being created in the program. The rest is history but I honestly think that if we win 3 or 4 of those last 7, things would be WAY different right now. To be fair, Capel has simply had a lot of bad luck here but in those last 7 games, there wasn't any luck required. We had enough talent to win some of those games but didn't and we've been in freefall ever since.
Where Capel went wrong
- Thread starter Sean Miller Fan
- Start date
Capel’s first mistake was putting together a bad coaching staff. His second mistake was not making any changes to the staff.
Pretty much. He never addressed obvious problems. Just seems like he simply isn't cut out to be a head coach. He reminds me of the parent who wants to be their kids' friend.
I was never big on this. If you hire a recruiter as your HC, you shouldn't have to rely on assistants to get you good players.
Continually targeting extremely coveted recruits while ignoring more realistic options was probably the first (or second, if you think his staff was unfit from the start) mistake. And he never seemed to adjust from that.
I think that most of us thought when Capel was hired, we would get an average coach but a great recruiter. Well, what we got was a lousy recruiter and coach.
Right we had to hire a recruiter because we couldn’t recruit.
He did improve recruiting, but couldn’t develop, control, maintain or coach his recruits. That failure (and some bad luck) ended his ability to recruit. He is done here.
Now, I think, we need to hire a coach to re-establish culture and stability. Hire Brandin Knight and be extremely patient with him.
If this team had Julian Champagnie and Posh Alexander last year from NY like we should have had both of them when we were leading to get both of them until Capel decided neither was good enough for Pitt, things would have been drastically different last year and this year.
And if Femi Odukale didnt have the severe arm break last year and Big John didnt get arrested for a felony last year and if Justin Champagnie didn't hurt his knee last year and have to play the year with a knee brace on, we would have potentially been quite good last year and this year.
Unfortunately for Jeff Capel, ifs dont matter much in year 4 when you dont choose to recruit the right players and other bad things happen.
The blunders on Julian and Posh were the 2 biggest recruiting failures to date because both wanted to come here and Jeff wanted neither in the end.
Agree things could have been much different if we didn't slow-play Julian and Posh. Its just been incompetence at every level imaginable. Coaching, recruiting, player retention, player behavior, etc.
That last paragraph nails it. Nobody’s a perfect evaluator but if he takes those 2 things might be much different.
Even this year, I think a take the sure thing approach would have netted us a couple more recruits.
After the Citadel game, they probably would have recommitted, but just saying.
Agree. It’s ok to dip your toes in the water of the high end recruits. But you gotta be able to read the tea leaves and be realistic. Maybe in hindsight he overestimated his ability to be persuasive and recruit. He did good at Duke (not exactly heavy lifting of course) and maybe he didn’t adjust here accordingly.
As painful as all the second place finishes were, his entire tenure he has "under recruited" in terms of the number if hs kids he could have brought in, and too often didn't have solid back up plans for the kids he had focused on.
Oh, and STILL has not recruited a viable center.
Mistakes have been made , but how do you ever account for a kid openly committing then backing out at the last minute without any warning ?
I can’t imagine having a job that requires to kiss the asses of 17 yr old kids , their parents and handlers to be successful. Granted the monies beyond great , but recruiting just sucks .
Sticking strictly to the kids you can get sounds great , but how do you ever beat the teams above you who have players with superior athletic ability and talent .
So how does what you say explain where he went wrong? I mean, if you said, during those last seven games Capel switched from running a predominant offensive set of “X” to a new offensive set of “Y” thereby denying the playmaking ability of his sophomores then I would say yes that makes sense. But you are only identifying that we lost those last several games which really was something he had been historically known todo.
My post said nothing about Mintz. That happens. Seems to happen more at Pitt but whatever. It was specifically about him turning down Julian and Posh.
I agree about the ass kissing part. I’ve said the exact same thing myself.
Sticking to the kids you can get worked pretty good for Dixon for a long time. Later he seemed to finish second a good but which is where things started going a little backwards.
None of it is easy. And that’s probably even harder. But for a time there was nobody who seemed to know and thrive in their lane better than Dixon.
FWIW, I stopped reading when you used the term "throbbing Petersen Events Center".
Yikes.
I don't remember the games exactly. How about devising any type of game plan to prevent 0-7 when you were 6-7. They had enough talent to go 10-10.
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