All this speculation about whether Pitt should fire Harris or extend his contract.
Apparently Stanford is looking at Walt Harris as a possible replacement for their freshly sacked head coach.
This may solve Pitt’s problem for them. Harris is a California boy, and many posts have mentioned that he is less than happy here in Pittsburgh. Stanford is a high profile job at a school with money – no shame for Pitt losing a coach to a top program near Harris home. If he takes the job, Pitt won’t look bad for firing him and acting like a head coach carousel.
Most importantly, it gets rid of Harris. I think the mea culpas I’ve been reading on this board are premature. This is the same Harris who almost lost to Furman and Temple, who did lose to bad a bad Nebraska team at home, who choked against UConn and Syracuse. The ND, BC and WVU wins were nice, but none of those teams are in the top 25.
Does this resemble any other seasons in the past few years? Of course it does. Harris was commended for turning the team around and beating VaTech after going 1-5 a few years ago – the trouble is we were 1-5 in the first place, with a loss to USF. We’ve lost to Toledo under Harris. We’ve come close to losing to 1-AA teams multiple times (remember Vilanova?). He’s lost to Temple AND Rutgers. Sure, he gets the occaisional upset, but they are wasted when he blows easy games. And it’s never going to stop. He can’t take us to the next level, which means over the next few seasons, when Pitt is winning the weak-ass Big East every year, we will be the 8th best team in the BCS and could endanger the conference with losing its BCS automatic qualification.
He may be the Big East coach of the year, but that is by default. Who else could they give it to? Not Rodriguez again, considering how WVU failed to meet expectations (expectations that were way too high, in my opinion, but still…). Not O’Brien at BC, since he is a traitor; not Pasqualioni at Syracuse, because the Orange suck ass. Maybe the guy at UConn (he probably deserves is), but the fact that I don’t know his name is evidence as to why he didn’t get it.
No, the COTY award may help Pitt get what it both wants and needs – to get rid of Harris without looking like the bad guy.
So who is available? Wansteadt, Cavanaugh and Grimm (although he will likely be an NFL coach) are Pitt grads; Zook and Willingham are high profile coaches who are looking for second chances after washing out of high pressure programs. Plus there could be some great coordinators and other assistants out there that none of us have heard of yet.
Right now, my personal favorite is Willingham. He has done well at schools where academic standards are very high. Imagine what he could do with Pitt? He could get some great recruits here, and improve Pitt’s image in the process. He’s the kind of personality that Pitt could build a program around, and he’s young enough to stay here a while.
