As I said, I don’t have a clue who the next AD will be. I’m not buying that Wannstedt will be looking to fill the role now or in the near future. Old names from the last search are brought up again.
Potential candidates could include Pitt’s last interim athletic director, Marc Boehm, now an executive associate athletic director at Nebraska, as well as three athletic directors who interviewed in ’03: Cincinnati’s Mike Thomas, Central Florida’s Keith Tribble and Florida Atlantic’s Craig Angelos.
Another notable name that has surfaced is Tom Donahoe, a former Steelers director of football operations and president/general manager of the Buffalo Bills. Donahoe received a personal guided tour by Wannstedt during a visit to Pitt’s Duratz Athletic Complex last month.
Not quite following why Donahoe would take a pay cut and prestige drop from the NFL, but let the rumors fly. As for Marc Boehm, returning if offered. I think that would be awkward.
Boehm is well-acquainted with Pitt, having been Steve Pederson’s right-hand man for six years before Pederson left for the athletic director’s job at Nebraska in late 2002. Boehm served as Pitt’s interim athletic director for 41/2 months and was the top candidate to replace Pederson.
But with Nordenberg and the rest of the university administration preoccupied with the search for men’s and women’s basketball coaches — a process Boehm helped facilitate — Boehm grew weary of waiting for Nordenberg to hire him full-time and followed Pederson to Nebraska in May 2002 to accept a position Pederson created specifically for him.
Unbeknownst to Boehm until late in the process, the eight-person search committee had unanimously voted to name him as the successor to Pederson. Nordenberg asked Boehm to reconsider, but the chancellor never offered him a contract. That led to a hasty search by the committee that ended two weeks later when Nordenberg appointed Long as Pederson’s replacement.
Chancellor Nordenberg really does dawdle over these contracts for ADs, doesn’t he? I realize money and time can heal a lot of wounds, but Boehm coming back would seem uncomfortable. How much would he really feel he could trust Nordenberg to back him and not, ultimately, undermine him.
I also don’t by the revisionism that the school was “preoccupied” by the men’s and women’s coaching job vacancies to deal with the AD issue. The coaching vacancies came well after the AD vacancy. In fact, part of why you have an AD is to lead the search for new coaches. The more I read that bit, the less sense it makes. Pitt’s men’s basketball coaching search had Skip Prosser at the top of the list and part of why he didn’t take it was that Pitt had no full-time AD and Nordenberg didn’t even assure Prosser that Boehm would be the guy.
That said, revisionism, doesn’t just apply to the time with Boehm. Long gets ripped on his way out the door.
Long’s biggest failure was his inability to maintain the season-ticket base for what should be the school’s flagship athletic program — football.
Pederson’s marketing initiatives led to the sale of 42,544 non-club season-tickets in 2003, a school record, and the establishment of a waiting list to buy season tickets for 2004.
Today, one literally cannot give away Pitt football tickets.
Puh-lease. At least rip on Long for things he actually did wrong. Heading into 2003, what had the season tickets sold-out was not any marketing initiatives, it was that Pitt was a preseason top-20 team that had the label of “darkhorse” Big East champion. A team that finished 2002 so strong, and looked poised to go farther. Instead, the season went to crap, the recruiting class was trashed and the head coach lost the majority of fan support.
Winning puts people in the stands, not “marketing initiatives.” Those only get their attention and might attract some first-timers.
Pitt is struggling with home attendance because the team isn’t that good and the home schedule is worse this year. Some of that is the weirdness of the Big East putting Louisville and West Virginia (and now Rutgers) all on the same home/away pace for Pitt so the Big East portion of the schedule is pitiful. The non-con is distinctly bad as a consequence of balancing the road games to Michigan State and Virginia. That part you can pin on Long.
Smizik also goes after Long, for being a caretaker rather than dynamic.
His two most notable undertakings were the hiring of Dave Wannstedt as football coach and a fundraising campaign tied to season-ticket purchases for men’s basketball. Wannstedt, who also was enthusiastically endorsed by Chancellor Mark Nordenberg, remains a work in progress. He has been a disappointment thus far, but it’s too early to make any kind of final judgment. The fundraising program was a success but not before it enraged some fans and forced a lawsuit that, in effect, was won by the plaintiffs.
Under Long, the men’s basketball program continued to flourish and he was able to fend off schools, notably Arizona State, trying to hire coach Jamie Dixon. The women’s program grew significantly under coach Agnus Berenato, who, like Dixon, was at Pitt before Long. Pitt’s hosting of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament first- and second-round games last season was a major step for the program and that success came on Long’s watch.
Let’s be somewhat realistic. The football and basketball programs had already been revised and dragged into the modern world of college athletics. There was success occurring in those sports. Exactly how was the AD supposed to do more with those parts, other than just try to make sure they keep moving in the right direction and keep the money moving? You really want an AD to tinker with what was going in the right direction? Jeff Long had been focusing on the rest of the athletic department that needed updated facilities, money and direction — which meant taking the hit for the fundraising by reseating for the Quest for Excellence.
College baseball is getting more attention each year. Pitt is finally on the way to having a modest ball field. Not to mention on-site facilities for the other sports to have practices and games — rather than going out into the burbs to high school fields.
Again, if you want to rip Long for being somewhat aloof, tin eared and actual sins committed that’s fine. To essentially make crap up, bothers me.
Who was it that said they thought he’d earn no more than 250K?
The way I saw it — and still see it — is that unless Pitt really hires an ace to replace JL, we fans may be in for a helluva disappointment; much like Chas stated in an earlier post, though we might not have liked the guy insofar as marketing the football program (viz dino-cat/dog) and scheduling its opponents, he did (in fact) do his job. (Aside from Dixon’s influence in the matter, you can’t fault the AD in his efforts to coordinate and seal-the-deal in contests vs. Duke, Washington, OKSt, Wisc, etc.) And grudgingly, I have to give him the benefit of the doubt in the Clemson debacle; IMO, he didn’t kill the supposed 1-4-1, and even if there was if both University’s was reached some mutual decision by both parties to dissolve the contract — I wouldn’t disagree with anyone contending that Pitt appeared ambivalent to see it through with the Tigers — but I don’t believe for a second that Long saw any real benefit in backing out. Really, if one program stood more-to-lose-than-gain by playing that game, it was Clemson. And whereas nobody wants the kind of exposure that comes with being annihilated on ESPN, Long was progressively more inclined than not, IMO, to gamble and play to the odds of a higher caliber opponent.
We don’t see PSUcks taking any risks with their football program …unless you consider the Temple Owls a competitive non-con foe. And based on earlier statements in defense of their renewed “instate rivalry,” you could argue (with some legitimacy, even) that the Lions truly consider Owls a challenge worthy opponent. Sh*t, even the basketball side of things is so preposterously arrogant that they’d prefer to side step Pitt than take a loss and…oh yeah, the potential interest and revenue generated by a televised broadcast; college hoops is big-market stuff, so even if a game draws only marginal interest from a regional audience, there’s still more to profit to gain than there is to lose (esp. if you’re PSU).
For now, though, PSU can and will get away with being ultraconservative. And they can afford their ignorance — you’d be equally right to call it a stubborn will to, literally, win-at-all-costs. But Pitt can’t do that. Not with the football program the way it is. So my point here is that whoever replaces Long better be willing to take some chances. And I don’t mean by changing the design of the uniforms.
….IMO, [Long] didn’t kill the supposed 1-4-1…
…I wouldn’t disagree with anyone contending that Pitt appeared ambivalent to see it through with the Tigers…
Regardless, …despite reports that a mutual agreement was reached to dissolve the contract (between Pitt and Clemson), I don’t believe that Long saw any real benefit in backing out… etc. etc.etc.
Sadly, while I disagree with the emphasis, I don’t contest the likelihood of the result. Especially considering they put the same turkeys from the last (botched) AD hiring fiasco back on the job again.
Let’s not forget Long was a face-saving last minute pickup off the waiver wire done to have somebody in place for the key BE meetings after the ACC fiasco … which he then didn’t even bother to attend.
