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May 18, 2011

Forgetting the Past

Filed under: Coaches,Football,Graham — Chas @ 10:09 am

Coach Todd Graham gets a front page piece from Rivals.com. He discusses the challenge of changing systems.

At Rice and Tulsa, he learned a few lessons, and with the Panthers, he still is in the process of changing old habits and putting his own stamp on the program.

“You ever watch ‘Men in Black,’ where they take that little wand and they kind of beep it and it makes them forget everything?” Graham says. “I wish we could do that a little bit.”

Graham wishes he could wipe the memories of the old offensive and defensive schemes from his players’ minds, and he probably wouldn’t mind erasing any memories of Pittsburgh’s tumultuous coaching search as well. In reality, the Panthers had two coaching searches, and Graham basically was Pittsburgh’s fourth coach between Dec. 7 and Jan. 10.

Safe to say it isn’t just the players who could use the memories of the last 10 months or so of Pitt football wiped.

Despite Graham’s successes at Rice and Tulsa, he suggests that he never quite reached the full potential on offense because of the time needed to get the conditioning and players in the system.

Now that spring practice is over, the major task for the players is to work on conditioning to run Graham’s preferred high-tempo offense.

“It almost takes three years to get where we want to be from a conditioning standpoint, where we can play a football game at our pace,” Graham says. “Coming out of spring, we can play at half at the pace that we want to go at.”

Graham’s Tulsa teams led the nation in total offense in 2007 and ’08, when Malzhan was the coordinator; the Golden Hurricane were sixth and second, respectively, in scoring offense those seasons. Tulsa was fifth in the nation in total offense and sixth in scoring offense last season, when Morris was the coordinator.

The group may be competent, but Todd Graham knows from experience that proficiency is a long-term process.

“We are not going to go from A to Z, not in one year,” he says. “When I was at Rice, we went from A to G. When I went back to Tulsa, we went from A to M. We’re hoping we can be somewhere in there.

“We will look very different from Year One to Year Four.”

Safe to say Pitt will look very different from what was Year Six to Year One as well. Or, um, something like that.





To have Tulsa as our benchmark is, um, not what I had in mind.

Comment by steve 05.18.11 @ 12:12 pm

I don’t see any reason why Pitt can’t go from A to Z by the end of the year. Pitt has better athletes. 3 years for conditioning? Give me a break.

Comment by TX Panther 05.18.11 @ 12:24 pm

I suppose this is intended to lower expectations for a 6-6 season.

Comment by matt42 05.18.11 @ 12:37 pm

Hopefully, what coach Graham is saying is that he will filter his system in over the next few years as he stocks the team with his type of player…In other words, he will adapt his system to the players on the roster over the next few years…I see no reason why he can’t do that and still win 8,9, or 10 games. This is the Big East, we have more talent than most (all?) of the teams in the league and it is wide open. I would consider 6 and 6 to be a total failure for next season.

Comment by HbgFrank 05.18.11 @ 1:11 pm

But does he need to start at ‘A’?

I’m not being facetious (for once)

Comment by wbb 05.18.11 @ 1:24 pm

Mike Haywood, alive and well and with good advice for Coach:

link to presnapread.com

Comment by steve 05.18.11 @ 2:46 pm

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