The Chancellor cast the die; the future is determined; there are no more options; events will proceed in an irreversible manner; the point of no return has been passed and we have received unto us a new Athletic Director.  In other words and as Justin states so well: “Pitt has hired Utah State Athletic Director Scott Barnes to replace some jagoff none of us liked”.

So it was announced yesterday that ex-Utah State AD Scott Barnes has been hired to fill the position that layed vacant for the last four months. His full resume can be found in this Blather article copied word-by-word from the subsequent PITT press release.

Before we get into the meat of the matter here are two good pieces that the PITT media dept. put out.  PITT rolled out the blue and mustard gold carpet for the introductory press conference. Here is the video introducing the long drink of water as our AD and the second is a photo slideshow of the same presser with photos of all involved including the only non-blond adult female in Utah, his wife Jody Barnes.  Funny how much more intelligent she looks then the last HC’s wife from west of the Mississippi. Plus he has a daughter named after a fantastic Pepperidge farm cookie – Milano – so he’s got a sense of humor also.

The local media seem to be happy with him, at least Jerry DiPaola doesn’t take any overt shots at the guy.

Just for local balance here is Sam Werner’s take on Barnes’ presser.  An even better read is Werner’s Redshirt Diaries where he lays down some of the more interesting and important pieces of information regard the Barnes hire.

OK then, now you have the skinny, at least as much as is publicized, and we can start forming first impressions.  A couple of days ago I wrote in a comment on here “Call me unimpressed for a variety of reasons.”  After researching Barnes’ history, reading what is been written about him, including the facts of his accomplishments and now seeing him conduct himself and talk about his future plans for PITT athletics  in his press conference, I’ll say the needle moved a bit to the more positive side then it was yesterday.

But I’m still not rolling around in the catnip over his hire and here is how I feel about him and PITT’s hiring process.

My reservations on the hire, and I have some, are tied to criteria I jotted down in my notebook soon after Pederson was sent on his contractually required self-awareness trek to the mountains of Nepal which was paid for solely by alumni contributions (I hope he finds one true love that isn’t himself).

In reading this bit in the paper the skeptic in me comes out:

As far as the search process goes, interim AD Randy Juhl (who chaired the search committee) said the initial list of candidates was about 15, which got whittled down to around eight for formal interview. From there, the search committee’s goal was to come up with three or four names “where if we put their names in a hat and we drew them out, we’d all be happy.” That’s what they did, and submitted those names to Chancellor Patrick Gallagher, who said Barnes’ rose to the top.

Acting athletic director Randy Juhl said Gallagher “agonized over (the decision) for a week,” an indication of the quantity of the candidate pool and the importance the chancellor placed on the hire.

What that makes me think of reflecting back to my days of hiring is that Gallagher might have been given less than he thought he would get and didn’t want to start the process over. May have that is, it could be he just didn’t have a hat to pull a name out of like the PITT professors of old always wore.  But if you have three fully capable and highly qualified candidates selected to go before the chancellor and they are equal in the search committee’s eyes then when their names land on your desk you take a single day and one last phone call to each person… and you’ll have your mind made up by that evening.

You don’t go looking around for a hat all week.

If you fire by the swift sword as Gallagher did, then you hire as quickly by gut instinct on choices given to you by people whom you trust.  Look, the guy had four months to tell people what he wanted.

At first glance Barnes seems to be a fine choice by the search committees (both of them) and by Chancellor Gallagher as the new AD.  He’s cut his teeth at smaller schools in smaller conferences and seems ready, even if it is kind of late in his life at 52 years old, to take on the challenges that a university like PITT will offer him.  That is on the surface and I can see why people are excited about him coming aboard.

What I can’t see ever doing or really understand what went down is why people who will be under his authority had any say what so ever in his hire?  PITT fans are jumping up and down about Pat Narduzzi, all of three months and zero games experience at PITT or anywhere as the Man in Charge and Jamie Dixon, who has an ironclad contract and could probably care less which actual body is in that AD seat, having input into the actual hire of the candidates. Not in my leadership house thank you.

As the Top Dog one finds and separates out the immediate minds you want to closely advise you, and teach you if necessary, on the things you don’t know like the back of your hand (athletics at a high level in this case). THEN you pick their collective brains for as long as it takes to make you comfortable that you yourself can find the right AD the field level coaches need to have guiding them.

The primary thought here is to have the soon–to-be subordinates “advise”, not “advise and consent”  There is a huge difference.

Moving on – one of the more important qualities we needed the AD to have is  a solid understanding of just what the University of Pittsburgh is all about, not just athletically, and what truly unique challenges a new AD would face regarding PITT’s position in the city of Pittsburgh’s hearts and minds.

When I say ‘not just athletically’ I mean the level of interest the university holds in the minds of the regular Tri-state area citizens overall.  Can we even find any another city where a university’s campus is centrally located yet  where the majority of local college alumni come from a singularly different place than the home town school, as is the case between PITT and Penn State in the city?

That’s just the start and is something that I’m sure Barnes has never experienced before.  Not when working living and in places like  the University of San Diego, University of the Pacific, Iowa State, Humboldt State, Eastern Washington, Washington (UW) and Utah State .  None of those schools are located in any markets that would draw away interest in their athletic programs save for the University of Washington in Seattle.

UW has some of the same traits the PITT does as it is a college football team, surprisingly historical also, in a professional-heavy sports market.  With the Seahawks in football and the Mariners in baseball UW gets a taste of what PITT faces but they don’t have the Penguins and Penn State jumping up and down on their backs.

So the majority of places he has he has worked earlier, especially in his recent three jobs, his employer’s athletic teams were the toast of the town in most cases which made his professional life much easier to succeed in.  That won’t be the case at PITT where we are perhaps fifth in line for sports attention.

With PITT holding that lowest ‘interest share’ in local sporting events it is a huge factor to fully grasp, understand and believe in for an AD’s success at PITT.  It is something that one truly has to understand the roots of and ideally would have some hands on experience with. You may ask why fifth place and I’ll argue that there as much if not more passion and support for PSU football then for PITT’s in the Tri-state area.

PSU, WVU and OSU peel off a huge percentage of college football fans in our area and I think that is a problem that really hasn’t been properly acknowledged and addressed by PITT.  If you look closely at this interactive college fan map done by the NY Times and drill down to local WPA zip codes (I researched an approximate 30 mile radius from Pittsburgh proper) you will see that unless you are looking directly in the greater PGH area the college fan base is split at around 29% PITT to 28% PSU.

That is a heavy burden for an AD to bear and I wonder if Barnes, with his western and non-urban area job history, is the guy to fight through that barrier of disinterest in PITT football and/or major interest in other school’s teams.  Hell, there are zip code areas not too far away from PGH where the third largest percentage was pretty close to PITT’s total. BTW –  I don’t count Seattle as anything like a typical “urban area” because Seattle resides in a place in the universe way off on its own.

Barnes didn’t have to address this fan base problem at all in his last three jobs at Utah State in Logan, UT; UW in Seattle, WA and Eastern Washington State in Cheney, WA.  The closest was a minor drawing off of the southernmost Washington populace who bled over to be Oregon fans.

As much dislike as PITT fans held for Pederson he actually did recognize that PITT would never thrive in the course it had been sailing because attractive to only PITT alumni and PITT employees in the greater PGH area.  So he planned a long-term specific outreach and market ‘brand’ entry into the college football fans who are on the fence.  The problem was that he chose to use an untested under fire Tank Killing Mortar instead of a precise M-16 when he tried to bamboozle the non-PITT affiliated local people into following PITT sports just by changing the name on the jerseys.

He did it to make people feel more welcomed by PITT and wanted PITT to be more welcomed by them (I suppose).  We all know how that went, it was a hung shell, backfired and thus wholly alienated the exact PITT people whose help and support he needed to thrive and succeed in his job.  In essence he blew up the last bit of true support he had.

So I believe the new guy has to actually experience this phenomenon himself before he can fully understand how to attack it.  Maybe it is growing up in the city, maybe being employed by or playing sports for the school, or maybe it can be someone who experienced Pittsburgh while working is a totally separate industry.

It is funny though that almost every PITT fan clamors for a “PITT Guy” to fill the highest level jobs in the PITT athletic department but then get super excited when we reach out and hire persons who don’t have any affiliation with the school at all.  I call it the “Good Witch of Oz” effect because fans expect someone with a magic wand to just drift in from nowhere to save something that isn’t really in dire need of being saved, but firmly adjusted for a different approach to better successes.

Personally I don’t think a real ‘PITT Guy’ (i.e. Big DW.) is necessary in our AD spot.  Sometimes a senior administrator in the university where he had earned a degree from or had worked at a lower position earlier in has a hard time seeing the forest from his individual trees.  We saw this writ large with Wannstedt when he had the support and backing of enough influential PITT ex-players, alumni and donors in the beginning of his tenure here to make him feel like he was above the senior executives in his authority chain.  No one wants a situation like that to happen again as it ended up sucking for all involved.

Then again, we had a true-red Nebraska guy come in twice and that wasn’t great shakes either.

When I look at Barnes’ resume I can’t help but wonder if that lack of a working knowledge of a school like PITT, in an area like WPA and in the division of loyalty of fans like PITT has to face will work.  I do not discount the very real problem of spending all of your professional life in the Western states and on the West Coast and then suddenly transferring to not only more responsibility, but to a whole completely different attitude the Eastern cities people have toward their approach to football and basketball specifically.

I know firsthand that those coastal swap transitions are not easy to process and deal with, especially in middle and upper management positions.  I can count on my fingers and toes men and women I worked with who grew up living and working on one coast and had a very hard time adjusting to the other.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope he and his family aren’t completely shocked by the cultural change they will experience in moving from Logan, Utah to Pittsburgh. That worked real well with the guy we had come over from the hinterlands of Tulsa, OK didn’t it?

It is also true that success in a position doesn’t always come from new hires who are already in that line of work. I hope we looked at a few candidates who had a firm grasp of the 360^o degrees of good business practices and the art of reaching out to garner support among outside and unfamiliar entities. ANY good hire can learn the nuances of a new situation in about 6 months if he sets out to do so.

Let’s hope Barnes doesn’t instigate sort of earth shattering shakeup in the athletic department just because it’s his toy now.  Unlike most PITT fans, I don’t believe there was a huge problem from the top (SP) to bottom there. I recognized, like others, that SP had lived out his welcome, the memory of his good works faded away and that a change at the top had to be made… and good for the new Chancellor to do it.

The people who worked below Pederson; the Executive Associate Athletic Directors such as Chris Ferris, Wendy Myers, E.J. Borghetti, etc. and guys like Chris LaSala as the Director of Football Operations and the many others who actually manage the various departments did well when they had an extraordinarily hard time with Pederson as the AD. They had to be his conduit down to the staff and out to the public all while they themselves were feeling heat from his blunders from just about every angle.

That was no easy task and they did it very well in my opinion.  I can’t foresee, and granted I view the inside of PITT athletics from a distance mostly, where any of those positions and the people filling them shouldn’t able to be carried right through this AD hire and stay on at PITT.

Finally, someone please tell me that Scott Barnes wasn’t hired on the strength of a recommendation from a certain football HC who worked with Barnes at that athletic powerhouse, the University of the Pacific, over the 1990-91 years.  That would be the PITT icing on the PITT cake wouldn’t it?

I expected different results from Gallagher and the search committees, but in all honesty I can’t pinpoint any more than I have what or who that would be.  I just didn’t experience a ‘gladdening of the heart’ when the Barnes announcement hit the public.  More like, ‘well, this guy probably won’t screw things up too much’.

That doesn’t mean I think Barnes will do a poor job as our AD or that I won’t be swayed in his direction once he really starts working and we see results from his position.  He could be great at the job.  He hasn’t had any major screw-ups or garnered a bad reputation anywhere that I can tell, so I may well think “what a great hire” at a later date.

But right now have much the same feeling with Barnes as I do with Narduzzi’s hire and probably will while awaiting his concrete results like I do Narduzzi’s.