The more time passes without a word from Pitt, the more I think we’re getting a third year of this mess

The passage of time thus far, in my opinion, less than one day removed from the last game of the season, is meaningless. If anything, Stallings’ response after the game was telling, he’s always honest (we’ll give him that) and he said he has no idea if he’ll be back next year. This is either an absurd lack of leadership on Pitt’s part or it’s indicative that he will not be back. If you’re going to try to milk one more year out of him, then do it like you mean it. If they’re actually planning to keep him for another year and the disconnect is that bad to solicit a response like that from Stallings, then I fear we don’t have the right leadership in place. If I had to put down $100 on the bet, I say he’s gone.

Coaches notwithstanding, When has Pitt EVER had the “right leadership” in place when it comes to sports?

The thing that concerns me the most about this is that Lyke gets a free pass to butcher this and maybe that’s fair, but the safe money for her would be giving it one more year. It’s not like the administration/board is going to come down on her in anyway.

Let’s not forget that fact that Pitt will still get paid a slice of the 7 or 8 teams that DO get to the dance in the ACC. Does that offset the attendance losses? Who knows? The number nobody seems to know is how much Pitt loses for poor attendance and booster rejection.

Keep Stallings and the only negatives are another year of poor attendance and fan anger/apathy. We already know how they feel about fan anger/apathy.

So yeah… I’m concerned.

Jon – Nothing is expected until after the ACC tournament.

Tossing – I was hoping that meant the end of the ACC Tournament for Pitt, but it appears it did not. Sunday is a long way away.

I’d be concerned if they bring Stallings back for another year due to the potential damage I’m afraid he’ll do to our brand, etc. It’s silly to worry about ‘not firing him’ publicly after 22 hours. Just nuts.

55 …when has Pitt ever handled a sports decision with any acumen ??!

Jon – haha. Me too. I took it to mean end of the tournament. Maybe I’m wrong.

If you’re on Twitter, rumors flying fast and furious. Already playing out in public and is heading towards a messy divorce.

Sheesh, talk about rubbing salt into a wound…Boston College upsets NC State and advances to the tourney Quarterfinal…

@Dan72 – Well… that’s tough….in football you’d have to go back to pre-80’s. After the Sherrill debacle. That was really the last time Pitt had a sniff of being truly relevant. I had interaction with people who were pretty powerful in the booster community during that period – many said at the time it was the end of an era. To this day they are still not wrong.

In Basketball, I’d say the Howland hire was Pitt’s one saving grace. They bumbled into Dixon non the back end so I don’t give any real credit for that, but there really was’t anything sleazy or strange about Howland;s hire or emergence IIRC. It was a good hire with maybe a shade of luck, but the guy was money, and he’s been money everywhere he’s been.

But yeah, you clearly get the point 🙂 🙂 🙂

Football- Good news from our great AD.
From the fan interview of this morning:
Heather Lyke’s told the Duzzi that football season tickets were ahead 6% this same time 2 years ago.
I think that just means the Penn State folks are buying our season tickets much earlier than they did before.

She’s counting the new expanded student section plus everyone they moved out of those sections as new buyers, thus the 6% bump.

I don’t think she knows what the hell this statistic means. LOL

Stallings,
We will all know Thursday morning “according to sources close to the program”. LOL.

“According to sources close to the program” we will have a coach next season, that you can be sure of . “We will have a coach but we don’t know who it will be”. LOL

Hey, actually having a coach is NOT even a given round these parts… 🙂

DDay…Heather’s Office 9am tomorrow!

Other HC news –

Out: HC Keith Walker of Delaware State. The Hornets ranked 350th out of 351 teams at KenPom this season. Walker lasted four seasons as a head coach in the MEAC. The program last made the NCAA Tournament in 2005.

One of Pitt’s lonely 8 wins this season.

It almost has to be over. I heard this morning that lawyers for both sides are involved. Wonder how long it will go and if it will end with “see you in court” which I still contend is a bad scenario for Pitt. It sends the wrong message to any potential coaches – that Pitt can’t be trusted to live up to it’s contracts. I’ve yet to see anything that establishes true cause from a contractual perspective:

Losing> Coaches lose. Sometimes they lose a lot. It would be easy to argue that he had nothing to work with and two years isn’t enough time to turn this wreck around.

Anger> Coaches lose their temper sometimes. They get frustrated. I haven’t seen him do anything that Boeheim hasn’t done a thousand times.

Academics> Pitt put a bunch of kids on the ACC Academic team. It would appear he’s got kids that at least go to class.

Sexual Misconduct> He’d have been gone by now if someone had something real.

Then again, I haven’t seen the contract. Maybe his agent was an idiot.

it’s all speculation – shouldn’t even be thinking about it. I do hold out a glimmer of hope that the reason Pitt is moving now as opposed to after the tournaments are over is that they have someone lined up or they want to start going after someone specific. Then I guess we hope for the best…

Craig Meyer
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@CraigMeyerPG
3m3 minutes ago

Pitt has fired Kevin Stallings, according to multiple sources.

Phew.

Oh crap, now there’s a coaching search.

Wheeeeeeee

I hear Rick Pitino is available.

link to post-gazette.com

“The decision comes two days after the Panthers lost to Notre Dame in the first round of the ACC tournament in Brooklyn, capping off a dismal 8-24 season. In the process, they became just the 13th major-conference team since 1985 to finish the season without a win against a league opponent and the only team in all of Division I to do so this season.

Stallings finishes his brief career in Oakland with a record of 24-41, including a 5-34 mark in ACC play. His overall win percentage of .369 is the lowest for a Pitt coach since Benjamin F. Printz, the first coach in program history, went 8-14 (.364) in his two years at the helm, from 1905-07.

He becomes the first Pitt coach since Andrew Kerr in 1922 to see his stint end before the start of his third season.”

Good riddance..

The good news for our AD? It would be hard for Heather to do worse than Stallings.

If it’s true, it sounds like there wasn’t anyone on the hook. That is disappointing but not unexpected. Did anyone use the dreaded “C” word (Committee)?

I’m not worried about Pitt not “honoring their commitment to coach’s contract”, in a day and age when contracts are almost completely meaningless, and coaches under contract leave schools more then we can count. And I’d be really worried if we sent the message that we ‘honored the contract’ of a coach that just lost 19 straight games and hasn’t put together a good solid recruiting class.

So Finally, some good news from leadership standpoint. We did the right thing, we did it quickly and with authority.

Yes, I know, now we need to hire the right guy, but first things first. Encouraging indeed.

link to sports.yahoo.com

“Kevin Stallings was the wrong choice for Pittsburgh from the moment he was hired”

link to thebiglead.com

“Pittsburgh Is Paying Kevin Stallings $9.4 Million to Go Away, After Former AD Scott Barnes Screwed Them on Both Ends”

Don’t draw out the hiring process. Don’t take weeks to do this. Don’t involve committees, firms, etc., etc. Have your ducks in a row, raise some cash if need be and make a hire! The spotlight is on you now Lyke. This is why the position of AD exists. Now get it done.

If the payout is really $9.4 million, then they must have projected the hemorrhage from poor attendance, etc. would have been way more than that. Or…someone from the ACC said do something about this or else.

H2P!!!

OMG – what a relief.

FU Scott Barnes.

I was upset when Kevin Stallings was hired. I really wanted to see Pitt get an agressive young Mid-Major coach, who would look at Pitt, as a step up. Considering where we are with buy-out and a young inexperienced team, I would have given Stalling’s one more year. Now that all that is behind us, I would like to see the type of guy that I wanted before. The basketball program has hit rock bottom and the Pitt job will not viewed as good a of ajob as it was when Jamie Dixon was leaving. They may not be able to get the up-n-coming Mid-Major coach now and we may be looking at lesser known canidates. Regardless, let’s hope they get it right this time around.

The “national search has begun” and so has the 2018 rendition of another Pitt Athletic Department Coaching Circus. Bring on the search firms, committees, “quoted sources close to the situation” etc.
If the AD does not have some idea of who she wants, we are in for another bottom of the barrel cast of characters.
What is she going to do when the Duzzi goes 6-6 or 7-5 this football season?. Will she fire him also?

WOW, how in the hell did the situation with our athletic programs get to this point?
It can only go up and improve.
For the sake of our Student Athletes, please pick some good coaches, they deserve it!!!

What will this decision do to the roster?
Who stays, who goes?

I fear it will be several years before Pitt see a competitive basketball team.

@Pitt Dreamer – All signs point back to the late 1970’s early 80 when Bozik and Posvar castrated Myslinski and in the end, forced out Sherrill. Posvar wouldn’t even meet with Sherrill to discuss his concerns. It was at that moment that Pitt made a conscious decision that haunts us to this day – athletics would forever play red-headed stepchild to all other Pitt concerns. There have been few decent decisions since then – they got lucky with the Howland hire because he came in under budget but still had talent, and Dixon wound up being by-product of that. yet they managed to pooch that in much the same way they pooched the Sherrill situation 35 years ago. There are definitely similarities. In the end, it’s why I’m usually pretty pessimistic about things getting better – it’s a cultural issue at the leadership level. The AD ends up being a pawn who gets frustrated/minimized/marginalized, winds up frustrated, cuts whatever deal they can, and then leaves.

We all like to get fired up over the misgivings of the AD, but my old man was privy to some of those conversations amongst the boosters and Myslinki when that whole thing went down. There wasn’t enough money or power anywhere to stop Pitt from changing it’s course. There was no reasoning with them. It was almost spiteful. That culture hasn’t changed much, if any, at the highest levels from what I’ve seen over the last 30+ years. Imagine being an AD at Pitt – they sell you a bill of goods, fill your head with ghost stories of tradition and honor, but when push comes time to double down, they pull the football away from you at the last second every time. Heather Lyke may want to run the show and make a bold hire, but it probably won’t matter what she wants. Pitt will tell her what she wants, and she’ll have to smile and sell it to us. I pray I’m wrong.

Sorry to be so negative, but you asked 🙂

@Pitt Dad – An interesting point. I’ve often wondered what, if any, influence the conference has on these types of things. It’s embarrassing for the ACC to be tied to this, from the low attendance to the media surrounding it all. Every conference has a red-headed stepchild of sorts, and every conference needs it’s share of mediocre teams, but when it becomes egregious, do they step in and make demands? I’m sure it happens behind the scenes if it does, but I would argue that it might make sense for the ACC to slide Pitt a few dollars under the table to make it go away.

Poor attendance? I have no idea what those numbers break down to. Pitt has had low attendance for decades in football, but with basketball its tougher to hide. I always figured Pitt could just rent out the Pete for a few more events to take some of the sting out, but it doesn’t make up for lost ticket sales.

As Pitt fans, we seemingly always live in interesting times 😉

@55 – I doubt that there is ACC money involved but I can see ACC pressure. Don’t forget that before we joined they still considered themselves to be the premiere basketball conference and certainly the most prestigious – whether that was true or not. Somebody has to be last in the conference (what do you call the person who graduates last in the class at medical school? doctor!) but there is a difference in being last and BEING THE ONLY D1 SCHOOL NOT TO WIN A CONFERENCE GAME THIS YEAR. I’m sure the bigwigs at the ACC do not want that to happen again.

H2P!!!

From a comment on the Trib: “Joe Dooley at Florida Gulf Coast University would be perfect. He came into a tough situation as the guy who inherited the “Dunk City” mania from FGGU’s Sweet 16 run in 2013, and has done a fantastic job. He was Bill Self’s top assistant at Kansas for 10 years previous to landing the FGCU gig. And as a Jersey guy, he grew up with Big East basketball in its heyday, and thus has appreciation for the history of Pitt basketball.”

“What will this decision do to the roster?
Who stays, who goes?”

They better stay because not even Bobby U would want any of those guys.

It all depends on the hire – some of them might inadvertently land in a reasonably decent situation,

I was reading about Dooley yesterday. I could abide by that. It’s early though, and I don’t trust the administration. They might just have a “Coach for a Week” promotion and let 30 or so “lucky” winners call the shots.

How bad could it be? 🙂

Alan Saunders at Pittsburgh Sports Now does a nice job identifying coaching canidates. With the exception Tom Crean, who I think is jerk, I like Dan Hurley and Ron Sanchez, but there are a few others that also sound like viable options. Hopefully no search firms this time around.

link to pittsburghsportsnow.com

We lucked out when Pitt hired Ben Howland. He was not a big name at the time and Northern Arizona isn’t a bigtime program.

Be careful in what you wish for. Does anyone think Pitt will get it right this time.

I guess that PSU Suzy is off the hook for this go around. Her team did have 2 ACC wins this season.

Pitt sports in general are what they are. At best mediocre.

JP – You fix football and men’s basketball before anything else. A women’s search right now would just be a distraction. It’s not a revenue generating sport so it can wait. Nothing against the sport, but it shouldn’t be a priority right now.

55-
You are so correct, it started when Jackie S. was forced to look elsewhere. Pitt was on top of the world and this school had a golden opportunity to invest and continue to grow the programs. By now we would have had either a remodeled or new Pitt
Stadium plus all other necessary facilities.
The administration (Posvar) did not want to hear any of it, just continue without any improvements.
We have been struggling ever since that period.
Kind of depressing when you think about it.

55- I just re-read your paragraphs about the reason for Pitt’s demise. You are so on point here, I remember all of those points and the results they created.
Please send it to the PPG, they may print it for publication. It’s a clear concise history lesson for all Pitt fans.

Posvar didn’t get it. When Virginia Tech made it to the National Championship game, their admissions applications went through through the roof. It inhanses the perception of a school. People connect with a schools teams and they want to be a part of it. With increased appilcations comes greater selectivity.