Okay, guess it’s time to clear some links. Not really any need for game recaps, right?

So, um, congratulations Coach Dixon on being named Sporting News Coach of the Year.

Coach of the Year honors go to Pitt’s Jamie Dixon, whose philosophy of player improvement led Pitt to a 27-5 record, 15-3 Big East record and Big East regular-season championship. The Panthers have won at least 20 games and 10 in the Big East in each of Dixon’s eight seasons and few of his players transfer if their careers start slowly. Never once have you heard of his team splintering because players were focused on their draft statuses.

“I think that’s the type of sacrifice you have to make to become a Pitt player,” senior forward Gilbert Brown says. “If you sacrifice for the team, you’ll have the outcome. I think that’s the environment Coach brings to the team.”

Outstanding timing.

(more…)

“Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with change, both from the perspective of an organization and on the individual level.”

That wraps up what the PITT administration has been dealing with since Pearl Harbor Day of 2010.  It is hard to look back over the course of recent PITT football history after WWII, and find another time when this type of purposeful change has happened. Perhaps 1973 with the hiring of Johnny Majors is up there with our 2011 shift.

We didn’t just see a change of Head Coaches and their staffs back over December and January, although that would have been a big enough task to deal with.  We also saw the PITT administration mandate the new Head Coach institute cultural changes in the football program to deal with what PITT recognized were real and continuing problems.

Some of these changes were enacted on the players right away by Todd Graham – clothing and jewelry standards, language usage and workout times to name a few.  Some of the changes were physical.  As Pat Bostick writes:

“Even the indoor field looked different – the old surface was replaced with a lush new turf, which changes shades of green every five yards. There’s also a Pitt logo in the one end zone, which I must say, looks pretty cool.  It doesn’t stop there. After 10 minutes of watching the guys in the white jerseys, wondering why there wasn’t anyone throwing or catching a football,  I realized that the defense was now wearing white and the offense had switched to blue”.

Note: That fact that it took an ex-PITT starting QB ten minutes to realize he wasn’t watching the offense is a whole different story line and rather disconcerting, wouldn’t you say?

(more…)