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.”

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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.

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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.