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July 31, 2019

I know, football practices start in a couple days. But I have to do this one first, because it’s been turning over in my head for a while and then there was  great piece in The Athletic yesterday that put a bit of a bow on it.

Over last summer and fall, there were some pieces about the rebuild for Pitt under Jeff Capel. The stressed point was that the wins probably weren’t going to be there. The key was to see improvement.

With all of the potential difficulties this team may encounter, fans may wonder exactly what they should want from Capel’s first season as coach.

The answer is relatively simple. Pitt fans should just expect growth and improvement. They should root for a team that is tough, competitive and getting better each week, crafting the foundation of a culture that will pay off down the road.

I thought that was about right — even if changing/creating/crafting a “culture” is kind of a stock thing when a new coach takes over — for expectations. Maybe a few more wins in ACC play was presumed, but the season was about what could be expected.

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about is that it is so easy to fall from the place Pitt had reached even five years ago. You look just in the ACC. Georgia Tech. Wake Forest. If you want go back further, Boston College. Look at Notre Dame suffering a couple injuries or Miami with some talent lost last year. The fall can happen abruptly — even if presumed to be temporary.

Blue blood programs aren’t immune to suffering a bad year. They are more likely to rebound more swiftly, but ask Indiana and UCLA about how that can go.

And Capel didn’t just know that. He experienced it.

Players normally stay on campus during the summer to take classes and work out. Capel decided they needed to get away and erase the memory of Pitt’s worst season.

“Then when you come back, let’s be ready to really get after this thing and understand how hard it’s going to be,” Capel recalled telling his players. “No one’s going to feel sorry for us, especially in this league. It’s a very unforgiving league, but we have to fight.”

Capel, son of a college and pro coach, was a four-year starter for the Blue Devils as a 6-foot-4-inch guard. His freshman year, Duke lost to Arkansas in the national championship game. The next season, with Grant Hill gone to the NBA and coach Mike Krzyzewski out of commission with health issues, Duke went 13-18 overall, 2-14 in the ACC, and failed to make the NCAA tournament. For Duke, missing the tournament is as unthinkable as Coach K’s hair going gray — it’s just not supposed to happen.

The following season, Duke started ACC play 0-4, then clawed back to make the NCAAs and finish 18-13.

“How do you get from under that? You either give in to it or you fight your way out of it. That’s the lesson I took from that,” Capel said during a conversation in his sparsely furnished office. Atop his glass-topped desk were neat paper piles of charts, plays and handwritten notes; a photo with his wife and three children; and three books: Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World And Me, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and The Power of a Positive Team by Jon Gordon.

“One of the most important things I learned during my time as a collegiate player was you have to fight for everything that you want. It’s not given. It’s not a birthright. You have to earn it,” Capel said. “And you earn it by what you do every day, how you show up every day. You have to keep pushing.”

Arkansas won back-to-back titles and after an acrimonious departure of Nolan Richardson, they haven’t been even close. None of their coaching hires have worked out. No matter how much the fit seemed right. No matter how much fan support or money they were ready to throw at the problem.

How far does VT backslide now that Buzz Williams is gone? As far down as Marquette went? Will they be able to claw back to conference relevance (but, not much more) as Marquette has done?

You can never take that past success for granted, or use it to assume that more is to come. Or else you end up in the situation like Pitt did.

Before his arrival in the spring of 2018, the visuals didn’t do that. They reflected, in fact, a place with inadequate storage space: mops, vacuum cleaners, a few trash cans, all lining the hall. There were some graphics on the wall but they were outdated, to put it charitably.

This is what you saw when you came to work every day as a player in a program in one of the best leagues in the country. You walked through a broom closet to get to your job.

And so begins the tale of how Capel, just three or four days on the job as Pitt’s head coach, felt compelled to apologize to his new boss. He was on his way to the practice gym. He noted the things on the walls that he did not like. So he made a decision. He began to rip things off that wall, without convening a staff meeting or a focus group. And then he pulled out his phone to contact athletic director Heather Lyke. It was a better-to-beg-for-forgiveness moment, in which he hoped Lyke would be empathetic to his unilateral redecoration plan.

“It was embarrassing,” Capel says now, sitting in his office a little more than a year later. “It wasn’t what it needed to be, at the level it needed to be. I took a screenshot and sent it to Heather and said, ‘Hey, I hope you aren’t mad.’ ”

Were there any questions about the Pittsburgh men’s basketball being a tear-down job, this should have answered them.

It’s easy (and not unreasonable) to put the blame at the feet of the previous two athletic directors. One who was looking to get out the door almost as soon as he arrived; and the other who never wanted to put money into the facilities once they were built. But it was more then that. Everyone (including Jamie Dixon), just stopped noticing the little things around the program.

Maybe even more important than the bump in basketball proficiency is the very obvious, very thorough commitment to enhancing the infrastructure for the program as fast as humanly possible, to pour millions of dollars into making Pitt basketball look like Pitt basketball should look.

It’s not entirely about Capel working wizardry on the recruiting trail to bring in elite talent (though clearly that’s the idea and clearly it would help). It’s not even about putting Pitt at the forefront of the college hoops amenities race. It’s about catching up. It’s about understanding that Pitt basketball might not have been ready for the ACC, from a resource standpoint, and getting to the point six years later where it at least looks like it belongs.

“It doesn’t matter how good the program is, man,” Capel says. “If you don’t take care of it, it can fall apart. We tell recruits: You have this beautiful plant or you have this seed that can produce this great plant. It can be beautiful. It can grow and spread and it can be beautiful. But, man, if you stop watering it and taking care of it, what’s going to happen? It’s going to wilt and it’s going to eventually die. And I think this program wilted big time.”

And now Pitt has a coach with the attention to detail needed. And an athletic director that knows that there was a lot of work needed on the facilities.

And again that seems to be the crux of the issue, certainly from an infrastructure standpoint. Pitt was winning big in a Big East Conference that had its own share of basketball spending leviathans … but also a pretty decent chunk of schools without outrageously bright and shiny new things everywhere you looked. The ACC, meanwhile, wasn’t lacking for schools in hot pursuit of bright and shiny things. Pitt didn’t have to hurry to keep up. It had to sprint just to get back in the damn race. “I would say the facilities — they were tired,” says Lyke, who was hired in March 2017. “And they didn’t reflect a very strong message or a strong brand. You hate to say it, but leadership matters. Facilities matter. Facilities tell your story. There’s a great story here, but I surely don’t think it was being told very well.”

Is that some shade being thrown at her predecessors? I’m saying yes.

She’s not wrong. Pitt basketball and Coach Capel are also benefiting from the timing. The ACC Network that launches very, very soon.

The upside is that Pittsburgh seems to have figured this all out, posthaste. The school is putting roughly $20 million into enhancements for both sides of the basketball operation, including $13.5 million in studios and production rooms for ACC Network broadcasts. Capel will have a flat screen and that “smart wall” in the locker room, for coaching on the fly during games. The soon-to-be-former media workroom will be his new film room, sans recliners. (A new media room is being built off of an upper concourse.) The players’ lounge will be upgraded and serve as a place for the Panthers to get away, while not exactly getting away. “These seasons are long,” Capel says. “You get tired of the coaches. We get tired of them. I’ve always felt there should be a space the players have that’s their space.” In the empty hall space and a stairwell outside the entrance to the basketball offices, soon there will be walls and glass and a new entrance behind which the school will build — wait for it — actual conference rooms for both basketball programs.

Every. EVERY ACC school is putting a ton of money into their facilities for the ACC Network. That wasn’t optional. It did, though, makes things easier to add on the renovations needed for the basketball side of things. Toss in the very important  — and can’t wait to see it — flipping of the cameras in the Pete to show the Oakland Zoo behind the court; and the off-the-court stuff for Pitt basketball is all very positive.

The basketball team is about to take off for an exhibition series over in Italy. With the ACC moving to the 20-game conference schedule, there were only 11 non-con games to announce. Plus, the season begins with a conference game against Florida State.





Welcome back! H2P

Comment by Will 08.01.19 @ 6:46 am

Nice to have the site back

Comment by Onetime 08.01.19 @ 7:58 am

Hi Chas! Welcome back and nice piece. Enjoyed it.

Comment by JoeL 08.01.19 @ 12:14 pm

Chas…welcome back and thank you for the outstanding article! From the “tone” of the discussion on facilities maybe we can dare to dream of a “Pitt Stadium” for football in the future.

Comment by HbgFrank 08.01.19 @ 12:32 pm

Really great read. Thanks.

Comment by PittFan28 08.01.19 @ 2:14 pm

Yea Chas!!

Comment by Reed Kohberger 08.01.19 @ 5:38 pm

Great read.
Thanks.
H2P!

Comment by Gasman 08.01.19 @ 8:48 pm

Great article. Glad this site is back.

Interesting to hear Capel’s perspective on the facilities and the need to improve the behind the scenes part of the Pete.

From a fan perspective, it was still a great facility. We don’t see what other schools have for the players.

Comment by notrocketscience 08.02.19 @ 6:08 am

Really good piece.

Glad to have you back from your hiatus.

Comment by PITT-cocks Fan 08.02.19 @ 11:15 am

Boom. Missed that rationality. Again, welcome back!

Comment by Tossing Thabeets 08.02.19 @ 12:59 pm

Welcome back. Looking forward to basketball and football.

Comment by anotherclancyrebound 08.02.19 @ 9:36 pm

Welcome back Chas. Look forward to more articles

Comment by BigB 08.02.19 @ 10:06 pm

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