Florida’s Urban Meyer is stepping down at Florida. The reasons are irrelevant. What isn’t irrelevant is the impact on Pitt’s coaching search.

Pitt and Florida are not on the same level in terms of present day prestige, money or potential. So, no Pitt and Florida are not going to be competing for the same coaches.

What it does do is set in motion potential dominoes that do compete with Pitt for the same guys.

First of all top assistants like Gus Malzahn, Dana Holgorsen and others are now going to wait and see if they get any chance to even interview with Florida.

Then there are schools like Louisville and Mississippi State with Meyer coaching tree guys. They are at the very least on the list to interview given their connections and recent success as head coaches. If one of them goes, it opens up another team looking for a head coach that pays somewhere in the same neighborhood as Pitt. That drives up the price on candidates.

If, say, Bobby Petrino at Arkansas were plucked by Florida, then the carousel spins longer as it trickles down. You can argue Arkansas isn’t much better a job than Miss. St., but Arkansas is willing (and able) to pay more.

You can create all the scenarios possible, but it just comes down to Pitt’s next hire could take a longer than wanted.

A hattip to PittScript who tweeted this last night, and posted this morning on it. Jon Baldwin made it very clear that he is leaving for the NFL. He blasted the coaches and his QB on the way out.

…but when asked, “Why would you stay [for your senior season] when you have no chemistry with QB Tino Sunseri, a new coach/system taking over next season and possibly hurt your draft stock for the 2012 draft, Baldwin clarified, “Oh, I misunderstood you … Heck yeah I’m leaving. It can only get worse. They had me running a lot of deep routes [this year] and yards were hard to come by. I barely ran intermediate routes; it felt like they were purposely trying to disrupt my draft stock.”

Not exactly the nicest things to say, and I don’t think he seriously believes they were trying to kill his draft stock.

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And it is already making my head hurt.

Since I didn’t see this coming (and yes, DeVanzo I owe you a DT from our bet during Saturday’s liveblog), I just haven’t given the whole next guy to coaching Pitt a lot of thought. Instead, I had been trying to draft a post rationalizing why I was keeping my season tickets. Now, the only way I have to resume work on that is if Paul Rhoads gets hired.

Others already have their lists out. Chris Dokish, Paul Zeise, Chris Mack, and Chris Peak (subs only — and I am of the belief that he put that picture of Paul Rhoads at the top just to see how much I will freak out at that prospect).

Lots of good points and interesting suggestions in the lists. I don’t think any one list is that much more superior than the other. I agree/disagree with some assessments on all of them. My feeling is to try and keep an open mind about all of them (well, almost all).

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