Inside a coaching change: Pitt players share their experiences

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It’s been a decade since the start of Pitt’s coaching carousel, a five-year period of instability that began when Dave Wannstedt “resigned” as head coach of the Panthers in December 2010 and finally came to a conclusion with Pat Narduzzi’s hiring in December 2014.

Between Wannstedt and Narduzzi, Pitt hired Michael Haywood for two weeks, Todd Graham for 11 months and Paul Chryst for three seasons. That seemingly constant state of upheaval took its toll on the program, the fans and the players.

This week, players who lived through the coaching changes shared their experiences with Panther-Lair.com. What was it like to live through such instability? How do you react when you get the news that your coach is leaving? What happens during that period when there is no coach? What is the first meeting with the new coach like?

Here are the players who spoke with us about living through Pitt’s coaching changes.

Pat Bostick - quarterback, 2007-2010 (Coaches: Wannstedt, Haywood)
Cameron Saddler - wide receiver, 2008-2012 (Coaches: Wannstedt, Haywood, Graham, Chryst)
Brock DeCicco - tight end, 2009-2010 (Coaches: Wannstedt, Haywood, Graham)
Artie Rowell - offensive lineman, 2011-2015 (Coaches: Graham, Chryst, Narduzzi)
JP Holtz - tight end, 2012-2015 (Coaches: Chryst, Narduzzi)
Shakir Soto - defensive lineman, 2013-2016 (Coaches: Chryst, Narduzzi)
Elijah Zeise - wide receiver/linebacker, 2014-2018 (Coaches: Chryst, Narduzzi)
Darrin Hall - running back, 2015-2018 (Coaches: Narduzzi)

And to refresh your memory, here’s the timeline of events as they unfolded starting 10 years ago:

December 7, 2010 - Dave Wannstedt resigns as head coach
December 15, 2010 - Michael Haywood is hired as head coach
January 1, 2011 - Haywood is fired as head coach
January 10, 2011 - Todd Graham is hired as head coach
December 14, 2011 - Graham leaves Pitt for Arizona State
December 22, 2011 - Paul Chryst is hired as head coach
December 17, 2014 - Chryst leaves Pitt for Wisconsin
December 26, 2014 - Pat Narduzzi is hired as head coach

Pitt followed its 10-win performance in 2009 with an underwhelming 7-5 record the following season. The Panthers had finished the schedule with a win at Cincinnati, but that didn’t overshadow nationally-televised blowout losses to West Virginia and Miami at home or a crushing defeat at Connecticut with the Big East’s BCS bid on the line. For many fans, the decision to fire Dave Wannstedt after that season was a welcomed move. The players, on the other hand, weren’t necessarily expecting it.

PAT BOSTICK: We weren’t thinking about it at all. It was disappointing how we ended the year with the loss to West Virginia at home. We got pounded pretty good in that game. But we beat Cincinnati on the road and we were turning our attention to the bowl game, which was our third consecutive bowl game after missing a few years. We knew we would have a lot back the next year and it seemed like Coach was starting to hit his stride. He had a good recruiting class put together and we felt like we had a really good culture. When we started hearing the rumors, I just remember feeling like a family member died. It was a really emotional moment for a 20-year old kid because everything you knew, relative to Pitt football, was going to change. That’s not easy.

CAM SADDLER: I don’t think we ever got to point where that was a concern of ours. I think we all knew that we were getting in a lot of trouble, like there was a lot going on. I think there was definitely that kind of, ‘Hey, it’s a little wild in here right now.’ But there was never an idea that Coach was going to get fired. We were still doing a good job in our eyes.

BROCK DECICCO: I remember when Wanny was getting fired, we were in the locker room. I think we were just getting done with a workout or something, because that was in December before the bowl game. I was sitting with Lucas Nix in the locker room and we got a text and we were like, ‘Is this really happening?’ We were just in shock.

I didn’t think it was going to happen with him. After that, I feel like I knew every time it was going to happen. But before that, I thought Wanny was going to be in it for the long haul at Pitt. Which I think he should have been, to honest. There’s not many guys who recruited like him; I understand that he might not have won some of the biggest games, but he could recruit.

PAT BOSTICK: I got some text messages from guys that day, and I remember thinking that was odd because we had just had a team meeting a couple days before. That night of the press conference, we had a team meeting in the locker room before he was going to give his remarks, and that was really hard. I remember seeing Jan Wannstedt in the parking lot; that was difficult.

ARTIE ROWELL: Coach (Tony) Wise and Coach (Brian) Angelichio and Matt Dudek recruited me to the point where I got to know that staff pretty well. I had my in-home visit with Coach Angelichio and one of my high school coaches encouraged me to ask him about the stability of Coach Wannstedt’s future at Pitt. My coach had done some research and was talking to some people - believe it or not, there is a strong Pitt following in central Pa.; you just have to navigate your way through the Penn Staters - and there were some rumblings.

So we’re doing our in-person visit and I ask him about Coach Wanny’s future and he just kind of laughed it off. He said, ‘Coach Wannstedt is a Pitt guy, he’s not going anywhere, you’re safe, you will play for the same guy.’ And like a day or two later, the news comes out and Coach Wannstedt is doing his (resignation) press conference.

I called and talked to the staff like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ And Coach Wise goes, ‘Alright, Artie’ - in only the way he can put it, he goes, ‘Look, my best friend is leaving this university and chances are, I’m not going to be here any longer. You’re a good football player and I think you have a future and I encourage you with whatever you may do, but my focus right now is on the guys in my room. I’m not really concerned about recruiting right now; I have other people to worry about.’ So at that point, I took a step back and reviewed my recruiting.

After Pitt announced Wannstedt’s resignation, the University made the curious decision to put him at the podium that night. A group of Pitt players showed up for the press conference, too, and when Wannstedt walked to the microphone, those players joined him in a show of solidarity that left the coach speechless.

PAT BOSTICK: I was there. I got up behind him. Jason Pinkston was really the leader of that. There were some guys that were much more emotional, that we all had to reign in in the locker room. I vividly remember that. It was a balance between supporting Coach and also representing ourselves and the University the right way and not coming across like we’re losing control. That was the balance. But we all came to the conclusion that we were going to all go up and stand behind him, and I think that’s the sign of what any coach would want from their players. I’ve watched that video probably 150 times since that day; I really look back on it and I think it was such a pivotal time for the program. I still remain in disbelief about all of that.

Bostick may have been in disbelief over Wannstedt’s departure, but less than a year later, Pitt would experience another change when Todd Graham left for Arizona State after just one season.

CAM SADDLER: We had a workout in the morning, so I was knocked out in bed. Someone called and said they heard Todd Graham might be leaving. So I called Coach (Chris) LaSala and I said, ‘Hey Coach.’ He said, ‘What’s up Cam? You hearing?’ Him saying ‘You hearing?’ made my stomach fall. It was like, oh crap. This is serious. He said he’d be reaching out to us in a little bit and we’d have a team meeting later that day.

I got off the phone and Todd Graham had sent a text message to a couple guys on the team. Chris Jacobson, Mike Shanahan, Tino Sunseri - he sent a message to a couple guys. No, not Todd; it was his guy who did everything - who was that guy? Blair Philbrick. Blair sent the text message and word started spreading and we started calling each other. Then Coach LaSala sent a text message saying there would be a meeting.

I got over to the facility and there was a buzz. I wouldn’t say excitement, but guys weren’t sad. It wasn’t the same as before. It was like, alright, here we go. Another one. Here we go.

ARTIE ROWELL: We had a team meeting because the offensive coordinator, Calvin Magee, left and went to Arizona. Coach Graham held a team meeting with us and really sold us, reassuring us that he was in it for the long haul, his assistant coaches were in it for the long haul, he’s not interested in hiring coaches for short-term periods, that it’s a destination job - I mean, he really went all-in on this. Two days later, there’s a lot of news.

Graham left Pitt in December 2011 and was replaced by Wisconsin offensive coordinator Paul Chryst. Chryst coached the Panthers for the next three seasons, winning 18 regular-season games and one bowl. But when Wisconsin head coach Gary Andersen decided to leave the Badgers and become the head coach at Oregon State in December of 2014, Chryst became a popular candidate for the opening in Madison

SHAKIR SOTO: I remember it. I remember going through the recruiting process when I was a senior in high school and the opportunity presented itself for Coach Chryst to leave (to go to Wisconsin in December 2012 after Bret Bielema went from the Badgers to Arkansas), and he made sure to call all the recruits and assure all of us that he wasn’t leaving. That helped secure my decision to stay committed to Pitt and go there early for the spring. I think that happened a week or two before I left to enroll at Pitt.

It’s something you have to think about, because you commit to the coach you want to play for. Obviously, it’s not good to commit to a coach because sometimes the situation could happen where the coach does leave; you have to have other reasons why you want to commit to that school, which I had at Pitt. But it does play a role because you’re not committing to a coach you don’t like. ‘I don’t like the head coach but I’m going to still go play for them’ - that’s not how it happens. You commit to coaches that you like.

JP HOLTZ: You kind of figured it was going to happen whenever we saw that the Wisconsin job opened up. I wasn’t really surprised when I found out. I’m pretty sure Coach (Joe) Rudolph told me ahead of time, before it hit the media. He told me it was a possibility. So I wasn’t really surprised.

ELIJAH ZEISE: Obviously that job at Wisconsin had opened up and it was kind of rolling on ESPN so we were all talking about it. It came up in the locker room a little bit and we were like, ‘Do we really think he’s going to leave?’ We didn’t really think that he would; we had all been around him long enough to know that it seemed like he really cared about the team and about being there. So we weren’t too worried about it.

As more and more stuff came out, it definitely was a little bit less convincing. Then he called a team meeting and brought us all in, and it was a long speech about how he really cared about all of us and it had been the hardest couple of days in his life. He was pretty much telling us that there was no place he would rather be and how hard it was because if there was another place he would consider, it was Wisconsin. So he was having a hard time trying to make the decision and figure out what he was doing. But he was very clear that we would be the first people to know if he was going to take the job. He said he would tell us.

Honestly, I felt pretty confident that he was probably staying. There was just something about the way he talked that made it seem really genuine and that he was really having a hard time thinking about it. So with the way he was speaking and how genuine he was, I felt very confident that, at the very least, if he was going to take the job, he would call another team meeting and bring us in. He even told us that he had taken a meeting with them early on, just a phone interview or something like that. He was just very genuine in what he was telling us, so I left that team meeting feeling pretty good with where things stood.

The next morning, he was on a flight to Wisconsin, and later that night we heard the news that he had officially took the job. We were like, ‘What?’ We were in shock.

SHAKIR SOTO: When that happened, everybody was like, ‘Wow.’ It was upsetting but it is what it is. When Coach Chryst left, it was sad. He was a players’ coach and a really cool dude, and it was devastating at the time. I mean, you don’t know who they’re going to bring in.

Darrin Hall was a four-star running back prospect at Austintown Fitch High School in Youngstown, and he was committed to Pitt at the time Chryst left for Wisconsin.

DARRIN HALL: The summer before my senior year of high school, I committed to Coach Chryst. I remember, leading up to it, there were so many articles about him saying how he wasn’t going to leave and he was going to stay at Pitt. Next thing you know, boom, he’s gone.

My high school head coach the time, rest in peace Phil Annarella, he called me into his office and said, ‘Hey, the coach left, but you don’t choose a school based off coaching. If you liked the school, stay.’ But he also called Coach Junk (Bob Junko) and got him on the phone and he was being the great guy he is. He said, ‘We want you here. If I find anything out about the head coach, we’ll let you know.’

ELIJAH ZEISE: He flew to Wisconsin the next day after that meeting and it broke on ESPN later that day, and as soon as it broke, everyone in all of our group messages, everyone was texting each other. The next thing we knew, we got a text from TJ Ingles, the director of football operations - he sent out a mass text to everyone that basically said Coach Chryst had accepted the job at Wisconsin and that we should be advised for coming schedule changes and things like that with practice and stuff. That’s pretty much how it all happened.

SHAKIR SOTO: Me, personally, I didn’t have any hard feelings. There were probably some people on the team who had hard feelings for the way he left (without meeting with the team). I think that once you leave, you leave. Once you made your decision, they’re not going to let you back in the building. If you left, you left. I don’t know the details of it so I can’t be mad at him about it; he might have had a tight window and had to make a decision right then and there. Then you just have to go. I can’t be mad at him.

That’s his dream job. It’s hard to reject it twice. He did it once; then the opportunity came up to do it again. If he wasn’t happy at Pitt or whatever - outside of football - with the front office people then, I mean, he left. You can’t fault somebody for just trying to live their dream job. It’s hard to reject it twice. I respected him for rejecting it twice.

ARTIE ROWELL: Coach Chryst leaving was a different situation. Nobody could blame the guy. He played there, he coached there, he’s from there; that is his dream job and we were all happy for him. It’s awesome to see the success that he’s having right now.

JP HOLTZ: I was actually really happy for Coach Chryst. I mean, that was his dream job. You really couldn’t be mad about it. It’s like, if it was me and I was coaching somewhere else and I got offered the Pitt job, that would be the same thing. So you can’t knock the guy. You have to do what you have to do.

When Wannstedt resigned and Haywood replaced him, the players were in the midst of preparing for its first trip to a bowl game in Birmingham that December, but that was just the start of transition that offseason, as Haywood would soon be gone and another change was on the way.

PAT BOSTICK: I vividly remember bowl practices and how insanely awkward those were, because Mike Haywood would be there with one of his guys and would ride a stationary bike and watch. It was just insanely odd. It was almost like a splintered break. Coaches are very type-A competitive people, and you have a bunch of coaches who are looking for jobs and think they should still be there, and you’ve got their replacements in the room - it wasn’t good. It wasn’t healthy.

ARTIE ROWELL: We had a team meeting (after Graham left) and a lot of the seniors were like, ‘We’re not going to the bowl game, we have no interest in playing for this staff, we’re not doing it.’ Coach (Bob) Junko and a few of the other seniors stood up and said, ‘No, we’re going to the bowl game. This is our last game together.’

I just saw an overall resistance by the upperclassmen who had totally bought into Coach Wannstedt. They were strongly against a new culture and a new message, especially when it goes from Coach Wannstedt to Coach Graham. I didn’t know what to think about that, but at that point, I was a freshman trying to block Aaron Donald on the scout team; the last thing on my mind was, how do you lead a group of guys in a transitional period?

CAM SADDLER: It was a wild time. It was the wild, wild west. We would eventually go through more coaching changes but this was the first one. This was the one when we were on the field with no coach and it was just kind of wild. We still had coaches and they got respected and whatnot, but there’s like this feeling of players knowing that those coaches probably won’t be here in three weeks. And the coaches were also like, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to be here in three weeks.’ It was a weird dynamic where we still had to listen and do what we were supposed to be doing, but you just have to be smart. And I remember Todd Graham’s (transition out) was really bad. Our quarterbacks coach, Todd Dodge, he ran our offense after Todd Graham left and those meetings were so out of control. I’m talking like, guys were walking out, going to the bathroom, not really paying attention. It was just wild.

It was one of those things where everybody understood, we had done this before, we just had to survive another year. So it was a weird dynamic. That’s the one thing that is a big takeaway: the bowl game is just like a wild, wild west. There’s a lot of crazy going on. There were fights. I got into a fight with somebody at practice, maybe Brandon Ifill, and then we had to hold hands running laps and I ended up getting kicked out of practice. Being truthful, it was probably just me being young and dumb, but I was probably just like, let’s see how much I can get away with, knowing that you really can’t get in trouble.

ELIJAH ZEISE: A bunch of the older guys who had gone through it were telling us all this stuff. They were honestly making it sound like it was going to be kind of fun because we were going into bowl season without a head coach - everyone’s pretty much just doing their own thing coming to practice. It’s not like it’s real strict or anything. Everyone’s kind of in this hangover stage from the news and no one knows what their future is after the bowl game, so they were telling us it was just going to be an interesting time and they kind of said it would be fun.

So we expected that, but honestly, it wasn’t as fun as I thought it was going to be. Practice was still hard and all of that. But it definitely was an interesting time, just having Coach Rudolph be the interim coach and not having Coach Chryst there and just the overall sense of instability - it definitely made that bowl practice month interesting, to say the least.

JP HOLTZ: It was more of, ‘whatever happens, happens.’ We knew it was out of our control, so we just had to stay together and control what we could control.

Once the initial shock of the coaching change wore off, the focus turned to finding a new coach. For the public, that means following news reports of candidates and interviews- and that was happening in the locker room, too.

PAT BOSTICK: It was really interesting because Tino (Sunseri’s) dad was one of the guys being mentioned. I remember seeing news reports that Tom Bradley had the job, too.

You follow all of it because you’re interested in what your life is going to be like for the next 12 months: who’s it going to be, what style of offense, where are they coming from, what pedigree do they have, what’s that going to be and what’s the culture going to be. So you follow it as close as you can. I can’t imagine what that would be like today, but even then, the rumors were pretty abundant.

CAM SADDLER: Me and Ray G. (running back Ray Graham) were hard-core into it. We were hitting message boards, coming in and talking about it. We were definitely invested in it, man. Somebody was going to be our next coach. We were super invested in it.

SHAKIR SOTO: Personally, I didn’t follow it that much because at the end of the day, we still have to work out and go to school; that was still my main focus. Whoever they hired, that’s who they hired, and once they hired Coach Narduzzi, I started looking into his resume and things like that to see where he was coming from. That’s when I looked into the details and everything, but I didn’t really do that until I found out who they were hiring.

The one thing we did was push for Rudy - Coach Rudolph - we really wanted him to be the head coach there. That was something that guys really wanted. I don’t remember if he got interviewed or whatever happened, but I know a lot of people were pushing for him to be head coach.

JP HOLTZ: I definitely read up on it when there would be reports. I don’t know if any guys didn’t look at it. We were all curious to see who our next head coach was and we were all happy when Coach Narduzzi was hired because we knew it was a pretty good hire for us.

ELIJAH ZEISE: I can’t remember that being a huge part of my whole thought process during that time. I can’t remember it being a big part of our daily life. Maybe the older guys a little bit, but we were just freshmen trying to make it through our first bowl season. But when Narduzzi took the job, I think we were trying to figure out what kind of guy we were getting. I knew he was the defensive coordinator at Michigan State and Montae Nicholson was playing safety there at the time, so we were talking to him a little bit to see what he was like and what we were getting ourselves into with him. But I don’t really think we worried about the search too much before he got the job.

DARRIN HALL: I wouldn’t say I was worried, but in the back of my mind, I just wanted to know who was going to coach me. I never opened up my recruitment, but a couple schools reached out to me. I ended up not taking any other visits. I was finishing school and just reading as many articles as I could on potential head coaches, things like that.

BROCK DECICCO: I remember looking at some of the people they were looking at, and me as a tight end, I was just praying they would bring in someone who would fit the offense. Not like Todd Graham.

While athletic directors have to decide which coaches to pursue and those coaches have to decide if they’re going to take the job, the players have decisions, too: they have to decide if they want to stay with the program or transfer.

BROCK DECICCO: I actually remember being excited that Mike Haywood left. He just didn’t seem like he fit the culture at all. We had one team meeting with him and it was him being a drill sergeant. But I stayed for spring and a couple weeks of fall camp, and I was like, okay, this is never going to work for me. So I left a week or two into fall camp.

ELIJAH ZEISE: I never originally thought about it. A lot of guys I came in with started talking about it a little bit and a couple of them ended up doing it, so I kind of thought about it in the back of my mind a little bit. But I nipped it in the bud pretty soon after that because I thought to myself, ‘Why did I come here? What do I like about this school? Is Coach Chryst leaving going to change my opinion about why I want to be here? Is it going to change why I came here?’ It just came down to, I love being at Pitt. I grew up around Pitt. I’ve always loved Pitt. My mother lived five minutes off campus and the rest of my family lived 20 minutes off campus. It’s where I grew up. With how much I love Pitt, it came down to that.

PAT BOSTICK: It wasn’t as en vogue then as it is now. But I thought about it and I got contacted by some people. I was in a situation where I was a backup and could have opted for an opportunity to go play somewhere, maybe a level down, and I didn’t really want to do that. I really fell in love with Pittsburgh and the school. The thought crossed my mind, but it was never more than a passing thought. But what came in the next few weeks (after Wannstedt was fired) was the interesting part.

[When Todd Graham was hired], all I heard was ‘spread,’ you know, ‘Tino Sunseri’s our quarterback’ and all this stuff, and I remember thinking - I was at a crossroads in my life anyway. I was about to get married and all these things, and it just kind of came to me that it wasn’t going to be for me. I just didn’t feel right about it. And I got along with those guys fine the whole time they were here. I ended up calling games (on the radio broadcast) for them, which is hilarious. But I didn’t want to continue.

SHAKIR SOTO: I did think about going and trying to follow Coach Chryst. It was something I thought about but I didn’t really want to do. I love Pitt. I’m a Pitt guy. And I don’t think I really wanted to chase a coach and do all of that, so I figured I would give Narduzzi a try. He was a tough coach, and that was something that we needed. That was something we needed to help build the future of Pitt. Honestly, any person I talk to, I tell them that I wouldn’t be playing in the NFL if it wasn’t for him. That position change changed my life, and I can’t imagine if I had been a D-tackle for my whole life.

After the players survived the departure of their old coach and persevered through the awkward transitional phase without any coach came the moment of truth: meeting the new coach. As you might expect, some of those meetings went better than others.

CAM SADDLER: We got done with practice and they called us in for our meeting with [Haywood]. We were sitting in the team room, and I think we were all excited. We were like, ‘We have this black coach, Michael Haywood from Miami of Ohio, it’s cool and he has won some games.’ And I played with a guy who went to Miami of Ohio, so I reached out to him and his first thing was, ‘Hey, he don’t play.’ I got that word back out to people. Somebody else had a teammate there and he was saying the same thing. But we didn’t care: we had a coach.

So we got that first team meeting, we’re sitting in the team room and Haywood walks in. The first thing he says is, ‘Everybody sit up straight in your seat.’ And the entire room sits up and looks around at each other like, ‘Uh-oh, here we go.’ He spoke probably for about five minutes, just what the culture was going to be, stuff like that, but in those five minutes, I think we all got the point: oh yeah, he don’t play.

After that initial meeting with Haywood, I would say there was a little bit of worry. Guys started reaching out, trying to find more people who knew him, like, ‘Is this serious or is he just putting on a front because we’re at the beginning of this?’ That first initial meeting with Haywood, that was crazy.

PAT BOSTICK: It was cold, and not physically cold. His tone was not very inviting. I’ll be candid, and I think there’s a misnomer out there that we had a culture or a discipline problem on our team with Dave; I’d be shocked if that wasn’t relayed to Coach Haywood that he was going to be the one to fix that. I think that kind of caught us off-guard because Dave was very hard on us. [Haywood] came in and hard-lined us, told us to sit up straight, and I don’t mean to disrespect anybody but you’re dealing with 18-to-22-year old kids who are in a pretty vulnerable spot; coming in there and trying to hard-line them is not the way to go, especially when you’re trying to win the room over. The thought was like, ‘Really?’

We know we fell short. My feelings about Dave are not all rose-colored: we missed some opportunities when he was there, and us players take the blame for that, too. We fell short against Cincinnati in ’09, we fell short in 2010, we fell short in 2008. We had opportunities to get over the hump that still lays out in front of this program and we fell short of it. So we knew that change could occur if we didn’t get it done. But to come in and orchestrate a total upheaval of what Pitt football is on Day One was not the right approach with the group of guys that we had.

ARTIE ROWELL: I saw that Todd Graham was on a short list but it didn’t work so they hired Mike Haywood. I had one call with Mike Haywood and I was in a grocery store. He gets me on the phone and he’s like, ‘Hey, I’m excited to meet you and I wanted to give you a call. Do you have any questions for me right now?’ My approach to recruiting was, you always have to have a question for somebody. When you’re trying to make an impression on somebody, you have to have a dialogue and a good question can start that dialogue. So the first thing I could come up as I’m in the chip section at the grocery store was, ‘What kind of offense do you run?’ And he just immediate gave me a kind of snarky answer. He said, ‘Do you watch football?’ I said, ‘Yeah, Coach, I watch football.’ He says, ‘We run the New England Patriots offense; have you ever heard of them?’ I’m like, okay; it’s time to open recruiting up entirely.

CAM SADDLER: The first one with Todd Graham was completely different. He was real energized. He was real excited. He just kept speaking with the Todd Graham words, I guess you could say. It had all of us excited. Like, ‘Oh yeah, explosive and big plays.’ And a guy like me, I was super excited.

We would do these drills up at the Cost Center and dudes were in. Dudes were so in with Todd Graham at the beginning. It was a competition thing. I think a lot of coaches do it now, but his were just so intense. Guys were just trying to get noticed. He had started this thing where everybody had a white jersey and you had to earn your blue jersey. I remember being one of the first guys to earn a blue jersey because it mattered. We were in on that.

He got us. He definitely got us.

PAT BOSTICK: Todd’s first press conference was the opposite of Mike’s. I think he, in the minds of some, was the second coming of Johnny Majors. He was going to revive life into the program. He was going to bring energy. And for the most part, I think a lot of guys appreciated that, given what we had gone through with Haywood.

If Todd Graham was the opposite of Michael Haywood, then Paul Chryst was the antithesis of Todd Graham. Calm, reserved and seemingly more down-to-earth than his predecessor, Chryst set about to stabilizing the Pitt program.

ARTIE ROWELL: They brought in Coach Chryst and it was a breath of fresh air. Sometimes when you would talk to Coach Graham, you would think, ‘Okay, he’s telling me this but is that actually how he feels?’ Coach Chryst is such a transparent person and football coach, and as a player, I always felt he shot his players as straight as possible. You always knew where you stood with him. His assistant coaches did the same.

CAM SADDLER: I was a little older. I think I had gotten so gassed up on Todd Graham that I wasn’t going to allow myself to do the same thing. It was like, ‘We’re going to give this guy a fair chance.’ I think the one thing that Coach Chryst did is they taught us the game. It wasn’t just them coming in and teaching their system; it was so much of them teaching us to play football. Coach Engram got us right away; he won the receiver room early and being with him was something we enjoyed.

Being older and going through a couple changes made that one less - I don’t know if exciting is the word, but we weren’t as hyped up as we were for the other ones.

Three years later, things had settled down from the upheaval of 2010-12. But when Pitt found itself in another coaching search in December 2014 after Chryst left for Wisconsin, the players had another chance to make a first impression when they met their new head coach: Michigan State defensive coordinator Pat Narduzzi.

JP HOLTZ: We knew he had a lot of success at Michigan State and he was there for awhile. We knew he had ties to Pittsburgh and he grew up in Youngstown, so he would be a blue-collar guy. And we knew he would be ready to work.

ELIJAH ZEISE: We found out he was a pretty fiery, intense guy, which was right on the money when he got to Pitt. But it definitely was interesting: when we had our first team meeting with him, I remember looking at him and thinking he didn’t seem like he would be the real intense guy that he ended up being. When he was talking to us, he was pretty calm, like he was a guy who was just ready to get to work. Despite what I had heard, I wasn’t thinking he would be the guy he ended up being. Actually, I kind of thought he was a guy who would just be here and then see what happens in a year or something - he just didn’t strike me as someone that would still be here today. I don’t know how to explain it, but from the team meeting, he didn’t strike me as passionate as I found out that he is. From that initial team meeting, I would not have guessed that he would still be here five or six years later.

JP HOLTZ: The first time meeting him, he actually remembered me from recruiting me at Michigan State and he said, ‘We lost out on you at Michigan State.’ So he remembered me from there. Michigan State and Pitt were actually my top two.

DARRIN HALL: Michigan State was one of my top schools. If not one, they were definitely two or three because Narduzzi went to school with my uncle. He played football with my uncle in high school, and my dad’s a little bit younger than him. But he remembers times with my uncle, and that was big because we would talk about it when he would come to the school. He was a Youngstown guy, my dad loved that, so I was really big on Michigan State at the time. But we had a running back from my area, L.J. Scott, and he ended up committing there first so that fell through.

Then he gave me a call like, ‘Hey, I’m going to take the job at Pitt. I would love it if you would stay and be the first recruit that I bring in.’ I was like, ‘This is a no-brainer to me. I already love you. You’re a Youngstown guy from the same home town? Yeah, I’ll stay committed.’ That’s how it went.

He reached out to me a day or two before (Narduzzi was announced as head coach). He was like, ‘Hey, just keep it under wraps, but yeah, I got the job.’

SHAKIR SOTO: He came in and introduced himself and then we pretty much just started going into meetings and installing the defense, stuff like that. I don’t remember the first time meeting him being too crazy; he just introduced himself and the staff and all of that. In that period, you really didn’t know what you were going to get. With Coach Chryst, you knew who you were dealing with, but with this new guy, you didn’t know. It was like dealing with a step-dad, kind of, you know what I mean? You had the breakup and your mom goes and finds another man and you have to deal with him. You don’t know what you’re going to get: he could be really cool or he could not be.

ARTIE ROWELL: When Coach Narduzzi got hired, I remembered how some of the upperclassmen handled the transition from Coach Wannstedt to Coach Graham, and we as upperclassmen at that point, we felt like it was an opportunity to not totally resist it but lean into it. We only had one year left and this guy clearly knew how to win - he was coming from a winning program - and although it might have been his first job, it was really important that we moved with his message to the team. I think we did that to the best of our ability.

Fortunately for Pitt, the coaching changes of the early 2010’s are in the past. Pat Narduzzi has been with the Panthers for five seasons and is preparing for his sixth. But the shadow of that instability hasn’t totally left the program or those around the program. Fans, players, coaches, administrators - no one forgets what it was like.

JP HOLTZ: I feel like it definitely took a toll on all the fans and everyone, really, who dealt with Pitt football. It felt that way because I know it was hectic before that, ever since they let Coach Wannstedt go. There was crazy times. But I think Pitt is on the right track now. It’s a job people want and it seems like Coach Narduzzi is happy here and wants to stay.

ELIJAH ZEISE: I definitely think there is. We would kind of make the joke that Pitt was a stepping stool; I know we said that a lot after all the offensive coordinator changes. Like when Jim Chaney left and went to Georgia or Matt Canada left and went to LSU, we were definitely joking that it was a stepping stool and all that. That’s something that goes through your mind.

ARTIE ROWELL: For a base of Pitt readers, it will never go away. That decade from Coach Wannstedt to where we’re at now, it has to be up there with the highest frequency of turnover at a major program.

BROCK DECICCO: It’s hard because that’s not the guy that recruited you. So you have to go through and earn their respect and prove yourself again. Every time there’s a new coach, you have to re-prove yourself. Which I didn’t mind, but it’s obviously not something you want to be worrying about; you want to worry about other stuff like being an expert in the offense.

You need a good group of leaders when that happens, to keep everyone together. Because you’re definitely feeling the coaches out and seeing if they really fit, and everyone is quick to make their opinion on the new coaching staff.

CAM SADDLER: I think you’ve got an 18-year old mind where you live in this little bubble and all you think about is your world and your recruiting and how important you are. You don’t ever think about a coach leaving. He’s not leaving, you know what I mean? ‘He got on a plane and came out here and ate dinner with my family; he’s not leaving me, man.’ Then it happens.

But you get older and you get hindsight. The one thing people always love to ask is, people love to ask about the Todd Graham stuff. People love it. But in hindsight, I can appreciate Todd Graham. He wanted to win and that was all that mattered to him. He understood for us that it was like, ‘These kids probably really don’t like me and my way of going about this, but I want to win.’ He may have been a bit egotistical, but the things he was doing was for us.

PAT BOSTICK: I knew it wasn’t going to be a fit (for Todd Graham at Pitt). I’m not the kind of person who says there’s one type of coach who can be here or win here, because there have been many who have been successful. But the authenticity wasn’t there, so I don’t want to say I foresaw it coming, but it didn’t surprise me that he would go.

I just felt like, really, it was a sense of expecting it but also another hit to the body for our program, for Pitt football. And you look back and it was self-induced. Not only do you think about how it hurts the guys that are there, but you think about how it’s going to set the program back. Who’s going to be the person who will come in and stabilize it?

BROCK DECICCO: I went to Wisconsin in September, and in December, Coach Rudolph and Coach Chryst left to go to Pitt. That was the worst of all my coaching transactions. I was trying to figure out if there was a way I could go back and not miss another year.

DARRIN HALL: You start to have your doubts, but really, Narduzzi was great at just being that foundation. Like, ‘Hey, I’m here for you guys. I want to be a part of this team. I want to be a part of this program. You don’t have to worry about me.’ That was big.

CAM SADDLER: You and your teammates realize, we have to get through this, we have a lot going on, we’re still in this thing together. Regardless of what happens, we’re still going to be in this together. My class, by the time we got out of there with the things that had happened in the last three or four years, we were so tight. We’re still tight. And we laugh about it now. In hindsight, things were kind of crazy.

I think it was really hard to buy in at the end. But I think the one thing [Paul Chryst’s staff] did is they taught us football, which made us kind of be like, ‘You guys are alright.’ But it was hard. It was tough for us. When they first got there, man, my class, I would say we were bad. We were kind of just like, ‘Yeah alright, yeah alright, yeah alright.’ And it got to a point where it was like, they’re coaches, they know what’s going on, let’s just try to win as many games as we can and keep it moving. I guess at that point you kind of understand it’s a business. That’s how it works.

Even with Narduzzi stabilizing the program, there were still more changes to come. Pitt had four offensive coordinators in Narduzzi’s first five seasons after Jim Chaney left for Georgia, Matt Canada left for LSU and Shawn Watson was fired.

DARRIN HALL: I feel like if it was a new running back coach every year, that would be a little bit harder. He was always there for us our four years. He made it easy. He was able to make the playbook make sense to us by comparing it to other playbooks we had. If we would have brought in a new running back coach, it would have been all brand new. Everything would have had to be from scratch. So with Coach Powell with us, he was able to make it make sense a lot quicker.

Even with the new offenses every year, me and Qadree (Ollison), it just kind of got easier. After the first year, we were like, ‘We can learn this playbook in a week.’ I feel like having so many offensive coordinators really helped me become a smarter player, because I had to keep learning different stuff, I had to keep learning different run schemes, different pass schemes, different pass-blocking schemes. So I feel like when I got to the senior games and they give you three days to learn a basic offense, I’m like, ‘I can do this. I learned three new offenses in three years.’ You give me 20 plays - I got that. I can knock that out in a night. It really just helped out with that. Having Coach Powell there made it easier, even though we had so many coordinators.

As long as I had Narduzzi as the head guy and Coach Powell in the running back room, everything else was okay.

SHAKIR SOTO: I still to this day believe Coach Narduzzi was a great hire. I love the guy. He’s a really cool coach. And my thing, he really changed me as a player. When I moved to D-tackle my senior year, I didn’t really have confidence in it at first; I was like, ‘Eh, I don’t really want to do this.’ I was playing a position I never played before, especially in my senior year and I had goals I wanted to accomplish outside of college and going to the pros. So I wasn’t really sure about it, but the team needed it and I thought about it and put the team before me. I did it for my boys because we were really close; I talk to a lot of the guys to this day and we were a really close team. So I knew I had to do what I had to do and make the position change for the team.