Six factors made Pitt right for Capel
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Jeff Capel had options.
Pitt wasn’t the first school to try to pry Mike Krzyzewski’s associate head coach off the Duke bench in the last seven years. A former star player with nine years of experience as a head coach and seven more as a right-hand man for one of the all-time coaches in college basketball, Capel was naturally going to draw attention.
And draw attention he did. But Capel never left.
“Over the seven years when I was back at Duke, I had opportunities to maybe branch out and to take over a program,” Capel said Wednesday on the floor of the Petersen Events Center. “But for us - and when we do this, it’s us; it’s me, my wife and my kids - it has to be the right fit. And throughout, we never found - it’s not like we were actively looking, but we never found the right fit.”
That changed last Thursday when he got on the phone with Pitt Athletic Director Heather Lyke, who was looking for a new head coach after firing Kevin Stallings in the wake of the Panthers’ 19-game losing streak to end the 2017-18 season.
The Thursday phone call led to an interview on Monday, and that turned into an agreement on Tuesday and Wednesday’s press conference introducing Capel as Pitt’s head coach.
The appeal of Capel for Pitt was obvious; but what drew the sought-after coaching candidate to Pittsburgh?
According to Capel, there were six things that stood out about the University of Pittsburgh and its men’s basketball program.
There were the academics; Capel was surprised by what he saw in his research into Pitt’s standing as an academic institution.
“That’s important to me,” he said. Academics are very, very important to me because that’s the thing that lasts forever.”
The next appealing factor was Pitt’s conference affiliation. A four-year starting guard at Duke, Capel knows the ACC well, and now he can be a head coach in the league.
“I never really had a dream job…I never wanted to be a coach until a little bit later in my life. So I never had a dream job, but my dream was to coach in the ACC. SO that was very enticing.”
Beyond the ACC, Pitt’s geographic location was appealing. That goes for the broad level - “All of our family is on the east coast,” he said - and the city of Pittsburgh.
“A great city, a city where I could see our family living and being a part of the community; that’s what drew me.”
And while Pitt’s last two seasons, when the Panthers went 4-32 in ACC regular-season play, haven’t been the brightest in the program’s history, Capel is old enough to remember when Pitt was a prominent player on the national stage of college basketball.
“If you look back at the great players here and the great teams and the championships that were won in the Big East, and as we’ve embarked now on the ACC, I look forward to building that.”
Those five things were key in Capel’s decision. But there was one more thing he considered - an element that might have been the deciding factor.
“The last thing, as important as anything, are the people,” Capel said.
There were several University representatives who communicated with Capel over Pitt’s six-day courting, but the charge was led by Lyke and Chancellor Patrick Gallagher. They were among the group that flew to Durham on Monday for an interview with Capel, and that visit left a big impression.
After an interview of “almost three hours,” Capel said that he and his wife Kanika left together with a lot to think about. When they got in their car to drive home, Capel had a simple question for his wife.
“I said, what do you think? She said, I was blown away. I said, yeah, me, too.”
At a stop light on the car ride home, Kanika turned to Capel looking for the first thing that came to mind in response to the simple question:
Are we going?
Capel’s response: “Absolutely.”
Capel didn’t want to make a rash decision, though, so he and his wife took the night to sleep on it. When Capel woke up, Kanika was sitting on the end of the bed, waiting for his decision.
Less than 30 hours later, Capel was standing on the court of the Petersen Events Center. And he was there, in large part, because of the people.
"I’m grateful to the administration here at Pitt that I’ve had the opportunity to meet," Capel said. "We were absolutely blown away by Chancellor Gallagher. His vision, his sincerity, how genuine he was - he was like a real dude; sometimes you get people that are high up that are not that. So that was very impressive to me."
Equally important was Capel's impression of Lyke and the support he perceived from her as Athletic Director.
“Over these last seven years, the thing I always said was that, what I would look for in a situation if I become and when I become a head coach again - you know, there are a lot of these things that we look for, but the main thing is that I need an athletic director that believes in me, that understands me and that believes in me.
“We had one conversation prior to the meeting on Monday. But then on Monday, when we were in there, that’s the thing that I felt right away. The people that were in that room, I felt like they believed in me. I felt like they believed in us. And that’s how I knew it was right.”