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In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re talking about more recruiting woes for Jeff Capel, an intriguing walk-on joining the football program and a lot more.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Capel concerns, pt. 2
Another week with hoops recruiting news, and not all of it good.

As a matter of fact, this week none of the hoops recruiting news was good. Last week, we could balance Olivier Robinson-Nkamhoua committing to Tennessee and Ethan Morton going to Purdue with the news that Pitt landed a JUCO shooter in Ryan Murphy.

That’s not an even trade, but it’s at least a little bit on both ends of the scale - some good and some not so good.

This week, it was all not so good, as Khadim Sy, a one-time ACC player who was a looking for a new home after spending time at a junior college, opted for Ole Miss over Pitt. And here we have, yet again, a prospect at a position of glaring need opting to pass on the sure-thing playing time with the Panthers.

Now, it’s not like Sy or Robinson-Nkamhoua or Qudus Wahab (Georgetown) or Ibrahima Diallo (Ohio State) opted to go to mid-major programs; they picked other power-conference schools over Pitt, so there’s not a ton of shame in that. But the question keeps getting asked:

Why can’t Pitt land a center? Why can’t Jeff Capel land a center?

The selling points are inherent. Pitt’s in the best conference in college basketball, with extreme amounts of exposure playing against some of the best programs in the country. And there is ample opportunity to get on the court early and often in the low post, since the Panthers are desperately in need of help there.

And yet, nobody seems to want to do it. At least, none of the guys Capel has prioritized (and there were others before the four I listed above) as a top center target.

So what gives? I don’t have an answer for that, of course. Each of those recruits made his decision for his own reasons, and that’s partially why we can’t offer a blanket statement to sum up the situation. Another part of it is that we’ve covered this before: the damage done by the Stallings Years (and the last few Dixon Years before that) set this program back.

Pitt is a program - and an athletic department, really - that needs to win to stay relevant. Pitt became a relevant men’s basketball program in the first decade of this century because of its success; the relevance followed the success, not the other way around.

And when the success waned, when the perennial conference contention and NCAA Tournament invites became less certain, the relevance went with it. Even in Pittsburgh, the Panthers struggled to draw anything approaching a respectable crowd because that relevance, which had been hard-earned in the early part of the 2000’s, went away quickly.

Maybe that’s carrying over to recruiting. It’s hard to imagine it not carrying over, even for a coach with as much recruiting acumen as Capel apparently has.

And I still think Capel is a really good recruiter. I still think he’ll recruit well at Pitt, and I’ll praise him a little more in a second. I do wonder about his staff, though; are they effective enough in supporting his efforts? That’s an impossible question to answer if you’re not in the room where it happens, but if you’re fairly confident about the head coach, then you start working your way down the ladder and ask questions on every rung.

Capel can do a lot, but he can’t do it all. I’m not totally absolving him of any of the discredit that comes with losing those targets; that’s on him because he’s the head coach. But the assistants have to make things happen, too. I don’t know if we’re seeing that yet.

The coaches you can get
Speaking of coaches and coaching hires, I was thinking about this recently:

What pool of candidates is available to Pitt when it goes searching for a new coach?

I’m thinking specifically of football and men’s basketball, but you can probably apply this to a lot of Pitt’s sports programs: when a Pitt athletic director goes looking for a new coach, where does he or she look?

To me, it seems like there are two aisles to shop in if you’re Pitt. You either look for a top assistant at a major-conference school or a head coach in a mid-major conference.

That pretty much translates to Power Five assistants and non-Power Five head coaches, and even if some of the non-Power Five conferences are on equal footing with some of the Power Five conferences in basketball, I don’t imagine Pitt will be hiring the top assistant at Villanova or Gonzaga, so that Power Five/non-Power Five distinction is probably accurate and good enough for our discussion here.

I think there’s enough history in the last 20+ years to back this theory up. The hiring of Capel, for example, as well as Pat Narduzzi, Paul Chryst, Todd Graham, Jamie Dixon, Walt Harris and Ben Howland. Even Michael Haywood fits the bill here, with Kevin Stallings and Dave Wannstedt being the lone exceptions in Pitt’s football and men’s basketball hires since the turn of the century.

You can include Heather Lyke’s other hires, too, like Mike Bell in baseball (assistant at Florida State), Lance White in women’s basketball (assistant at Florida State), Keith Gavin in wrestling (assistant at Oklahoma) and Jodi Hermanek in softball (head coach at Ohio).

You can even include some of the other coaches Lyke pursued when she hired Capel. Dan Hurley was the head coach at Rhode Island before opting for UConn over Pitt, and Mark Schmidt is the head coach at St. Bonaventure.

That’s where Pitt is shopping these days - it’s not a big enough name or a big enough paycheck to lure away a sitting Power Five head coach, but it’s competitive enough to make a play for nationally-recognized top assistants like Capel, Narduzzi and Chryst.

There’s inherent risk in that approach, of course. If you hire a top Power Five assistant, you’re presumably getting someone who has been around success at the level you’re trying to reach. But they haven’t been the coach in charge of it all, the one running the show, so you don’t quite know how smoothly they’re going to transition to the Big Chair.

At the same time, there are no guarantees with a sitting head coach from outside the Power Five. Yes, they’ve run a program and, presumably, had a lot of success (or else why would you look at them?). But a step up in competition is not to be overlooked, and not everyone is up for the challenge.

That’s the balancing act for Pitt in a coaching search: finding a qualified candidate from one of those two categories with the least amount of risk. You can do well in that talent pool - if you can find the balance in the risk.

The least risky
You know who fits into one of those categories and has the least amount of risk?

Jeff Capel.

As a former Power Five head coach and a sitting top assistant at one of the premier programs in America - maybe the premier program in America - Jeff Capel had to be as close to a perfect candidate for Pitt as you could find in college basketball.

Seriously, the guy comes from a basketball family, had a successful career as a player, segued smoothly into coaching, enjoyed a meteoric rise with success at the highest level and then, after a bump in the road, spent seven years as an apprentice to the best head coach in the game.

He became part of the architecture of the Duke program, a No. 2 to Mike Krzyzewski as he learned from his former coach what it takes to win, what it takes to build a legitimate program that can compete for national titles every year.

That experience alone is exactly what Pitt would be looking for when hiring a Power Five assistant. But this one, this particular Power Five assistant, had the added bonus of five years as a head coach in the Big 12, a period in Sooners’ hoops that was not without controversy but also not without success.

Talk about the best of both worlds. Talk about a perfect candidate. That’s how Jeff Capel looked a year ago at this time, and guess what?

He still looks that way.

No, he has not been able to attract an instant-impact post player despite a glaring need that creates ample opportunity for playing time. But he did bring in two of the best players to put on a Pitt uniform in…I don’t know. How long would you say it has been since the Panthers had someone like Xavier Johnson or Trey McGowens?

It’s been awhile, and Capel got both of them on the same roster. He needs to fill out that roster with more pieces, of course, and he would probably be the first to tell you that. But signing those guys plus Au’Diese Toney and then posting a season that was, by any and every measure, an improvement on the one that preceded it - I don’t know how you can look at those things and not continue to believe Capel is the right guy for the job.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

What will it really come down to?
I don’t know who Capel is going to sign to play center in this recruiting class. I’m pretty sure he’s going to get someone, but I don’t know who it is yet.

That said, I can’t lie: there’s part of me that isn’t sure how much it matters, to be honest. At least in 2019, I’m not sure that the player Capel lands in the post is going to be a significant factor. Maybe in the best-case scenario, Pitt gets 12 or 15 minutes out of a freshman center with 4 points and 3 rebounds per game - you know, roughly the production Khadim Sy put up as a freshman at Virginia Tech.

Maybe Pitt gets that. Maybe a little more. Maybe a little less.

But the reality of the situation - and maybe it has always been the reality and I’ve just been slow to accept it - is that Pitt’s leading production at the center position probably isn’t going to come from any freshman or transfer.

It’s probably going to come from someone who wore a Pitt uniform last season.

It’s probably going to come from Terrell Brown.

Now look, I am fully cognizant of the fact that Brown is very much teetering on the edge of being one of those players who never realizes his potential, who never becomes the contributor that most believe he can be. He’s right there, and for some, he’s already that player.

I see it as a potential outcome for his future, but not a guaranteed one. I still believe.

I still believe in the lasting power of those fleeting moments, the times when Brown really turned it on, put full focus and effort and determination into what he was doing on the court and responded with strength.

That seems like an important word: strength. Because when Brown looked like he was playing “strong,” he looked like he could be productive in the ACC. And when he looked like he was playing, um, “not strong,” well, he didn’t quite look like an ACC player.

So maybe that’s one of the keys: Brown simply needs to get stronger this offseason. Maybe if he can improve his strength, it will translate to improved play and production. That seems to make sense. He’ll need the drive and the effort and the focus and all of that, of course, but if he can manufacture those things in his offseason strength and conditioning work, then surely he can bring them out on the court, too.

And Pitt certainly needs Brown to do just that, because I think whatever the Panthers get out of the post, both in points and rebounds, is going to come from him.

How did that happen?
Some interesting football recruiting news this week, as Pitt added another piece to the 2019 roster. Paris Brown is going to join the Panthers this offseason as a walk-on running back, and that, in and of itself, isn’t too noteworthy. Pitt, like most teams in college football, adds a bunch of walk-ons every year, whether it’s the “preferred walk-ons” who are guaranteed a roster spot in training camp or the other walk-ons - the un-preferred? - who will, at worst, join the team once the fall semester starts and the rosters expand.

So, nothing to see here, right?

Well, not exactly.

Paris Brown isn’t your typical walk-on. For one thing, he’s coming from Georgia, and while Pitt has a few walk-ons from south of the Mason-Dixon Line (the Vardzel brothers are from South Carolina, originally) there aren’t many that come that far to pay their own way.

But Brown isn’t just traveling a great distance to come to Pitt. He’s also coming in as a rather impressive prospect. A three-star running back recruit, Brown put up impressive numbers playing at the highest level of football in Georgia, topping 1,000 rushing yards each of the last three seasons while carrying the ball about 500 times, which isn’t much.

Colleges took notice, and Brown told us that somewhere north of a dozen schools offered him a scholarship. But the recruiting process doesn’t always follow a straight path, and Brown’s journey took a few turns. Through a variety of circumstances ranging from Brown not maintaining contact with coaches to schools filling their scholarship spots, the 5’10” 200-pound running back found himself in the unenviable position of looking for a college in the spring of his senior year.

He ultimately settled on Pitt, and before we go any further, let me say this:

I’ve learned over the years that it’s not always a great idea to overhype walk-ons. I’ve certainly written plenty about walk-ons picking Pitt or walk-ons making plays in camp, and the number of times those walk-ons have turned out to be contributors is…slim.

So I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to start making Paris Brown into the next LaDanian Tomlinson - he’s a very good pass-catching running back - because that doesn’t serve anyone’s interests. But it’s hard to say that the Panthers didn’t do well in this deal. They’re getting a productive back from a talent-rich state who, for whatever reason, fell through the cracks.

Pitt has nothing invested in this and won’t have to invest in Brown until he earns it. And if Brown really is as good as people around him claim he is, and if he makes a contribution on the field, and if he ends up earning a scholarship - that’s just another positive-outcome scenario.

I don’t know what Paris Brown will become at Pitt, but it’s hard to find any downside in adding him to the program.

JUST ONE MORE THING

So there won’t be a 3-2-1 Column next week unless I get bored at the beach. I’m going out of town with my family, as we’re taking a Saturday-to-Saturday trip to Anna Maria Island on the Gulf coast of Florida. It’s a lovely spot that we’ve visited twice before, and I can’t endorse it strongly enough. The water is beautiful, it’s not too rough so the kids can enjoy it and it’s just overall a pleasant place to vacation.

So that will be nice.

But before I get on the plane, let’s talk about kickoff times.

Oh sure, it was all very exciting when the ACC Network meant that Pitt will open the 2019 season with a conference matchup against Virginia at Heinz Field in primetime. That got the blood flowing.

But then in Week Two, the Panthers are going to host Ohio for an 11 am game, and that news immediately overshadowed the news about the Virginia kickoff time. For every tweet or message board post about the primetime season opener, there were two or three or ten about kicking off a game at 11 am.

Which I think is a lot of hot air about nothing.

So the game starts at 11 am. Big deal. Teams in the Central time zone start games at 11 am all the time and their programs haven’t fallen off the face of the planet. And if your point is that the 11 am start time will hurt attendance, allow me to let you in a little trend that you may not have noticed after watching Pitt football for the entirety of your life:

That game was never going to sell out or even come close. Attendance was always going to be sub-50,000 and likely sub-40,000. That’s how local Pitt fans roll. They’ll come for the event games - although I wonder what the primetime season opener against a conference opponent will bring - but something like Ohio…that’s not drawing, whether it’s played at 11 am or 11 pm or anywhere in between.

Start times aren’t the issue. Kickoff times aren’t the reason fans stay away from games like that. It’s because the local casual sports fan - who ultimately makes the difference between 35,000 and 45,000 - isn’t interested, not with Pitt’s middle-of-the-road performance and a non-marquee opponent.

Win more consistently and you’ll draw more of those people in. It really does come down to that. Pitt drew 50,000 for a game against New Hampshire in 2010 and 48,000 for the opener against Buffalo the next year. Interest waned in the seasons after that and still hasn’t really recovered, but it can be done. Those numbers can be reached. Pitt just has to win.

And if the Panthers go out and look really impressive against Virginia in the opener, then maybe that Ohio game gets a little bit of a bump. But if Pitt puts in a truly successful season, with a Coastal title backed by 10 wins, then I think the 2020 opener against Miami (Oh.) could see some decent numbers.

Even if that game kicks off at 11 am.