The 3-2-1 Column: Capel, McGowens, Lyke, Heinz Field, PSU and more

MORE HEADLINES - FREE ARTICLE: Vision and transformation in Lyke's first 13 months | Lyke meets the media: PART ONE | Lyke meets the media: PART TWO | How did Jeff Capel land his first commitment? | Grading the staff: What does Capel's first staff look like?

In the Panther-Lair.com 3-2-1 Column, we’re looking at three things we know, two questions we have and one prediction on Pitt athletics.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Capel did something big this week
That didn’t take long.

Less than a month after he was hired, Jeff Capel landed his first commitment and it was a big one. On Tuesday, four-star guard Trey McGowens committed to Pitt, breaking the seal for Capel’s recruiting and providing a huge piece for the new Pitt coach to build on.

There are a bunch of really positive angles to McGowens’ commitment, not the least of which is his eligibility. A native of South Carolina, McGowens went to Hargrave Military Academy in Virginia this past year as a member of the 2019 recruiting class (and the No. 75 overall prospect in that class). But reclassifying to 2018 - and thus playing for a college team this fall - was always an option if the right opportunity presented itself.

As fortune would have it, Pitt turned out to be the right opportunity. Now McGowens will be playing for Pitt in the 2018-19 season. He’s still a four-star recruit in the class of 2018 and ranks No. 80 overall the group, making him the highest-rated Pitt commit since Steven Adams was ranked No. 5 in the class of 2012 (technically, Detrick Mostella was ranked No. 53 in the 2013 class, but he never actually made it to campus).

That immediate eligibility is huge. As it stands right now, Capel is looking at returning about half the roster he could have had coming back after Marcus Carr, Parker Stewart and Ryan Luther announced they are transferring and Malik Ellison is still on the fence. It’s not just about the numbers, either; among the six scholarship players confirmed as coming back, only two are guards - Kham Davis and Jared Wilson-Frame - and neither is a point guard.

McGowens could play either guard spot and Capel continues to pursue point guard candidates who can help this season. But McGowens is certainly capable of playing the point, and with his commitment, Capel can go with this starting five:

Trey McGowens
Kham Davis
Jared Wilson-Frame
Shamiel Stevenson
Terrell Brown

Assuming natural second-year improvement and progression from Davis, Stevenson and Brown, that lineup is probably better than any lineup the Panthers rolled out last season. And Capel isn’t done; he’ll bring some more pieces to the 2018-19 roster before the summer ends.

One more thing: if scoring a four-star prospect wasn’t enough, the fact that Capel landed McGowens without getting him on campus really made a statement. It’s a testament to Capel’s recruiting prowess, his ability to connect with a recruit and sell not just his program but himself. We heard so much about how Capel was an “elite-level recruiter;” this week, we saw it in action.

I said last week that concerns about Pitt’s staff lacking an Ace Recruiter were misplaced, since the staff very much had exactly that in its head coach.

This can create momentum
Now that Jeff Capel has landed commitment No. 1, the focus immediately turns to his encore. We’ll see who is next - there are certainly some good options - but I do think the McGowens commitment has the potential to snowball.

College coaches use their current commitments as recruiting tools all the time. I can remember watching Dave Wannstedt introduce Elijah Fields to Jason Pinkston, telling Fields, ‘You’ll get 10 interceptions playing behind this guy’ (Pinkston was a DL recruit at the time). Coaches have to sell the potential and future of their programs, and what better way to do it than by using the players who will represent that potential, the players who will comprise that future?

Over the last month, Capel has been recruiting on his vision and his plans for the program. Now he’s got a four-star guard who has bought in, and that’s just extra ammunition for the Pitt head coach. He can walk into the home of Xavier Johnson or Aundre Hyatt, bring up McGowens’ video on YouTube and say, “Look, Trey believes in us and he’s going to be a great player in the ACC; come play with him, line up next to him and let’s all build this thing together.”

Recruits want to go to a place where they think they can win. They want to believe the program they’re choosing has a chance to be good and, with their contributions, can be great. At the same time, we’ve all talked about how rebuilding projects can go a lot faster in basketball than they can in football. One or two key players can turn things around pretty quickly.

So put that together - recruits want to win and it can take just a couple high-level players to bring success to a basketball program - and you’ve got a situation where a coach like Capel can use a commitment like McGowens’ to show prospective 2018 recruits where things are headed in the very near future.

“We’re not going 0-19 again, so don’t even worry about that. We already have Trey on board, ready to lead us; if we get you in here, too, we’re going to be a force in the ACC very, very soon and you guys can lead us there.”

McGowens broke the seal for Capel. Now that it’s open, more will follow. Maybe McGowens will end up being the highest-rated recruit Capel, but once you get the first one, it can start momentum.

There’s something about having vision
if you’ve followed Pitt athletics for even a short amount of time, you’ve seen leadership changes.

Football coaches, basketball coaches, athletic director changes, chancellor changes; if we include interims - and why wouldn’t we? It makes the discussion more entertaining - in the last 11 years, we’ve see this University go through eight football coaches, seven athletic directors, two basketball coaches and two chancellors.

That’s a lot of leadership change, and while much of it caused considerable consternation at various points (although some of it was celebrated), there are some things we can learn from it. Like what a new leader does when he or she takes over.

This first stood out to me when Todd Graham arrived at Pitt in January 2011. Say what you want about Graham, but when he got to Pitt, he walked into the facility with a fresh set of eyes and saw things that other people who had been around a long time maybe didn’t notice. Like how the facility needed a facelift; I remember seeing him put a lot of changes into action and thinking, “That guy came in with a vision for what he wanted the facilities to be.”

Pat Narduzzi did the same thing. By the end of his first summer, Pitt had new locker rooms and a new team meeting room, and that was just the start, as renovations continue in the South Side.

Narduzzi had a vision for what he wanted the football facilities to be, because he came in with vision. The same goes for Jeff Capel; the talk is that he has already presented ideas to Lyke and the Athletic Department about how to improve and enhance the experience for the players on his team. In fact, he apparently deserves a good deal of credit for the “flip the court” idea, since he seems to have brought it up to Lyke shortly after taking the job.

Capel came to Pitt with vision. Narduzzi did, too. And so, too, did Lyke. Consider this line from her Wednesday sit-down with the local media:

“It’s hard for me to go to an event and be like, ‘Okay, everything here was perfect today.’ You always can evaluate and say, ‘What can we do better?’”

What can we do better? It seems like every college coach and administrator should walk into a job with that mentality. And the really diligent ones keep asking that question every day they’re on the job. That’s why I don’t think for a second that Narduzzi is done renovating Pitt’s facilities, even as he enters Year Four in Pittsburgh.

That’s also why I was pretty sure Lyke would have some kind of facilities project brewing and asked her as much on Wednesday. Sure enough, she’s got an eye on the Fitzgerald Field House, Trees Hall and the OC Lot - that is to say, she’s got an eye on taking a wrecking ball to those three structures and building something brand new.

What that brand new something will be is a couple of multi-purpose facilities aimed at providing training and competition space for the Pitt student-athletes who don’t play football or basketball. 16 sports don’t have training facilities in the South Side or the Petersen Events Center; what they do have is a set of pretty old buildings (if they have a building at all - ahem, track).

Lyke wants to market that project as something that would benefit the University as a whole, with health and wellbeing facilities that the general student population could take advantage of. But at the heart of the project is a desire to improve the opportunities and enhance the experience for Pitt’s student-athletes who participate in wrestling, swimming, diving, volleyball, gymnastics, track and field, baseball, softball, cross country, tennis and soccer.

Leaders have vision, and Lyke looked at 16 varsity sports with aging facilities and saw what was needed. The quality of a leader’s vision is a verdict rendered over time - Steve Pederson and Scott Barnes were leaders with vision, as well, to varying degrees of success - but a leader without vision is an ineffective one.

With six coaching hires and a major facilities project underway, Lyke is showing that she definitely has the vision part of the job down pat.

TWO QUESTIONS

What’s next for Lyke?
A week or two ago, I wrote in this space about the coaching moves Heather Lyke had made and the impact of her first year as Athletic Director. I said that I thought she would follow the half-dozen hires she had made with some plans for major facilities projects, and that is the case.

So what’s next?

There will be “little” projects - although I’m sure she doesn’t think of them as little - like the ongoing building of studios and space for the ACC Network. The end result of that will be a pretty cool studio in the lobby at the Petersen Events Center, plus a lot of “back of house” production areas. They’re also working to bring Wi-Fi to the Petersen Events Center, which I personally am looking forward to. And I’m sure they’ll be making other improvements all over campus.

Of course, they also have to keep working to get funding for the “Victory Heights” project - that’s what they’re calling the plans to tear down the Field House and Trees and the OC Lot and build something new - so that’s going to be a priority.

But if something else is on Lyke’s plate, if there’s something else we should all be keeping an eye on, it’s probably baseball. She was asked about the baseball and softball programs on Wednesday, and here was her answer:

“I’ve only been able to see one softball game so far. Obviously, I watch it online or follow it closely, and I think they are having a good year. She made some changes in her assistant coaches this year and I think both of those assistants have had an impact, which is great.

“Those are two programs with facilities that I think are strong; from a playing facility standpoint, those are in really good positions. Baseball had a great win over Miami and has done some nice things and they’re progressing.

“We evaluate everything throughout the season and it’s kind of early. It’s early to get outside; it isn’t early for baseball season but it is early for them to be playing outside. But they’ll be both programs we continue to evaluate throughout the season.”

I believe there was some artful dodging on the matter of the baseball program. Joe Jordano has been Pitt’s coach since 1998, and while college baseball in Pittsburgh is always going to be an uphill battle, things have been rough for that program in the last few years. After finishing second in the Big East in 2013, the baseball program has struggled in the move to the ACC, never posting a winning record, never winning more than 11 conference games and never finishing higher than sixth in the Coastal Division.

This year seems to be a bit better. The Panthers are 21-16 overall, and while they have a 10-11 record in the ACC, they’re sitting in a tie for third in the Coastal Division with Miami, who they beat two-out-of-three over the weekend.

Pitt has series against LIU-Brooklyn and Maryland Eastern Shore this weekend and early next week before wrapping up the regular season against Notre Dame (8-13 in the ACC), Louisville (10-11 in the ACC) and Clemson (14-7 in the ACC). Jordano has a decent shot at his best ACC record - he only needs two more wins to accomplish that - but he still could be on the hot seat.

What about Heinz Field?
Last things first here, and that’s how it felt on Wednesday when we went roughly 50 minutes into the sit-down with Heather Lyke before asking about one of the biggest issues facing Pitt athletics:

How do you get more people into Heinz Field?

There’s the simple answer, the answer that is most accurate: you have to win more games and you have to play premier opponents. Pitt’s best year of attendance at Heinz Field was 2003, when the Panthers were a top-10 team in the preseason, had Larry Fitzgerald returning as one of the nation’s top players and had Notre Dame on the home schedule.

Season tickets sold out that year and attendance averaged 59,197 per game - the most in Pitt’s history at Heinz Field and one of only three times in the 17 years the Panthers have played at Heinz that attendance was above 50,000 per game.

The other two seasons when Pitt averaged better than 50,000 were 2009 and 2010. In 2009, the team hosted Notre Dame, worked its way into the top 10 of the BCS rankings and carried a 9-2 record into the de facto Big East championship game in the regular-season finale against Cincinnati (the announced attendance for that game was 63,387, making it one of only three games with 60,000+ against an opponent not named West Virginia, Notre Dame or Penn State).

Since 2010, when high expectations and big games against Miami and West Virginia boosted the numbers, Pitt’s attendance has been on a downward trajectory. The double shot of Florida State and Notre Dame pushed 2013’s average attendance to nearly 50,000, but in the last three seasons, Pitt has had just one home game against an opponent other than Notre Dame or Penn State that drew 50,000 (the 2016 opener against Villanova was announced at 50,149).

In the last two seasons, seven of the 14 games at Heinz Field have drawn less than 40,000. That included a paltry 35,425 for the Duke game in 2016 that came one week after the Panthers upset Clemson on the road, as well as the following week’s finale against Syracuse, which brought out 34,049.

And in 2017, only two of Pitt’s seven home games drew more than 40,000, and those two barely got there (40,012 for Youngstown State, 41,124 for N.C. State). We all know the numbers are bad; the question is, how do you improve them?

For Lyke and the Athletic Department, the focus is on what they can do outside of the on-field product. Wins will draw the most people (generally speaking), but in the meantime, there have to be ways to draw more people to the stadium.

I don’t know what the answers are. I can think of small things like half-price concessions for a half hour before kickoff in order to get people into the stadium for kickoff, but that doesn’t increase the overall attendance, just people’s promptness. Somehow they’ve got to make the experience more attractive in all the ways that don’t rely on touchdowns.

If you’re an athletic director and you believe in your coach, then you assume the touchdowns will take care of themselves and you work on controlling what you can control. Lyke has made a few ideas public - she has made the student section into a horizontal swath rather than a vertical stack and has moved the band - and she says there are more ideas that will be revealed as the seasons arrives. But like every one of her predecessors from Steve Pederson to Jeff Long to Steve Pederson to Scott Barnes, getting more people into the stands is one of the top goals, if not the top goal.

Build a TV studio, tear down buildings, replace them with state-of-the-art facilities, connect the Pete with Wi-Fi - all of those things are great. But if Heinz Field is still a sea of yellow seats on Saturday, it won’t matter. The court at the Petersen Events Center is being reconfigured to look better on TV; filling those seats on the North Shore would look good on TV, too.

ONE PREDICTION

Pitt won’t wait for Penn State much longer
One other notable item Lyke mentioned on Wednesday was regarding the Penn State series. She said that Pitt has sent a contract to PSU Athletic Director Sandy Barbour that would restart the series for four years beginning in 2026.

As we all know, next year’s game in State College is the last scheduled Pitt-Penn State game, so the future of the rivalry is once again up in the air. Lyke has mentioned this contract proposal before, putting the ball firmly in Penn State’s court when it comes to continuing the series.

When Lyke mentioned it on Wednesday, though, one thing was clear: that ball isn’t going to stay in Penn State’s court forever.

In fact, I think Lyke is very close to moving on from the idea of playing the in-state rival, at least in those proposed years. I don’t know if she’ll go so far as to rescind the contract proposal, but I do think that she could be on the verge of arranging some other non-conference matchups that would preclude a resumption of the rivalry.

Lyke said that there are other teams that would like to schedule Pitt, attractive opponents “that you guys will be excited about,” in her words. I can’t help but notice that the upcoming series against West Virginia is scheduled to end in 2025; that would dovetail nicely with the opening from 2026-29 that Lyke proposed to Penn State, and I have to think that a lot of people would be happy about extending the Backyard Brawl (maybe not as much as extending the Penn State series, but it would still be better than playing someone like Oklahoma State or Purdue).

I don’t know if Lyke plans to add another four years to the WVU series or if she’s got her eye on a different Power Five opponent for that opening in 2026-29. Her priority, of course, is to get Penn State into that slot, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the clock strikes zero on that option in the very near future and Lyke moves to get someone else on the schedule.