The Panther-Lair.com 3-2-1 Column: All about the Capel hire

MORE ON PITT'S NEW HEAD COACH - Capel's expectations for Pitt recruiting | Free article: What Pitt basketball will look like under Jeff Capel | Free article: Six factors made the difference for Capel | Capel on picking Pitt and more |Video: Capel's introductory press conference | PODCAST: Pitt gets it right | Free article: Capel is "an elite-level recruiter" | The college hoops world reacts to Capel and Pitt | Slideshow: Capel meets the press

It's the Panther-Lair.com 3-2-1 Column, where we look at three observations, two questions and one prediction. This week, it's all about Jeff Capel.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

Pitt got it right
It’s hard to come away from the news that Pitt had hired Duke assistant Jeff Capel or the press conference that formally introduced Capel and think anything less than this simple statement:

Pitt got it right.

Really, take your pick of qualities in a coaching candidate. Line up the things you would want Pitt’s next coach to be or qualifications you would want him to have. Design your ideal - but realistic - best option. Chances are, your candidate creation is going to have a lot of overlap with Jeff Capel.

Head coaching experience? Check.

Experience coaching in the ACC? Check.

Experience recruiting in the ACC? Check.

Mentorship from a Hall-of-Fame coach? Check.

Relative youth? Check.

Really, what’s missing? Where’s the downside in Capel? I’ve been looking since Tuesday, when he turned from a shoot-the-moon-but-probably-not-gonna-happen pipe dream option into a real viable candidate, and I still haven’t found much in the way of something to dislike about this hire.

A lot of credit has to go to Heather Lyke. She didn’t work alone in this coaching search and there are a lot of people who played a part, but she is the Athletic Director; whether the hire works out or not will ultimately be on her, and much of her legacy at Pitt will be based on what Capel does with the Panthers.

There’s also something to be said for the rest of the University, in particular Chancellor Patrick Gallagher. A few weeks ago in this space, I said that if Lyke was going to replace Kevin Stallings with a top-end coach, it was going to take commitment from the University administration. That means money for salaries - the head coach and the assistant staff - and resources for recruiting, facilities upgrades, etc.

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I have the numbers Pitt committed to Jeff Capel, but given that Capel has turned down other head-coaching opportunities over the last seven years, I think it’s safe to say he doesn’t take this job if he doesn’t believe he has the support of the administration.

Really, he said as much himself on Wednesday:

“The people that were in that room” - Capel said, referring to his interview with Lyke, Gallagher et al - “I felt like they believed in me. I felt like they believed in us. And that’s how I knew it was right.”

Throughout this process, I felt that “selling Pitt” was one of Lyke’s most important tasks. Not only did she have to identify the right candidate, but she had to sell that candidate on the rather daunting rebuild project that is Pitt men’s basketball at this point in history.

Lyke sold Pitt. She identified Capel and sold him on the job.

Again, she didn’t work solo on this, but she got it done and she deserves the credit. For now - and we all know the honeymoon period can end abruptly - it looks like she got this one right.

Recruiting is going to improve
After Capel was hired, I wanted to get as much background info on him as possible, so I reached out to our friend Clint Jackson. He’s the basketball recruiting analyst at DevilsIllustrated.com, the Rivals.com site that covers Duke. Clint has been around for awhile, and I knew he could tell me a lot about Capel.

So when we got on the phone Tuesday afternoon, my first question was simple: What’s the word on Jeff Capel?

And the first thing Clint said, the first topic he touched on, was recruiting. He called Capel an “elite-level recruiter,” citing his sincere nature and high relatability; Capel can connect with the recruits and their families, Clint told us, and he’s a big reason why Duke has recruited so well in the last five years.

Now, one of the immediate reactions a lot of people had to hearing about Capel’s recruiting acumen was to offer some version of the following:

“Yeah, he’s a great recruiter - at Duke. And Pitt ain’t Duke.”

That’s true. Recruiting at Duke is not the same as recruiting at Pitt. No matter how great a recruiter is, he’s probably not getting Marvin Bagley or Jahlil Okafor to Pitt. But I don’t entirely agree with the extended theory that Capel’s recruiting should be dismissed because Duke, we’re told, “recruits itself.”

Sure, Duke does recruit itself. Walking into a high school gym with that blue D on your chest turns heads. Duke is a brand - maybe The Brand - in college basketball. And with that comes an immediate recognition and respect that open a lot of doors in recruiting.

But here’s the thing: Kentucky sells itself, too. So does Kansas. And North Carolina. Duke isn’t the only blue-blood program in the country, and to get the likes of Okafor and Bagley and Jabari Parker and the rest, it wasn’t enough to say “We’re Duke.” There’s more to it than that when you’re working against other top programs.

The brand gets you into that stratosphere of recruiting, but what sets you apart at that level, what wins the recruiting battles against Kentucky and Kansas and Carolina is the people. And that’s where Capel comes in. If being Duke opened the door, Capel was the one who had to sit in the living room and close the deal.

So no, he might not get multiple five-star recruits in every class for Pitt, but he should be able to draw legitimate interest from a higher level of prospect than we’ve seen consider the Panthers in the past. And really, if there was one thing that needed to be improved above all else, one thing that ultimately was just a little less than it needed to be, even during the heyday of Pitt hoops in the 2000’s, it was recruiting. A little more talent, a little more game-changing, playmaking ability, and who knows what might have come of the Jamie Dixon era?

Maybe, just maybe, Capel is the coach who can take the best elements of that time in Pitt history - good coaching and players who embody what the coach is teaching - and add that elusive-yet-crucial factor of talent. And if he can do that…well, it will be interesting to see where this thing goes.

The in-between period is interesting
We’ve written Jeff Capel’s bio enough times in the last four days to know it pretty well.

After his standout playing career at Duke, he went overseas for two years before entering the world of coaching. That started with an assistant gig at Old Dominion and then a year as an assistant at VCU, which turned into the head coaching job a year after that.

Capel was head coach of the Rams for four years before heading to Norman to be head coach at Oklahoma. He was a rising star, one of the brightest young coaches in the game, and his reputation only grew as he landed a bunch of McDonald’s All-Americans and took the Sooners to the Elite Eight and 30 wins in 2008-09.

Then the slide began. Oklahoma went 4-12 in the Big 12 a year later and then ended up vacating those four wins and 14 others after using an ineligible player. The next season started with one of Capel’s assistant coaches resigning under investigation of recruiting violations and ended with the Sooners going 14-18 overall and 5-11 in the Big 12. Capel was fired at the end of the season.

He didn’t stay on the market long, though, as his old head coach, Mike Krzyzewski, gave him a job on Duke’s bench. Capel stayed there for seven years before taking the Pitt job this week.

It’s that period in between Oklahoma and Pitt that really interests me because it was, for all intents and purposes, a re-education for Capel. In fact, if Capel leads Pitt to a relevant level of success, there will likely be long-form pieces written by national reporters on how Capel went from the VCU wunderkind to the Oklahoma outcast before reinventing himself on Coach K’s bench.

“Reinventing” probably isn’t the right word to use, but Capel definitely changed during those seven years in Durham. He talked about that on Wednesday, calling that period in his career “necessary” multiple times.

“Duke was necessary for me,” he said at one point.

“Going from a head coach for nine years back to an assistant, it was interesting; it was interesting, but necessary,” he said later.

And most important was what Capel said those seven necessary years did for him as a coach.

“I learned during my seven years at Duke - I think the biggest thing is how to really run a program. I thought that I was good before, but I know I'll be better now because I've had a chance to sit beside and be with every day and have these intimate conversations with a guy that I think is the best that's ever done it. I knew Duke as a player, but I didn't know the ins-and-outs. That's the thing that I've learned.”

Learning how to run a program from one of the best to ever do it - that sounds like a good way to spend seven years, not to mention one heck of a lead-in to taking over the Pitt job. He was good at VCU and good at Oklahoma; now he’s had seven years to look back and figure what he did right and what he did wrong in those jobs. He can keep the right, ditch the wrong and add in anything and everything he picked up from Krzyzewski.

When Pat Narduzzi was hired, we all talked a lot about how he had decided it was the right time for him to be a coach. How he had turned down other opportunities because it wasn’t the right opportunity at the right time. Capel seems to be in the same boat: he waited for the right opportunity at the right time.

And that was Pitt, a job that was seven years in the making for Capel.

TWO QUESTIONS

Did we misread the process?
Coaching searches are always far more chaotic on the outside than they are on the inside. After having watched Pitt go through six searches since I started covering the Panthers, I am confident of that. Not enough real, actual information gets out, so the opinions that are formed in public rarely have more than a passing connection to what’s happening behind the scenes.

So all of us out here - media, fans, etc. - try to form whole scenarios of what’s happening based on the scraps we come up with, either real or fiction. We see Step A and Step G and assume there were stops at Steps C, E and F in between, when in reality, the search went to Step B and Step D before getting to F, which ultimately led into G.

We know the starting point - Kevin Stallings got fired - and we know the end point - Jeff Capel got hired - and we might even know one or two midpoints - Danny Hurley got offered the job - but there are a lot of blanks that never really get filled in.

Such was the case last week, when the early-week revelations that Hurley was leaning to UConn turned into a maelstrom of uncertainty, unconfirmed reports and straight-up untruths that led to conclusions which misrepresented the situation in totality (something about lacking a compass or something).

I’m guilty of this, too. I released a podcast on Monday asking the question, “What’s missing from this coaching search?”, essentially wondering aloud why Pitt hadn’t been able to find someone to take the job yet. They had been turned down by Hurley; we were sure of that much. And it seemed like Buffalo’s Nate Oats had also given Pitt the “Thanks, but no thanks.”

How, with the money and the facilities and the University commitment and the ACC connection, had the position stayed open for what was looking like three weeks? What were we missing about this situation? Why didn’t anyone want the job?

Well, in the aftermath of Capel getting hired, we can probably revisit some of those discussions and put together a rough timeline that looks something like this:

Two weekends ago, Rhode Island was knocked out of the NCAA Tournament - by Duke, of all teams - on Saturday the 17th. Shortly thereafter, Heather Lyke and company made a very competitive offer to Danny Hurley, an offer they apparently re-upped in a bidding war with Connecticut and Rhode Island. As the week neared its midpoint, it became clear that Hurley was going to UConn, leading Lyke to move onto Plan B.

That resulted in a phone conversation on Thursday with Jeff Capel. Duke was still in the Tournament, so he understandably wanted to keep this focus there, but the phone call was apparently encouraging enough that Lyke was willing to wait until Monday before moving forward (it would have been interesting to see what happened if Duke had beaten Kansas on Sunday and advanced to the Final Four; Lyke seemed to indicate on Wednesday that she would have more or less needed a verbal commitment from Capel if she was going to wait until after next weekend).

Less than 24 hours after Duke got bounced from the Tournament, Lyke and company were on a jet to Durham to interview Capel, and less than 24 hours after that, the deal was done.

Now we look back at that timeline - which probably also included some exploratory talks with Nate Oats (and possibly even a “What do you think?” offer, expressed in vague enough terms that it could be denied as an actual offer) and other candidates - and I think a clear picture emerges. Hurley was the top candidate; when he came off the board, Lyke moved on and Capel’s name was on the list. His reciprocal interest led to an interview, but that interview couldn’t really happen until after the Elite Eight.

So while the timeline seemed to be one of delay and confusion, a rudderless ship floating through an ocean of candidates and not attracting any of them, it now seems to be one that happened on a fairly reasonable schedule.

There might be a lesson in there that we can all draw upon the next time Pitt needs to hire a coach, but hopefully that is so far down the road that we all forget about it by then.

Where does Capel’s press conference rank?
I asked this on Twitter in the afterglow of Capel’s press conference, but I think it’s an interesting question worth revisiting now.

If you look back at Pitt’s “new head coach” press conferences of the last eight years, where does Capel’s stack up? There have been quite a few, so just to make sure we’re all working with the same data set, here’s the list, in chronological order:

Mike Haywood
Todd Graham
Paul Chryst
Pat Narduzzi
Kevin Stallings
Jeff Capel

There’s a good chance that each of those names brings a pretty specific, unique and perhaps even emotional response for Pitt fans, from the glow of optimism to the cold shudder of bad memories. Naturally, the events that followed each of those introductory press conferences color the way we see those days - Todd Graham’s first day on the job was much better than the next 336 - but if you could take your mind on a time traveling trip to December 16, 2010, or January 10, 2011, or December 22, 2011, or December 23, 2014, or March 27, 2016, and compare the feelings you had on those days compared to the feeling you had on Wednesday, how do they rank?

It’s probably easier to start at the bottom, where Haywood and Stallings reside, if for different reasons. In the case of Haywood, the affair was dreary and uninspiring, his style coming across as either no-nonsense or lack-of-sleep. In the case of Stallings, he was really an innocent bystander catching strays in the gunfight at the PEC Corral between the assembled media and then-Athletic Director Scott Barnes.

Haywood’s press conference was dull; Stallings’ was anything but. Haywood was probably worse in terms of a new coach selling his vision, but the Stallings affair gets the prize as the worst overall simply for being cringeworthy and embarrassing for all parties involved.

After those two, it’s hard to go anywhere but up (they really are the press conference equivalent of going 0-18). So Paul Chryst comes in at No. 4 on our list as a step up. Chryst’s reputation isn’t necessarily that of an inspirational figure, and his introductory press conference was far from a pep rally. But it’s important to remember that, at the time, his press conference was exactly what Pitt needed, coming as it did after Todd Graham’s 11 months here. Pitt needed an anti-Graham, on a lot of levels, and Chryst presented that in his low-key, understated introduction.

For No. 3 on the list, I’m going with Graham, and I’ll admit that hindsight colors this ranking. I can freely recall the excitement around Graham’s hiring and press conference. It wasn’t 100% unanimous at the time, but there was enough enthusiasm and confidence in the new head coach that most people walked out of that press conference feeling like Pitt got exactly what it needed: namely, an exciting and modern approach to college football, which most thought was missing from the Dave Wannstedt era.

Graham’s press conference was pretty close to perfect, but what happened over the next 11 months casts a shadow on that day’s proceedings that is just too much to ignore. I want to make this ranking just about the press conference itself, but I simply can’t (I imagine you can’t either). So I’m putting him at No. 3.

That leaves Narduzzi and Capel, and there was a lot to like in both instances. For starters, both guys walked into the press conference already carrying the confidence of a pretty strong reception to their hires; more or less universally, Narduzzi and Capel were considered the Right Guys at the Right Time for Pitt, and that helps make the press conference go smoother.

So Narduzzi and Capel had that advantage going in, but they both capitalized by giving Pitt fans and administrators and boosters what they wanted: clear, concise visions for the future, enthusiasm and respect for the University and athletic programs and an overall impression of being ready to step in as the man in charge.

How do we separate those two for our rankings, then? I think the biggest thing that stands apart is composure; Jeff Capel was very composed at the podium. From his lack of prepared to his apparent readiness for any question the media could come up with, Capel was very poised and comfortable.

That’s not to say Narduzzi wasn’t composed or comfortable; he was, and he did a good job at his press conference. But where he was a ball of anxious energy, driven partially by his first press conference as head coach in a new town and partially by his own high-energy personality, Capel was cool and collected. He had his own brand of energy, a controlled conviction that came through in his speech.

Capel also hit almost every “right note” that a coach in his position could hit, from his confidence in recruiting to his candor about getting fired at Oklahoma to his expectations for the team. Of course, Narduzzi hit a lot of right notes in his press conference, too, laying out in very specific terms what Pat Narduzzi’s Pitt Football Team would be.

Capel and Narduzzi also both did a great job, intentionally or not, of conveying exactly how they would be an improvement on the coach they were replacing. Narduzzi was high energy, unlike his predecessor; Capel was…well, Caple was a lot of things that his predecessor was not.

Really, I’m splitting hairs here; much like Narduzzi and Capel both seemed to be the right hires, they also both seemed to get it right in their press conferences. I’ll give a slight edge to Capel, though; I was really that impressed with him on Wednesday.

ONE PREDICTION

It will take time
Okay, I admit it: this is one of the great clichés and obvious statements that always get made when a new coach is hired.

But most clichés have some basis in truth, and that’s especially the case with Jeff Capel. It’s going to take some time. Anyone who watched Pitt this season, anyone who knows the roster Capel will inherit even under the best of circumstances - and those circumstances remain to be seen, re: potential transfers out - knows that the most likely collection of talent he will be working with will likely reside somewhere below the line of average in the ACC.

That’s not to say he won’t have some talent coming back, and it’s not to say he can’t add to that talent with a few late acquisitions. But 2018-19 will probably be another tough season; maybe not “0-18 tough,” but probably something along the lines of a half-dozen or less wins in the ACC. That seems reasonable.

I think Corey Evans, the Rivals.com basketball recruiting analyst who joined me on the podcast after Capel was hired, had a pretty good potential timeline for Capel at Pitt: show some improvement in Year One, play yourself onto the Tournament bubble and potentially the NIT in Year Two, and then make the NCAA Tournament in Year Three.

Is that a bit accelerated? Maybe; it will probably depend on how much progress guys like Marcus Carr and Shamiel Stevenson - assuming they’re back - make over the next two seasons. Capel will need to recruit at a higher level, but his early-tenure success will stem in large part from the improvement those guys make.

Here’s the good thing, though: Capel is going to get time to make it work. He is Heather Lyke’s hire, her most prominent move as Athletic Director and the one she is staking at least some part of her career on. So if it takes him three years to get back to the NCAA Tournament, he’ll get it. If it takes him four years to get to the NCAA Tournament, he’ll get it. If it’s Year Five and he still hasn’t made the Tournament, well, that might get a bit dicey, but I suspect he’ll still get to Year Six.

Lyke is tied to Capel and she has bet on him. It looks like a pretty solid bet to me, but it’s a bet all the same. He’s inheriting a tough situation and will have to make it through some lean times, but above all else, I’m confident he will have plenty of time to get the ship righted.