The Panther-Lair.com 3-2-1 Column: Pitt hoops coaching change edition

Pitt is now looking for a new basketball coach, and that’s what we’re thinking about in this week’s 3-2-1 Column.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

It’s not just one thing
Stallings’ departure was never going to be a product of just one cause.

It was never just about the wins.

It was never just about the attendance.

It was never just about fan support.

It was never just about working for a new Athletic Director.

It was all of those things - and probably more behind the scenes - that led to Thursday’s inevitable news. And the news that Pitt had fired Stallings really was inevitable; for as much as the fan base pined for it, the Athletic Department administration saw the end coming, too, and was prepared for this outcome to the season.

In fact, I really wonder if there was anything that could have happened in the final month (maybe more) of the season that could have saved Stallings’ job. Barring a miracle - and that would mean a run through the ACC Tournament into the Big Dance - I think his fate was sealed a long time ago.

But it probably wasn’t sealed by any singular event. This was a body-of-work decision, merited by any number of factors - and there is a large number of factors to consider.

- The eight wins this season were the fewest in a single season since 1976-77. That Pitt team went 6-21; that’s two fewer wins in five fewer games.

- The zero conference wins this season represented a new all-time low: no previous Pitt team had ever gotten shut out in conference play. Even that 1976-77 team that won six games still managed one Eastern Collegiate Basketball League win when it knocked off Duquesne in the regular-season finale. The team went 1-9 in ECBL games.

- In one of the more visually-striking ignominies, attendance was abysmal. Pitt averaged 4,117 over 18 games at the Petersen Events Center this season - an all-time low by not a small margin. Only six of the 18 games saw Pitt draw more than that average total, topping out with the Jan. 10 game against Duke; 9,180 showed up to watch Pitt get blown out by 35 points that night.

West Virginia and Syracuse, each bringing a fair number their own fans, both reached 7,000. Virginia in the season finale saw 6,534 in the seats. The ACC opener against Miami, when Pitt was 8-5, drew 5,307. And the game against Louisville on Sunday, Feb. 11, brought out 4,772.

Not one game over 10,000 in a 12,500-seat arena. And only three with more than half the seats filled.

- Of course, recruiting was a factor, too. Stallings did an admirable job of adding 11 players to the roster in one offseason. He found some seemingly-solid contributors who could be good players down the line in Marcus Carr, Parker Stewart, Terrell Brown and Shamiel Stevenson, not to mention Khameron Davis, who started 24 games, and Malik Ellison, who transferred from St. John’s and will be eligible to play next season.

But the 2018 class of Danya Kingsby and Bryce Golden doesn’t seem to have the kind of impact player the program needs, and there weren’t many indications that things would improve.

It’s also tough to ignore the recruiting at a certain school in Nashville. After hearing that Vanderbilt was a difficult place to recruit, which was supposed to explain why Stallings didn’t have highly-rated classes there, Bryce Drew is proving otherwise. His three-man class in 2018 consists of two five-star prospects - including No. 1 power forward and No. 7 overall prospect Simisola Shittu and No. 5 point guard Darius Garland - and a four-star prospect to give the Commodores the No. 8 class in the nation. So maybe it wasn’t just Vanderbilt.

All of it bundled together, all the losing and the on-court struggles and the attendance, combined with awkward moments like Stallings being caught cursing at a player on television or the cameras picking up his heckling of fans at Louisville, topped off with the natural difficulty that comes with an Athletic Director inheriting a coach who seemed to have no support of the fan base and you get what we have here this week.

Which is the way the fans want it. Well, you get it.

Now it’s done and time for Pitt to move onto the next step.

This hire is crucial for Lyke
This is among the most obvious statements I’ll make in this column (perhaps in my entire life), but Heather Lyke is on the spot now. She made the decision to change coaches, and while that decision certainly has plenty of support right now, it’s really Decision 1A; now she is facing the even more important Decision 1B:

Who to hire?

There are plenty of candidates out there, from experienced head coaches who could be looking for a fresh start to guys who have had a lot of success at a lower level and are ready to try swimming in a bigger pond to up-and-comers who may lack one element or another but are nonetheless attractive options.

First, Lyke has to decide what she wants Pitt’s next head coach to be. Does she want to go down the Thad Matta/Tom Crean path (not that those two are the same, short of being head coaches with major-conference experience and a fair amount of success)? Or is she thinking more along the lines of a Danny Hurley or a John Becker (mid-major head coaches with success)? Or could she go to the potential of coaches like Eric Musselman or Earl Grant (mid-major coaches with success in a limited amount of time)? Or are there outside-the-box options like Micah Shrewsberry or Kevin Boyle or Brandin Knight?

There are a lot of paths Lyke can take. Within reason, she should have a pretty good pool to choose from - better, presumably, than her predecessor had when he hired Stallings - provided the University is ready to commit to a new coach. We’ve written plenty already about how there needs to be considerable commitment in this process, both to pay what a good coach commands and to show the next coach that the University is willing to invest in things like recruiting, facilities upgrades and staff salaries.

If the available pool of options is solid, then, what’s the best route for Lyke to take? I would probably take someone like Hurley or Becker, a mid-major coach with a lot of success who is hungry and ready for a bigger stage, but that’s just me. I don’t get paid the big bucks to make these kinds of decisions, and when Patrick Gallagher decided that Lyke should be Pitt’s next Athletic Director, he did so for expressly this reason:

He believes she can make this kind of decision. In roughly a year on the job, Lyke has already brought in four new head coaches. She hired former Pitt All-American Keith Gavin to lead the wrestling program. She named Samantha Snider coach of the gymnastics team. For the women’s soccer program, she hired former Notre Dame coach Randy Waldrum. And last June she brought in Katie Hazelton to coach diving.

Time will tell if those were good hires, but it goes without saying that Lyke’s next hire is her biggest. The basketball program was, for the bulk of the 2000’s, the best thing Pitt had going athletically. The fall for the program has been drastic, and while there is optimism that it can return to the levels it once enjoyed - or at least get close to them - the reality of the next few years will be entirely Lyke’s responsibility.

Different things can be true
A final thought on Kevin Stallings as his era comes to an end.

While most Pitt fans will be anxious to move past the last two years of basketball and maybe even forget that they existed in an “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” kind of way (Dan Dakich referred to it early in Pitt’s ACC Tournament loss to Notre Dame as “the nightmare of real things”), I’m guessing that the 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons are going to be discussed quite a bit over the next few years - especially if the next few years don’t bring a quick turnaround in success.

Inevitably, there will be two camps of discussion when it relates to the Stallings Era. One will say that Stallings was a terrible hire, a bad fit and a poor representative for the basketball program who never should have been employed by Pitt in the first place.

The other camp will say that that very perspective, the one that wrote Stallings off before he had even coached a game, was precisely the reason his tenure ended after just two seasons. That camp will say that Stallings never got a fair shake at Pitt, that he was doomed from the start by people who had judged him the first time his name was connected to the job.

The reality is, both sides are more or less right.

It’s true that Stallings never got a fair shake at Pitt. And it’s also debatable how fair of a shake he deserved.

The fan base did come together in its dislike of the hire; there’s no question about that. And that created a difficult situation right from the jump. But many of the complaints about Pitt hiring a coach with good-for-Vanderbilt success who seemed to be on the way out of Nashville did have their merit. Was Stallings really the best option that Scott Barnes could find? Was he really the kind of coach Pitt wanted or needed at the time it hired him?

(It certainly didn’t calm any of the antagonism toward Stallings when Barnes bailed for Oregon State.)

Similarly, there are valid points to make about the difficulty of the situation Stallings walked into with the team he inherited. It was a senior-laded squad that had very little senior leadership, so Stallings got the double-whammy of a team with personality issues in Year One and then, when all of those seniors graduated (and a bunch of other players left, too), a team that was almost completely comprised of newcomers in Year Two.

That’s a difficult situation, and one that might make any coach squeamish. To Stallings’ credit, he filled the roster with players who seem to be good representatives of the program; assuming most of them stay with the new coaching staff, there’s a chance a few could become solid ACC players.

But they weren’t going to be at that level as freshmen, and that meant 2017-18 was going to be a tough year for Pitt and for Stallings. Perhaps a different coach would have been given a longer leash by the fans and the administration, but the toxic environment of his hire plus the difficult situation he inherited almost guaranteed his time would end shortly after Pitt’s season did.

So was he a tragic hero, martyred by forces outside his control, as some would claim? Or did he deserve exactly what he got, as others would contend?

Again, it’s probably both. Yes, he was dealt a raw hand. But no, I can’t fault fans who took issue with the hire from the start.

TWO QUESTIONS

Who does Pitt hire now?
Heather Lyke gets paid the big bucks so we’ll leave this decision to her, but we might as well discuss it anyway.

I already said that I like the “successful mid-major” route. Danny Hurley’s name has been floating around for awhile, and he may or may not have interest. I think that’s a good candidate type for Pitt to pursue. The biggest hang-up with Hurley specifically may be the competition: if a lot of jobs come open this offseason, he’s going to be hotly pursued, which could mean a bidding war, if nothing else. Is Pitt willing to get into a bidding war and, more relevantly, is Pitt capable of winning a bidding war? That will be an interesting question to play out over the next few weeks.

John Becker at Vermont is interesting. He has had a lot of success with the Catamounts and reportedly turned down Duquesne last year. The one hang-up is his resume: he has been really good at Vermont since 2011, but his history prior to that looks like this:

2006-11 - assistant at Vermont
2004-06 - assistant at Catholic University
1997-99 - head coach at Gallaudet
1994-97 - assistant at Gallaudet

(If you’re not familiar, Gallaudet is a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, D.C.)

I think if you’re going to hire a mid-major head coach, there should be some background of recruiting at the high-major level or some connection to that level. Hurley, for example, was an assistant at Rutgers for five years and has extensive ties in New Jersey.

Or Earl Grant at College of Charleston; he’s been the head coach there since 2014, but before that he was an assistant at Clemson (plus, he has worked with Gregg Marshall, which is a good source of lineage).

Of course, the one name we can’t discount and is certainly worth a long look from Pitt is Thad Matta. For as much as I like the rising mid-major star, there’s no substitute for the kind of success Matta had at Ohio State. He has already been linked to various jobs as he looks to get back into coaching after sitting out the last season, and it’s hard to argue with the resume: 439 career wins, a .740 career winning percentage, four Big Ten Tournament championships, five Big Ten regular-season championships, a pair of Atlantic 10 Tournament championships at Xavier and, of course, two Final Four appearances at Ohio State.

Matta certainly seems like he could be a huge hire for Pitt if the Panthers could land him, and while I still think Pitt should look for the next mid-major coach to make the jump to high-majors (like Matta did when he went from Xavier to Ohio State), I can’t deny the appeal with Matta.

Like I said, though, this is where Lyke has to start: what does she want at Pitt? Obviously she wants success, but she’s going to need to hone in on some targets and decide what kind of coach she thinks can bring the Panthers back to those levels.

Is it important to win the press conference?
This is a fairly common topic in Pitt circles, most likely because Pitt has been through so many coaching changes in recent history. By my count, there have been five introductory press conferences in football and men’s basketball since December 2010, which is one every 17 months or so.

Yeah, we’ve all got a little experience with this.

And those five introductory press conferences present an interesting contrast. There’s the seems-to-be-good (Todd Graham), the legitimately good (Pat Narduzzi and even Paul Chryst, if for no other reason than his contrast to Todd Graham), the uninspiring (Mike Haywood) and the uncomfortably bad (Kevin Stallings, through no fault of his own).

If we go back before those five, we get Dave Wannstedt, who most certainly won the press conference and then proceeded to lose 19 games over the next three seasons, so the correlation between winning the press conference and winning games isn’t necessarily perfect (although Wannstedt did start winning in his fourth season, when the promises and plans he issued in his press conference came to fruition).

Still, there’s an underlying question of whether or not Heather Lyke needs to be thinking about the fans’ reaction when she makes the next hire. She can’t have a Barnes & Stallings affair, which turned into an embarrassment for all parties. Chances are, that won’t happen, though; she’s not replacing Jamie Dixon and she’s unlikely to find a coach who is more widely disliked as a candidate than Stallings was.

But there’s a difference between avoiding that level of bad press conference and actually “winning” the press conference. We know Lyke’s ultimate goal is to win games, but should she be concerned with winning at the podium?

In most cases, I would say it shouldn’t be a concern; athletic directors need to make the best hire they can come up with, bringing in a coach who understands the program and how best to run it, ideally with some history of success.

But this situation is unique. Fan support has been eroded so severely through the events of the last 24 months (or 23 months and change) that a jolt of some kind is probably merited. Lyke sent the first spark through the fan base when she fired Stallings; that move alone got the online crowd excited on a Thursday morning and may have even produced some moderate level of donation spikes.

Now it’s Decision 1B - the actual hire - and that’s the one that will truly generate goodwill in the fan base. But again: how much should she be taking the fan reaction into consideration?

Ultimately, there’s probably an overlap between an exciting hire and the right hire, since the right hire should be exciting for the fan base.

ONE PREDICTION

The March reactions will be forgotten next January
Picking up on the thought about fan reaction…

It will be one thing in March. It will be another thing altogether in January. Whatever hype a Matta or a Hurley or a Grant or whoever they hire generates upon the news of the hire, it will all fade if that new coach extends the current 19-game losing streak into the 20’s.

This probably goes without saying, but you might have heard that sports fans in the city of Pittsburgh are a bit fickle.

It’s a funny sort of duality, really. Because for as much as we hear that western Pennsylvania sports fans live in the past, they’re also remarkably myopic. The present seems eternal, and what is happening now is what will happen forever - regardless of what history tells us.

Even though we believe a coach is a good coach, we can get clouded by the here and now, letting the outcome of one game - or how we perceive that outcome was arrived at - determine what we think about a coach overall. It’s applying a specific perspective to a general concept, when the long view is usually the more sound approach.

So when Pitt’s new coach loses a non-conference game or two in December or has a multi-game losing streak once ACC play gets going in January, there is going to be some backlash, whether it’s Thad Matta or Dan Hurley or someone we haven’t even considered yet.

And the praise that the hire received in March will be long forgotten, a relic of a more hopeful time when there weren’t any games to play, no on-court action to remind us that this program will take time to rebuild.

That’s probably the biggest key to keep in mind, isn’t it? Heather Lyke can knock this hire out of the park, and the new coach is still going to inherit a roster that might have a half-dozen ACC-caliber players after it experiences the natural attrition of a coaching change. It’s going to take a little time for that next coach to work his magic.