Got plenty of Ollies tho
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Iâd hope Shaka or any other candidate would say how about you pay me 5 mil (or even less) and give me the rest to spend more on players.
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Because itâs hard at Pitt after the program deteriorating after Dixon leftâŚ.
Dixons worst season there was 19 wins and was a 1 seed in the madness twiceâŚ
And Ben Howland got to sweet 16 the year before Dixon arrived.
how fast did that dissipate? 2 years of Stallings and it was gone.
I would also say they should have never left the Big East and same for SyracuseâŚ
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Kevin Stallings is really lucky that Kenny Payne exists, otherwise heâs a real hard candidate to beat for worst ACC coach of the last 30 or so years.
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Yeah the Stallings era is a cautionary tale of program prestige being tied to its coach. Iâm sure Pitt fans though âhey we are fine, Jamie Dixon showed that you can win big here. The next guy can pick up where he left off. And he had a 60% win rate at Vandy, thatâs so hard to do!â And thus began 6 straight seasons wandering in the wilderness. Happy Monday!
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I will say that the Stallings hire by Pitt was heavily criticized at the time. His seat was getting pretty warm at Vandy and it was such an uninspired choice.
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Fans need to understand that money doesnât equal getting anyone you want. Everybody has lots of money, nearly every high major team has more funds available than the market value of a roster they could hope to assemble. Itâs not whether you can pay a player, itâs whether you can get the player worth paying.
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And I want a bunch of players that donât âfitâ our current system⌠like all of them.
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Judging by how the seasons going so far Iâd say we already have a bunch of players who donât âfitâ the system
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Will add that Pitt shouldnât have joined the ACC. Did any legacy Big East hoops teams benefit by being in the ACC?
Maybe VPI⌠but they were barely Big East
I would typically agree with this except for VaTech. Their coach runs good plays itâs just something is off with their recruiting butvthst may be due to their management.
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Thatâs 100% accurate. However, you canât simply go into a season with a roster with as many inexperienced players, and players that are in early development and expect to compete at a very high level. Saunders & I-Mac are the only guys that are capable of playing at a high enough level consistently to help win games.
Tennessee was caught off guard after last year when their two experienced bigs transferred out, (Awaka & Aidoo) and somehow they went out and landed both Igor & Okpara. We were already thin with bigs, played all last year without a true rim protector & knew we were losing Minor. In the pre-NIL days, we wouldnât see very much of Blake Buchanan until 2026-27, his redshirt JR year. How did Bennett & company not account for that?
If you want to compete at the highest level in todayâs game, occasionally itâs necessary to money whip a guy to campus.
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It was an uninspired choice. But he only got 2 years. However, Jamie Dixon had let recruiting slide. He had a roster full of stiffs, and Stallings really never had a chance to get his guys in there. He just weeded it out, then Cam Johnson unexpectedly transfers out and their big man got hurt, and he was left with a non-competitive roster. It wasnât like it is today when you can pull a Pat Kelsey and flip the entire roster before you coach your first game.
Jamie Dixon really let Pitt fall. It was going to crater hard, even if Dixon had stayed. His recruiting the last few years at Pitt was dogshit. In his last 5 years at Pitt, his overall record in conference play was 45-45. (2 years BE, 3 ACC)
Jamie Dixon hasnât had a team that finished above .500 in conference play since 2013-14. Thatâs an insane stat.
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And what did TJ Power do at Duke? Why did UVA recruit a guy that didnât do jack shit in his one year at Duke?
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His first season at Pitt was absolutely not devoid of talent, he inherited a roster sans James Robinson that was a tourney team the year before and proceeded to go 4-14 in conference along with getting shit for verbally berating his players and being super aggro at press conferences.
He then made an AWFUL PR move of trying to restrict where Cam Johnson could transfer to and followed that up by going 0-18 in the ACC. There was no chance he was surviving that season with all the negative press he was getting.
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Because hood talent gets buried on the bench at Duke all the time. It clearly didnât work out, but I donât think it was a bad idea
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Agree with that. Blakes was coming off 9.5 mins/game at Duke and is averaging 14.5 points per game at Stanford now. Power was at 7 mins a game last year â but he certainly hasnât blown up like Blakes.
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They went 9-9 in the ACC to 4-14. Mostly because they didnât have a point guard. Who had Jamie recruited to replace James Robinson? Justice Kithcart?
Check out the rest of the roster Stallings inherited. It was mostly garbage.
I heavily disagree that their roster was garbage at least in their first season, they returned six of the top seven players from a rotation that went to the tourney but to each their own. I understand that Robinson graduating made an impact but he wasnât THAT good to where it meant they became an under .500 team. Guys like Jamel Artis, Michael Young, Cam Johnson, and Sheldon Jeter were damn good players.
I also agree that things were on a downturn with Dixon, but I can assure you that he wouldnât have gone 0-18 in conference like Stallings did. Both things can be true, Dixonâs time there was souring and Kevin Stallings basically took the program from slowly sliding down a mountain to tombstoning them off a cliff. Itâs why I will give credit to Capel for working his ass off to repair the image of their basketball program, it started off rough but over time heâs built them back up.
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