Should Jeff Capel make us change how we evaluate college basketball coaches?

The fifth-year Pitt coach went from the hot seat to the NCAA Tournament. How he did that -- and what it might mean

Editor’s note No. 1: The author of this piece, who covered Pitt for six years for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, currently does freelance assignments for H2P Magazine, the in-house publication for the Panthers’ athletic department.

Editor’s note No. 2: Several quotes and informational nuggets referenced or included in this story came from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, including some pieces written by the author while he was employed there. Nearly half of the Post-Gazette’s editorial staff is in its 10th month of an unfair labor practice strike against the paper, which has refused to negotiate a new contract with the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh in good faith since the previous deal expired in 2017. While references to any Post-Gazette reporting will be cited in this story – in adherence with journalistic standards – no links to the stories (and the subsequent web traffic that comes from them) will be provided as an act of solidarity with the striking writers and editors.

Maybe it was just the Brooklyn Nets’ black-and-white color scheme draped over the walls, but for whatever the reason, as I watched Jeff Capel speak to the media in the practice gym of the Barclays Center in March 2022, I felt like I was at a funeral.

A coach who had arrived at the University of Pittsburgh four years earlier with all the answers to save the school’s ailing men’s basketball program had appeared to have run out of them.

Minutes earlier, the Panthers were drubbed by lowly Boston College in the first round of the ACC Tournament, their fourth-straight loss coming by at least 20 points. They ended Capel’s fourth season 11-21, their second-worst win percentage in a season since 1977. At a point when most successful coaching tenures begin to bear fruit – if they haven’t already – Capel’s had reached a nadir.

After the final, ignominious setback of the season, a man who normally went to great lengths not to blame his players started to do just that.

“We have to get better players,” he said. “I mean, that's the reality of it. It's not anything personal. We have to continue to add better players. We have to recruit better. All those things we have to do better. We have to continue to develop guys. We have to continue to help them reach their potential as players. Those are things that we have to continue to do.”

Months later, Capel apologized to the returning players for those remarks. He said he was defensive (understandably) after being told a group of local reporters wanted to speak to him about his job status and that he thought his comments were taken out of context (they weren’t). 

Blunt as it may have been, his larger point was right. Capel’s coaching career had been defined in part by an ability to attract talent, yet four years into his time in Western Pennsylvania, he had assembled a roster largely devoid of it. And because of that, what was likely his last chance at a major-conference head-coaching gig was in grave peril. Something not only had to change, but do so in just a few months.

One year later, what once seemed like a promising-yet-ill-fated marriage between program and coach was flourishing.

Capel helped engineer one of the biggest turnarounds in college basketball last season, guiding Pitt to 24 wins, its most in nine years, and its first NCAA Tournament appearance in seven years. Once there, the Panthers won multiple games, something they hadn’t done since 2009, back when they were a No. 1 seed and a national power.

How someone goes from one of the hottest seats in the country to ACC coach of the year is more than just a compelling, feel-good story. It offers a template for how a program in modern college basketball can rise up from an ostensibly unsalvageable situation and, possibly, make leadership across the hundreds of Division I colleges reconsider how they evaluate their coaches and the trajectories of their tenures.

It wasn’t clear he’d ever get to this point

While Pitt’s 2021-22 season represented a low point for the program under Capel, there was an eventful and oftentimes puzzling journey that preceded it.

He came to the school in 2018 after seven years as an assistant coach at Duke, where he became an ace recruiter for the Blue Devils as they overtook Kentucky as the go-to option for the top one-and-done talent nationally. After an 8-24 season that included a 0-19 mark in ACC play, the Panthers, above all else, needed an influx of talent. Among the school’s realistic coaching targets, Capel would be as capable as anyone of accomplishing that.

The early returns were promising. Pitt brought aboard two top-150 recruits in Capel’s first three months on the job and continued that success on the trail. In each of his first three seasons, the Panthers signed a top-50 recruiting class, something they hadn’t done even once since 2013. They had a six-win improvement in his first season. While far short of the sellouts that once defined the building, attendance was up at the Petersen Events Center. Perhaps more than anything, Capel gave Pitt fans something that had been drained from them after Kevin Stallings’ disastrous two-year stint – a reason for hope.

Gradually, though, that withered away.

After promising starts in each of his first three seasons, the Panthers faltered down the stretch, posting a combined record of 6-26 after Feb. 1. In his first season, when the program was recovering from the wreckage Capel inherited, it was understandable. By his second and third seasons, with more seasoned players who had spent time in his system, it raised larger concerns.

The talented prospects he brought aboard too often failed to live up to their potential – or, worse, they did, but only stuck around for so long. None of the seven players from his first two recruiting classes were still at Pitt by the start of his fourth season. Those worries were exacerbated by what had been internal chemistry issues with his 2019-20 and 2020-21 teams and reached a crescendo late in his third season when starters Xavier Johnson and Au’Diese Toney entered the transfer portal with two weeks still remaining in the season.

Johnson and Toney’s absences, along with star forward Justin Champagnie’s early departure to the NBA, were palpable the following season, when the Panthers finished 10 games below .500, lost at home to The Citadel and UMBC by double digits, and dropped eight of their final 12 ACC games by at least 16 points. The program’s shortcomings were that much more glaring as Toney started for a top-10 Arkansas team and Johnson was instrumental in a late-season push that sent Indiana into its first NCAA Tournament in six years. Clearly, somebody could win with those players. It just wasn’t Pitt or its coach.

At times, the woes extended beyond the court. In back-to-back seasons, the Panthers had a rotation player be charged with a felony and miss a significant chunk of the season. In both instances, the most serious charges were dropped, but the damage, both perceptually and for the on-court product, had already been done. Then, last October, mercurial freshman guard Dior Johnson, one of the program’s highest-rated recruits in decades, was charged with aggravated assault, strangulation, unlawful restraint, simple assault and false imprisonment. His alleged victim told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that the altercation wasn’t the first time they had fought and there were previous instances in which “I was scared for my life.”

In Capel’s first four years, Pitt went 51-69 overall and 21-53 in the ACC while never finishing better than 12th in the 15-team league. Perhaps most damning of all, and in a profession of micro-managers, he appeared to have little control over the program and its players, whether it was in the facility or away from it.

When paired with the end of his five-year run at Oklahoma, where he went 27-36 in his final two seasons before being fired, Capel’s career arc was becoming increasingly easy to define and even discredit. He had won at a VCU program where every coach this century was won, ridden a generational in-state talent in Blake Griffin to an Elite Eight before fizzling out once his star forward left for the NBA, and was now starting to plummet in his second chance at leading a major-conference program.

Three days after Pitt’s final game in 2022, and after weeks of interview requests on the subject, Capel and Panthers athletic director Heather Lyke released joint statements confirming that the coach would be back for a fifth season.

“We share the disappointment of this past season and expected to be further along in building this program back to a great source of pride for Pitt,” Lyke’s statement read. “We are committed to Jeff Capel as our head coach and leader of our team. I am confident Jeff will continue to assess and evaluate every aspect of our program and work tirelessly to continue building it the right way. He and our staff are committed to helping our student-athletes develop the consistency and habits to reach their full potential on and off the court.”

Capel would get to keep his job, but it came with the dreaded vote of confidence that’s often a harbinger that a coach’s time at a given school was running short.

With the assurance of another year to try to make things right, Capel was entering the most important offseason of his career. With eight scholarships to fill and three of his five starters gone, effectively every move he made would have to go right.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened.

He lifted the program up with a specific and well-executed plan

Though his “we have to get better players” declaration understandably created most of the headlines, it was two other statements from Capel’s presser that fateful late-winter day that would ultimately prove to be the most consequential.