Pitt Assistant Jason Capel Rants About 'Disrespect' After Win Over UNC

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — Pittsburgh’s dramatic, 65–64 victory over North Carolina Wednesday night was punctuated by a boisterous, borderline bitter explosion from Panthers assistant coach and former Tar Heel Jason Capel.

It started on the court immediately after the game, when Capel and some of the Carolina fans began yelling at each other. North Carolina senior associate athletic director for media relations Steve Kirschner, who was the sports information staffer when Capel played at UNC from 1998 to ’02, yelled at Capel to leave the floor. But the anger didn’t stop there.

“Don’t disrespect me!” Capel yelled, walking around in circles in the hallway outside the Pitt locker room. “Y’all going to boo me? Disrespect me, all I did here? Final Four, ACC championship. …. I held this shit together when (former coach) Matt Doherty tore it apart!”

In response to a question from Sports Illustrated, Capel’s older brother and Pitt’s head coach, Jeff, addressed Jason’s strained relationship with his alma mater. Jeff said the hurt feelings go back as far as 2009, but asserted that there was fresh fuel to the fire before this game.

Jeff cited a Wednesday morning post from the North Carolina men’s basketball Twitter account that he said was “trolling” Jason. The post showed walk-on Creighton Lebo, the son of assistant coach Jeff Lebo, who has appeared in one game this season. Lebo wears No. 25, which was Jason Capel’s number as a Tar Heel. 

Kirschner tells SI the social media post had nothing to do with Jason Capel. But that was the alleged trolling post Jeff Capel referred to after the game.

“I was hoping he didn’t see it,” Jeff said. “This is one of the most tradition-laden programs in college athletics, not just college basketball, and you hear a lot about the Carolina family. And it’s just amazing to me that their social media people would do that.

“I don’t think it’s Hubert [Davis, the North Carolina head coach]. Hubert’s awesome. I don’t think it’s the players on the team; they are incredibly respectful and really good guys. I hate it for [Jason Capel], I hate it for this program, because he loves this place.”

Jeff Capel said the 2009 incident that began the rift between Jason Capel and UNC was from a regional final game, when Jeff’s Oklahoma team was playing the Tar Heels for a spot in the Final Four. Jason was in the stands wearing an Oklahoma shirt in support of his brother, and Jeff said that drew some angry responses from UNC fans.

“The Carolina fans were pretty shitty toward him, excuse my language,“Jeff Capel said. “But pretty, pretty nasty. And it took one of the former players to say something.”

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This wasn’t the first time Jason Capel was involved in a verbal confrontation with the home fans in the Dean E. Smith Center after a game. Last year, when the Panthers shocked the Heels in mid-February, Capel yelled toward the stands that North Carolina was soft and the fans hurled insults at Capel.

The Heels regrouped after that loss to win 11 out of 12 games, advancing to the national championship game. But in Pitt’s next trip to the Dean Dome, hostilities were renewed between the fans and a guy who played 120 games and scored 1,447 points in a Carolina uniform.

“My brother loves this school,” Jeff said. “Dreamt of coming here as a player when he was little. He wore that jersey with a lot of pride. And since he’s left here there’s been a lot of disrespect toward him. It’s a complicated relationship with him and North Carolina. He loves it but I think at times he doesn’t feel that back.”