After Five Years, Pitt HC Jeff Capel Finds Footing in New Neighborhood
PITTSBURGH -- Entering this season, Jeff Capel was on the ropes. He arrived in 2022 with a 58-69 record as head coach of the Pitt Panthers. He'd led them to four straight losing seasons, the worst of which came last year and ended in another mass player exodus during the offseason.
But this season has been a renaissance for his program. Capel has gone from fielding questions about his job security after bowing out of the ACC Tournament in round one to pushing for a top-four seed in the next tournament after a quarter of the conference season has passed. Pitt is 4-1 in ACC play with two wins over ranked opponents under their belts and a load of confidence behind them heading into a date with No. 24 Duke. It's all the product of a long rebuild - one that is still in progress.
This game is a homecoming for Capel, who not just played at Duke but won a lot there as well. After spending nine years as a head coach at VCU and Oklahoma, he returned to coach for the Blue Devils, earned first assistant coach status under the incomparable Mike Krzyzewski and won a lot again. He left to take the Pitt job four years before Krzyzewski retired and even though some assumed Capel was a lock to succeed him, he never did.
“I never had thoughts of being the next Duke coach," Capel said. "When I was there, I never thought of it. I tried to be the best assistant coach I could for Coach [K] and the program. I understood my role. I was never caught up in titles. I remember when Coach [K] asked me to come back there, and he said ‘[Steve Wojciechowski] and Chris [Collins] are both associate head coaches. I can’t name you that,” and I was like ‘I don’t care. We’re all assistant coaches. It doesn’t matter to me,’."
So Capel bided his time, waiting for the right chance to reenter head coaching ranks. He had offers and even interviewed for some of them but never pulled the trigger. That is until Pitt came knocking.
Capel said his dream was to coach in the ACC and that it would never happen at schools like Virginia, Wake Forest or NC State (and especially not North Carolina, he joked) because traditional powers did not want a Duke alumnus leading their program. Pitt didn't have that same history against the Blue Devils and it made the marriage easier.
Still, there was so much more to the task of restoring Pitt basketball's prestige than just installing a new coach. Capel's predecessor, Kevin Stallings, has been shouldered with the lion's share of the blame but Capel claims the issues with this program ran much deeper.
"There was one thing that was blamed or one person that was blamed and that’s not it - there was a lot of things," Capel said. "One person doesn’t make a program and one person doesn’t break a program."
When he first got to Pittsburgh, players were out of shape, the talent level was lacking, the facilities lagged behind what existed at other ACC schools and there was instability - in the four years prior to Capel's arrival, the school had employed three different athletic directors and two other men's basketball coaches. There was also a major discrepancy between perception and reality regarding Pitt and its home city. Capel claims recruits and their families didn't even know that the Panthers had been a member of the ACC for five years before he arrived.
"Most people have never been to Pittsburgh, so most people have an opinion of what they think Pittsburgh is," Capel said. "I know I did before I moved here and it’s nothing like I imagined or thought it would be."
So Capel went to work addressing the holes he could. He overhauled the strength and conditioning program, pursued top-tier talent, and lobbied for and eventually got the necessary upgrades to facilities. Then a trio of destabilizing forces hit college athletics.
A new NCAA rule allowing every player to transfer once without having to sit a year was introduced in 2019. Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit and handicapped both the everyday routines of his team and recruiting from 2020 through 2021. Then name, image and likeness became a new concern for coaches in roster management.
"All these things in a four-year period happened - two of which you didn’t anticipate, so that made the job more difficult," Capel said.
Capel hired more staff to manage the transfer portal and the fact that his current, most successful roster has been fueled by transfers indicates that was a good move. Once pandemic restrictions were lifted and he could get recruits on campus to see the city and program up close, his high school recruiting improved too. The stability took care of itself with athletic director Heather Lyke sticking around and keeping Capel in town as well.
All these factors have combined to make a more comfortable situation for Capel. Pitt is slowly adjusting to life in the ACC and now fits more comfortably into the league's personality, according to Capel.
"I didn’t know that being in a new neighborhood - I didn’t understand the effect of that," Capel said "I didn’t realize that instability. I didn’t realize how important it would be to get kids on campus because of the perception people had of Pittsburgh - right or wrong, that’s the reality of that."
Now that work has paid off. Pitt is on track to making their first NCAA Tournament since 2016. They've also received votes in the AP top 25 for the first time since that year as well.
There is a long way to go but also plenty of reasons for optimism. Pitt is facing a relatively wide-open ACC, a conference steeped in hardwood history that is being led by non-traditional powers like Clemson, Miami and these Pitt Panthers, and it approaches the meat of league play with an older roster that has been there and done that.
Still, Capel has seen enough promising starts turn to disaster before. This has historically been the danger zone. Yes, they've won some conference games, but according to forward Blake Hinson "nothing's happened yet." Prior success doesn't necessarily indicate future performance and Capel is counting on his team's collective experience will serve them well in their effort to bounce back.
“It doesn’t give me comfort. I’m not comfortable. I am optimistic and hopeful that all of us can learn from the past," Capel said. "But we all have experience, ... good and bad. ... So the thing we talked about was bring all those experiences with us - good and bad - and let's try to learn from them and not let that happen here.”
Even with the threat of a collapse constantly hanging over his head, Capel spoke with great confidence - in Pitt's program, his players and himself - as he prepares to face what could have been. There are no regrets, especially as the rebuild begins to bear fruit.
"I believed in this program, I knew the history of it, I believed in Heather and Chancellor Gallagher, but just as importantly, I believed in me and what we could do," Capel said. "It’s been hard, it's been difficult, it’s been a lot of setbacks, a lot of that but we’re still here, still swinging and we’re trying to get better each day and we’re fighting."
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