Tim Benz: Championship coaches encourage Pitt’s Jeff Capel to stay the course
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Can you blame him for being frustrated?
Five straight losses. By blowouts. By nail biters. Down to 6-12 in Atlantic Coast Conference play.
Pitt basketball coach Jeff Capel was decidedly frustrated after his team’s 72-49 loss to Syracuse at home Wednesday night.
“We have guys who are taking playing here and wearing a uniform for granted,” Capel said on his “93.7 The Fan” postgame show. “And frankly, that (ticks) me off.”
It didn’t stop there. When Capel answered questions in the media room after that, he had cooled. But he was still simmering.
“I’m worried about everything,” Capel said when asked if he was concerned if his team’s attitude may go south because of the losing streak. “And I’ve been worried about everything since we’ve been losing. I think a coach’s nature is to worry. And I think when things aren’t going right, you tend to worry a little more.”
Capel voiced frustration that his team hasn’t shown much ability to bounce back through what he called the “grind” of late-season games in February.
“You have to be mentally tough enough, physically tough enough to be able to push through. And we haven’t. We haven’t.”
Pitt has won just twice since Jan. 22. Perhaps most alarming to Pitt fans hoping to see progress this year is the failure to ascend late in this season.
“Slightly,” Capel responded when asked if his team has improved. “Certainly not over the past month.”
Technically, Pitt has improved in year two under Capel. They have 15 wins this season with two regular-season games remaining. They only went 14-19 last year.
However, over the last two games, Capel has fallen to two NCAA championship-winning coaches — Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim and Virginia’s Tony Bennett.
After each game, both coaches have encouraged Capel to stay the course.
“They’ve played a lot of good basketball this year,” Boeheim insisted Wednesday night.
“It takes time,” he continued. “They have a lot of young players. Their freshman (Justin Champagnie) is as good as any freshman in the league. Their guards (Xavier Johnson and Trey McGowens) are still sophomores. They are going to be really good players. It doesn’t happen overnight. To say they were rock bottom is not even a close approximation of where they were when Jeff took over. They were below that.”
That’s a rather scathing description of where things were in the months after Kevin Stallings was fired.
It’s also entirely accurate.
“That’s how you build it,” Bennett said after his defending national champion Cavaliers won at the Petersen Events Center on Saturday 59-56. “You get young guys experience. It’s hard to keep guys until their upper-class years. But that was our model. You can just see it coming.”
The Panthers had a massive flameout last year, losing 14 of 16 to end the season. So, at least, this year’s tour through the ACC hasn’t been quite that bad.
“They are getting better, and if they stay together and work, that’s a formula that is hard to beat in college basketball,” Bennet added.
Right now, though, Capel is finding it hard to win.
Which is why he’ll probably keep “worrying” until the supportive predictions from Boeheim and Bennett come to fruition.