Zach pleading with the University of Pittsburgh to fix their athletic department, 2025, colorized. 

I will not sit here and pretend that this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament is one of the best I have ever watched. After all, there is not really a “Cinderella” story. Only one double-digit seed has advanced to the sweet-sixteen, and that is 10-seed Arkansas, led by basketball hall-of-fame coach and Moon Township native John Calipari. It is hardly a Davidson, a Loyola-Chicago, or a Florida-Atlantic. 

However, March Madness is still an amazing spectacle, despite my brackets busting early every year. It was also fun this past Friday to see Robert Morris University put up a strong fight against two-seed Alabama in the round-of-64, although they ultimately fell short, as almost everyone thought they would. 

Jamie Dixon coached Pitt’s men’s basketball team from 2003-2016, succeeding Ben Howland, who departed for UCLA after the 2002-03 season. At Pitt, Dixon went 328-123, a .727 win percentage, and 143-81 (.638) in conference play, spanning ten seasons in the Big East and three in the ACC after realignment. He won two Big East regular-season titles in 2003-04 and 2010-11, a Big East conference tournament title in 2007-08, and led the Panthers to 11 NCAA tournament berths in his 13 seasons at the helm. Three of those tourney appearances resulted in Pitt advancing to the second weekend, with one elite-eight appearance and two sweet-sixteens. 

After the 2015-16 season, Jamie Dixon would leave Pitt for Texas Christian University, the school at which he played four years of college basketball in the mid-1980s and the university that led him to becoming a 7th-round pick in the 1987 NBA draft. 

Since then, Pitt has employed two coaches: Kevin Stallings (2016-2018) and Jeff Capel (2018-present). In Stallings’ two seasons at Pitt, the team was absolutely dreadful. They went 16-17 in his first year with a 4-14 conference record, and then regressed further in his second (and final) season, going 0-18 in the ACC and 8-24 overall, leading to his dismissal. 

Capel took over a mess of a program. Pitt did begin to trend in a positive direction with him at the helm, though. From 2018-19 to 2022-23, the Panthers’ ACC regular season finishes were: tied-14th, tied-13th, 12th, tied-11th, tied-3rd. 2022-23 is also the year that Pitt made the NCAA tournament for the first time since Jamie Dixon’s last year, as they knocked off Mississippi State in the first four and upset six-seed Iowa State in the round-of-64 before succumbing to three-seed Xavier in the second round. 

In 2023-24, Pitt was (controversially) excluded from the postseason. However, they should have never been on the bubble to begin with. They had an NBA lottery pick in Carlton “Bub” Carrington and one of the best players in the ACC in Blake Hinson and still managed to lose 11 games, eight of them in conference play. 

This past season was awful, as Pitt surrendered a 12-2 start and finished 17-15 (8-12 in the ACC) despite the ACC being very weak. 

Since Dixon left, Pitt’s cumulative record is 138-148, and their conference record is a dismal 59-111. They also have not been to the sweet-16 in the past 15 years (although that includes the latter part of Jamie’s tenure). 

I miss Pitt being in the tournament. I miss agonizing over every possession, every deflected ball out of bounds, every foul call, and the other games in their bracket quadrant. Pitt has only made it to one NCAA tournament since 2015-2016, and that is completely unacceptable.

The blame does not fall solely on Capel—the players share a large portion of that—but there certainly is a lack of good fundamentals within his teams. Countless times, I have watched Pitt offensive possessions be run with no players moving off the ball. I have watched completely unnecessary fouls be committed. I have watched turnovers occur because players are not taught about ball security. 

Something needs to change within the Pitt basketball program. The players have come and gone, yet the results have (largely) stayed the same. It is time for a serious shake-up in the ranks—if it is not the head coach, it needs to be his supporting cast. Someone needs to save him from himself, because the players do not exhibit substantial improvement from game 1 to game 32.