TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- The perception around Jeff Capel entering this season was clear.
Or, so we thought.
Every ounce of the makeup for this year's Pitt team is woven through its head coach.
Heather Lyke put her faith in him, and then she backed it up.
She believed, he worked, and the fruits of Capel's labor have his Panthers in firm position to make the NCAA Tournament for the first time since the Jamie Dixon days.
And, in the process, those fruits have completely altered the narrative around Capel as a Power Six basketball coach. Within the ACC, nobody has done more with less than Capel this season.
"Coach of the year. Straight up, coach of the year," Nike Sibande said following Pitt's 83-75 win over Florida State in Tallahassee Saturday. "He found a way to get it done. Nobody expected us to be in this position that we're in right now. He makes it happen. I feel like he's coach of the year. He's doing his thing, for sure."
At this point, it is hard to disagree with Pitt's sixth man.
Capel already has secured his "best" season by record as Pitt's coach with 18 wins. He is guaranteed his first winning season as Pitt's coach and the program's first since that final Dixon year of 2015-'16 in which the Panthers made the NCAA Tournament.
All of that was achieved from a leap into the transfer portal and concocting this team's makeup out of virtually nothing. It sometimes is hard to recall Pitt is on this run after replacing four of its five starters via the portal, losing rotation regular Will Jeffress to foot surgery, losing the previous season's leading scorer and rebounder in John Hugley IV as he continues to battle through personal issues, and not having his top-rated recruit Dior Johnson available after he faced legal issues in the fall and rolling over into the early winter months.
He is down to 10 scholarship players -- it was nine before Aidan Fisch was recently awarded a scholarship for the remainder of the season -- and has had to replace a bucketload of minutes which were expected to be there this year.
He has done that, and then some.
Pitt is tied atop the ACC standings with Virginia with a 11-3 conference record, and Pitt has the head-to-head advantage over the Cavaliers. Pitt has beaten four of the remaining five teams within the top six in the current ACC standings, with the outlier a one-point loss to Clemson. Pitt has never been in first place in the ACC this late in the season since it joined, and had it not been for a wonky call to sway Virginia to a win over Duke on Saturday, Pitt would be alone atop the mountain.
In mid-February! This team was voted to finish 14th in the ACC by the writers. That is where I had them slotted, mainly because of Capel's recent track record of never having a winning season as Pitt's coach combined with the replacing of four starters.
There was even discussion about Capel being on the "hot seat" if another sub-.500 season followed. It would have come to life, too, if that was the case.
Color me -- and many others -- dead wrong on Capel. He has earned every bit of credit which can, should, and will go to him for this masterclass of navigation throughout the season.
Pitt is 5-2 within "Quadrant 1" games with respect to the NCAA NET Rankings. That record is the best among all ACC teams, with Miami following at 6-4 in Quad 1 games. Pitt checked into last week's Associated Press Top 25 poll with 26 points, which effectively places it at 30th in the country. It finished 70 points behind San Diego State's 96 for the No. 25 spot in the country.
After blowing out Louisville and by pulling away from and avenging a loss to Florida State this week, Capel could have Pitt back inside the AP Top 25 for the first time since Jan. 11, 2016.
His peers are certainly taking notice of the job he has done.
“To lose as many transfers as he did last year shows how creative they are, what such a good job they did evaluating," Seminoles coach Leonard Hamilton said Saturday. "Bringing in not only talented guys, but the guys who fit their system, their style. That was a genius job I think he has done. Sometimes you can bring talent, but if you look around the country, there’s a lot of issues going on with chemistry in our sport. They seem to like each other, they seem to play through each other, they play extremely unselfish, and that’s remarkable. A coach being able to communicate, and the players on the team accepting the system, the style. They’re locked in, and that says a lot about the job that he’s doing. Obviously that’s the new wave of college basketball. All five of his starters came from the portal, and I think the average age is 22. They’re a mature team, they’ve got something to prove, and they did it today.”
One can wonder if Capel had, or still has, something to prove, too.
That is just within the big-picture, too. We cannot lose the train of thought on the micromanaging throughout the season which has resulted in this run.
Take Saturday's game as a perfect example. He knew Nelly Cummings was banged up and has played two games hurt. He saw Cummings get worked down by a career-high scoring effort from the Seminoles' Jalen Warley. He saw Cummings struggling on each end of the floor. He saw how Pitt needed to adjust in the second half to quell Florida State's top threat.
Pitt came out of the tunnel a near 2 minutes and 30 seconds before Florida State did to begin the second half. There was not much to discuss or break down with his team. The adjustment was clear from the jump.
Sibande became the hero in Pitt's eight-point win on each end of the floor, as Warley was held to nine points in the second half.
"He continues to put the battery in our back, continue to give us confidence, and continue to point out things that we can do better going into the second half," Jamarius Burton said. "It was up to us to execute, and we do that."
I went back to what Capel told us in mid-January about not just piecing this team together, but about how he discovered the recipe for the success it even had a chance of attaining, much less sustaining.
"They first time we were all together was the end of August," Capel said. "That's something that I worried about, but once we got together, it was pretty obvious right away that the pieces fit, and I think with having some older guys and them having a maturity about them and being all about winning, I think that helps."
Then, Pitt battled through layers of adversity. First came the Jeffress injury, then the Johnson suspension and subsequent trial in court over a domestic dispute, then came a treacherous 1-3 start in November marked by a 29-point beatdown to Michigan at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Then came word that Hugley was going to remove himself from the program to focus on his personal matter.
That seems like a lifetime ago.
This Pitt team is not within the same universe as that November Pitt team was.
"He's just very poised, and he communicates and talks to us," Sibande said. "Another thing we go by is putting that battery in each other's backs, and he does that at a high level. I feel like he's one of the best coaches in the country, and I'm excited to play for him."
That phrase has been used ad nauseam by various Pitt players throughout the season.
"Put the battery in __('s) back."
Giving somebody else a boost. Lifting somebody up. Being there for your teammate.
A perfect descriptor for this Pitt team. (Print the shirts, Jon Rothstein!)
"He's a tremendous coach, and he has a locker room that believes in him. He has the locker room that's pointed in the right direction, and the results show. Everybody's bought into him. Everybody feed off his confidence, feeds off his energy, feeds off his I.Q., and this whole locker room is grateful to have him."
Among ACC coaches, Capel is not the only deserving candidate for Coach of the Year, and I would not want to be unfair or naive to those coaches.
Clemson's Brad Brownell is certainly deserving and is perhaps the top contender alongside Capel for it. The Tigers are at 10-4 within the ACC after being picked 11th in the league. Then there is Virginia's Tony Bennett and Miami's Jim Larrañaga, who are right there with Pitt atop the ACC but were pretty much expected to be there.
NC State was picked 10th in the ACC, and Kevin Keatts has the Wolfpack at 20 overall wins and a 10-5 mark in the ACC.
All are deserving, but none has a resume and a story written like Capel's.
