Is it Actually Anger from Fans? I Don’t Think it Is

Heading into the 2017-18 Pitt Men’s Basketball season all we heard were the jokes, Do you think this team will win 1 game this year, No way they are going to win an ACC game and so on and so forth.  And PITT fans hate being the punchline for people’s jokes and that is why most PITT fans respond not very favorably to those people who use those jokes and talking points far too often.   And that is leading to something that people are calling anger, but I don’t think it’s anger at all, it’s simple frustration boiling over right now.

That is one reason I am proud to be a part of the PITT fan base as an alum because yeah we may only get 50,000 to 60,000 to football games and what is it, 12,700, to basketball games when the teams is doing really well and average 40,000-45,000 at football games and 8,000 at basketball games no matter what.  Some times that may just be ticket sales as we saw at a football game or two this season, but you get my point I hope.  The PITT fan base is what I call a “Family” fan-base because we support the teams, we support each other and support the athletes/coaches usually no matter what.  I think that is what drives some people in the sports talk show industry crazy some times because PITT fans act like that.  And it’s because we want to see our teams all have success and win championships year in and year out.  And it pains us to see them struggle and we look for answers why.  The school in central Pennsylvania can have their 107K strong on Saturday’s in the fall, I’ll take what we have at PITT.  FYI, that 107K strong wasn’t true on a few occasions this year as well, but I digress.

Now onto the point, I’ve been hearing a lot of anger the past two years directed toward Kevin Stallings and I just don’t get it.  From the moment the hire was announced, you had some fans and even some media already ripping the hire because they thought Brandon Knight didn’t get a fair shake.  As much as I liked Knight as a player and even as an assistant coach, the way Jamie Dixon was going here, once he left, the University needed to make it a clean break from Dixon and his staff.  People forget that the arrow was pointing down at PITT in the last few year’s under Dixon because he didn’t want to adapt to the style of play in the ACC and that stunted the growth/consistency of PITT basketball.

I know Stallings’ wasn’t the sexy pick as some would say, but he does have a good resume as a Head Coach for being at Vanderbilt all those years.  And so looking back at when the hire was made, we could of done a better job of welcoming him to the city and the University.

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