Back in January, when Pitt finally ended up with Todd Graham as its new head coach after the Mike Haywood 16 day disaster, many Panthers faithful were complaining that Graham was just going to use the job as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. I guess the fans and alumni saw this as a slap in the face. "What college football job is better than the one at Pitt?"
They wanted someone who considered this a dream job and would be willing to stay for life.
Well, guess what? They had that guy. His name was Dave Wannstedt, a man who considered being head coach of the Pitt Panthers one of the greatest honors of his life.
Unfortunately, he failed to elevate the program from where Walt Harris left it. In fact, Wannstedt couldn't even duplicate the success that Harris had and never got the Panthers back to a BCS game.
Around this time last year, Wannstedt said his tearful goodbyes and that's when all the fun started. Two coaches later, Graham came in talking a big game. He wasn't just going to settle for mediocrity, he wanted to build a national champion. I was all for that.
Was he looking at the Pitt job as a mere stepping stone? Well, duh! But in order for a job to be a stepping stone, in most cases, you're supposed to do some great things when you're walking on those stones. You're supposed to leave the program in a better condition than it was when you came on board.
Like how Johnny Majors turned the Panthers into a national powerhouse after he took over the program in 1973. When Majors was named head coach at Pitt, they were a national doormat. By the time he left for his dream job in Tennessee in 1977, Jackie Sherrill was named new head coach of the defending National Champions, and the Panthers were so full of talent, they remained in the hunt for a national championship until the early 80's.
If you want a more recent example of a coach using a job as a true stepping stone, but leaving the program much better off than where he found it, you need not look any further than Pitt's Men's basketball program.
When Ben Howland inherited the basketball program from Ralph Willard in 1999, it was a complete mess. The success the Panthers had in the 80's and early 90's was a distant memory. Howland was just a no-name coach from Northern Arizona, but by the time he left for his dream job in UCLA following the 2002/2003 season, he helped transform Pitt into one of the most consistent programs in the country. Pitt was wise to promote Howland's lead assistant, Jamie Dixon, to head coach in 2004, and today, Pitt Men's basketball is considered elite.
Those are two positive examples of a person using a job as a stepping stone. They came in, established themselves, established their programs, and left them better off than when they took over.
This might irk a lot of his haters, but what Walt Harris did when he took over the Pitt football job in 1997 was maybe an even better example than what both Majors and Howland did. When Harris took over the Pitt program, it was arguably in even worse shape than in the early 70's. Majors came back to coach the football team in 1993, but unlike the 70's, Majors' second tenure was a complete disaster. Things were so bad by 1996, it was even suggested by a local columnist or two that Pitt consider downgrading their program to division II.
Harris came in, and in his first year, took the program to its first bowl game since 1989.
By the time he left for Stanford in 2005, the Panthers were a perennial bowl team, and Harris coached them in the Fiesta Bowl in his last game.
Back to Graham. I wouldn't of had any problem with him leaving after a few years if he had elevated the program to that of an annual top ten team, groomed a successor on his staff to continue on the high octane tradition that he established, and left the program better off than where it was when he took over; that would have been an example of a stepping stone that Pitt fans could have eventually accepted.
Sadly, Graham just saw the Pitt job as another car on the highway that he would eventually leave behind, and when the opportunity presented itself, he got in the left lane and put the hammer down all the way to Arizona.
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