Pitt avoided a doomsday scenario
Since joining the ACC July 1, 2013, Pitt has changed athletic directors twice and replaced 11 of its 13 varsity head coaches. (Men’s basketball and wrestling also have hired twice since then.)
Dixon is gone. He’s entering his third season at Texas Christian University. He said the timing of Pitt’s move to the ACC initially was a shock, but he’d felt Pitt departing the Big East was inevitable “almost from the day [he] got there” as an assistant coach in 1999. As head coach, Dixon hoped his team, a perennial Big East power, would put Pitt in a prime position when realignment arrived.
“My mentality was to build the program, to be successful and do things the right way,” he said, “and be attractive to one of the conferences … so that our school wouldn’t get left behind.”
Opening Pandora’s box
On New Year’s Eve 2009, two weeks after Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany announced the conference’s plan to explore expansion, Pitt’s then-Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and then-athletic director Steve Pederson traveled to South Bend, Ind., to meet with Notre Dame president Rev. John Jenkins, the Big East conference chair, and athletic director Jack Swarbrick.
On their agenda: finding a way to hold the Big East together.
Saving the conference, they determined, required that the league’s Division I football (FBS) schools commit to staying. When Nordenberg presented that challenge to the Big East membership, he recalled this week, he discovered “essentially without exception” schools were unwilling to commit. They seemed less concerned with strengthening the Big East than what would happen if they stayed and others left — stranding them in a crumbling conference.
On May 28, 2010, Nordenberg sent a letter to then-Big East commissioner John Marinatto and copied Rev. Jenkins and Georgetown president John DeGioia, leader of the Big East’s nonFBS schools. Nordenberg wanted to explicitly state Pitt’s position. Without firm buy-in from other Big East schools, if other conferences inquired about Pitt, Nordenberg needed to listen.
“To be absolutely clear, John, I do not know if any such opportunities will come to Pitt,” Nordenberg wrote in the letter, which he provided to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week. “I also do not know what we would do if such an opportunity did come our way. To be equally explicit, though, the fact that Steve and I are participating in these processes [efforts to keep the Big East membership together] should not be viewed as a sign that we would not seriously assess any such opportunities if they did arise. To the contrary, we almost certainly would do so.”
Nordenberg’s letter preceded the ACC’s invitation by 15 months.
“I wanted to put the cards on the table,” he said this week, adding later, “The main thing we were seeking was certainty, or a better way to gauge the magnitude of the uncertainty.”
After Virginia Tech, Miami and Boston College defected from the Big East in 2003, Nordenberg went on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” taped at center court at Petersen Events Center, and emerged, he said, as “the public face to the Big East’s resistance to the ACC.”
“Those were times when civil but clearly adversarial words were spoken,” Nordenberg said, “and they frequently came from my lips.”
For that reason, Nordenberg believed it was “an important responsibility” to give Marinatto an early warning. “I didn’t want to be hypocritical,” Nordenberg explained. “I wanted to lay out what we were doing so no one could complain they had been surprised or misled.”
As the Big East tried to secure a new TV rights contract — its presidents turned down a nine-year, $1.17 billion proposal from ESPN in May 2011 — an executive committee comprising athletic directors and former NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, the chairman of Georgetown’s board of directors at the time, attempted to assess a “future value proposition” for remaining in the conference. “A lot of work went into that,” Nordenberg said, “but we never made as much progress as we would have needed to hold the conference together.”
Pederson, who agreed only to an email interview, said initial conversations centered on persuading Big East members to remain. When it was clear that wouldn’t occur, he wrote, “we moved forward with our own plans.” Schools looked out for themselves. By waiting for the dominoes to fall, Pitt would flirt with a doomsday scenario: trapped in a weakened Big East.
“We had been working since 1996 to build an athleic [sic] program that would be desirable to a major conference,” Pederson wrote. “The program was at such a low point in the 1996 [sic] that no conference would have had interest in Pitt. That is when we went to work changing both our competitive levels and made the major facilty [sic] changes that Pitt enjoys today.
“When conference realignment began, I was very concerned that if we did not end up in a Power Five conference, we might never have that opportunity again.”
Finding a new home
Nordenberg and Pederson declined to discuss which conferences courted Pitt, but Pederson said “the ACC and the Big Ten were most logical and appealing for many reasons.” Pitt fit in the Big Ten’s footprint but didn’t expand it into the larger markets it found farther east. The Big Ten adding Rutgers and Maryland spread the Big Ten Network into New York and Washington, D.C.
Former Pitt head football coach Dave Wannstedt in June said “the Big Ten, obviously, was the wish list.” But nobody asked him. “At that point in the game, when all these discussions are going on, Steve Pederson and I weren’t even talking, so I don’t know,” Wannstedt said. He laughed. “The guy that was delivering the mail there probably knew more than I did.” (He resigned Dec. 7, 2010.)
Nordenberg, a North Allegheny graduate who attended law school at Wisconsin, said the ACC, a conference of academic peers and partners with a rich athletic history, had a diversity of institutions — size, location, prestige — “that fit someplace between the Big East and let’s say the Big Ten.” He also felt it was in line with a fundamental truth he holds about Western Pennsylvania.
“Pittsburgh is a place of Midwestern values with just enough of an Eastern spark,” Nordenberg said. “But the truth is for Pitt, if we’re sitting on that border, we always have looked east.”
After the ACC created a committee to evaluate expansion candidates, commissioner John Swofford said “double-digit numbers of schools” expressed interest. Louisville, Connecticut and Cincinnati were among the schools rumored as candidates. The committee alerted several schools it had targeted as compatible and planned campus visits.
“It became a very prolonged and awkward process,” Nordenberg said.
The conclusion, however, came quickly.
According to Nordenberg, Swofford phoned Pederson early in the week of Sept. 11, 2011, to gauge whether Pitt would accept an invitation. Nordenberg and Swofford spoke midweek, and Pitt’s board of trustees executive committee met Friday. That night, Nordenberg got a call at his home from a New York Times reporter. The news leaked, and the move was official Sunday, around the time Dixon landed in Auckland, New Zealand.
“We put the university in a better spot,” Dixon said. “The Big East was never going to be the same, and it wasn’t going to be what it was. That wasn’t an option. It was either what was going to be left [of the Big East] or be in one of these Power Fives. We did exactly what we needed to do to put ourselves amongst the Power Five.”
The ACC gained Pitt, Syracuse and Notre Dame (as a non-football member) in 2013, then lost Maryland and added Louisville in 2014. Last month, Swofford described the frenzy as “exciting,” “challenging,” “stressful” and “also fun.”
“It was like putting a puzzle together in a way,” he said.
Swofford said the ACC achieved its goals of increasing its geographic footprint — “you’re going from stone crabs to chowder, with some barbecue in between,” he said — and improving its football programs while maintaining the quality of its basketball programs. It also attained a measure of stability. In 2016, the ACC extended its grant-of-rights provision through 2035-36.
“I don’t see the ACC changing in the foreseeable future,” Swofford said.
Room to mprove
Pitt isn’t going anywhere. Whether that’s good or bad news depends on your perspective.
The athletic department revenues continue to climb while wins have declined almost across the board. Pitt’s flagship programs have yet to find their footing. Men’s basketball was winless in conference play last season, then hired its second head coach in three years. Football hasn’t won more than eight games in any season since 2010.
Would staying in the Big East have been any better? The conference split in 2012 into the Big East — a basketball-centric conference — and the football-focused American Athletic Conference. Connecticut, Cincinnati and South Florida, the only AAC schools that were in the Big East with Pitt, are now drawing far less league and TV profits, stuck in a weak football conference and playing a watered-down basketball schedule compared to their Big East days.
Nordenberg retired as chancellor in 2014 and now serves as chair of the university’s Institute of Politics. There’s a sign curled up in the corner of his office in the Cathedral of Learning. It’d been planted in his yard after he announced the move to the ACC on Sept. 18, 2011. The sign, thanking Nordenberg for the work he’d put into finding Pitt a new conference home, was signed by the athletic department faculty. “I think it was a day of real happiness for [them],” he said.
“There was a real sense of satisfaction,” Nordenberg said, “that we had worked so hard to pursue a secure future for the University of Pittsburgh in athletics. And now it was ours.”