Momentum killer

COVID-19 costs Pitt baseball team big weekend series vs. No. 7 Louisville.

departures goes beyond those numbers. Toney (14.4 points and 5.9 rebounds per game) and Johnson (14.2 points and 5.7 assists) were two of Pitt’s three best, most effective players, making their absences next season that much more difficult to withstand, particularly as the Panthers roster is as depleted as it currently is.

“It’s tough, but things like this happen,” Capel said in late February. “Nothing surprises me anymore. Nothing surprises me anymore in college athletics, especially college basketball. You do spend time recruiting and developing relationships and you do spend time coaching, mentoring and trying to help them develop, both on and off the court. Sometimes, when situations like this happen, it can be a gut punch. But you’ve got to move on. That’s the bottom line. You’ve got to move on to the next thing.”

Whatever woes the Panthers are undergoing are exacerbated by a murky future. They have three players, be it a high school player or transfer, committed or signed in the 2021 recruiting cycle. While transfers, graduations and early exits for the NBA have created holes at other programs, they’ve largely been filled. Just this week, the Panthers got their first two transfers for next season — former Oakland (Mich.) University forward Daniel Oladapo and former Texas Tech guard Jamarius Burton.

It’s emblematic of what has been a player-retention problem for Capel for much of his three-year tenure. In his first two recruiting classes, he brought in eight players with multiple years of eligibility remaining. Six left the program before their eligibility was exhausted and a seventh, Justin Champagnie, currently is testing out the NBA draft process. It’s an issue that predates Capel’s arrival. Between 2015- 19, the Panthers brought in 17 freshmen. Only two of those players either spent all four years in Oakland or are still at the school. That figure is a product of a pair of coaching changes, but for a program whose success was predicated upon players developing into stars and contributors over their years on campus, that roster fluidity has been detrimental.

Transfers don’t occur in a vacuum. They happen for a slew of reasons, which requires a level of context and explanation beyond simply listing the number of players leaving a school.

Coulibaly was in search of a destination where he could be more involved in the team’s offense. Brown and Drumgoole transferred to smaller schools where they’re likely to play more than the limited minutes they received at Pitt. Johnson and Toney’s departures are not nearly as conventional. The exit of two three-year starters with two weeks remaining in the regular season evokes larger concerns and questions about the program’s culture and the team’s internal dynamics.

The timing of those moves, which came weeks before the overwhelming majority of players in the portal, added to the perception that Pitt was engulfed in some sort of unique turmoil. It was not and would not be the only team to lose players. But nearly two months after Johnson and Toney’s decisions, it’s still one of only a handful of programs that’s in the kind of hole it presently occupies, still searching for replacements for standout players who have found new homes.

While the Panthers are far from an outlier, they’re hardly the norm, either. Their problems aren’t just college basketball’s. They’re their own.