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Earlier this week, Pitt was expected to reach out to former Rutgers coach Greg Schiano regarding their head football coaching vacancy. Today, I ran a poll to see what readers were thinking. More than 1,000 votes later, Schiano was the top preference.
Only one problem - Pitt isn't planning to interview him, per KDKA's Richie Walsh:
Pitt will talk to Holiday and Narduzzi. Bradley and Schiano not expected to get interviews.
— Rich Walsh KDKA (@RichieWalsh) December 19, 2014
I don't know what to think here. Schiano makes sense for several reasons - he's a strong recruiter, built Rutgers into a regular 8-10 game winner, could be a guy that sticks around since a failed NFL stint. For Pitt not to be interested is just weird. His personality may rub some folks the wrong way, but we've seen the alternative in easy-going Paul Chryst and that led to a wall of 6-6 seasons.
If the initial report about Pitt wanting to reach out to him is true, that would seem to be an indication that former athletic director, Steve Pederson, was the one who was interested in him. With Pederson gone and the program seemingly going in another direction, it looks like Schiano just doesn't interest the search committee.
If Pitt didn't hire him because they found a better candidate, I could deal with that. But if it's true that they don't even want to talk with him? Now that I don't get. I'll leave it up to the committee to do the right thing here and there's so much under the radar that we never see/hear about. In a nutshell, if they're not interested, there's a reason for it.
I can only hope that it's a good one because, on the surface, Schiano looks like a guy that makes sense to, at the very least, interview.
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