Pittsburgh Basketball: Stallings’ mental toughness in question after latest loss

Pittsburgh basketball lost on Tuesday by 26 on the road at Louisville. It was what their coach said during the game that has grabbed the headlines, though.

What happened in Louisville was to be expected for Pittsburgh 8-7 (0-2). The Panthers were already considered the least talented team in the ACC and, to make matters worse, Ryan Luther, who averages a double-double for the team, continued to be sidelined with a foot injury.

In the first five minutes of the game, Pittsburgh held steady with Louisville 11-3 (1-0) before a 17-0 run by the Cardinals made this game basically over. The final score was 77-51 Louisville, but it was what happened late in the game that caught people’s attention.

A Cardinal fan behind the Pitt bench was heckling the team, something that happens all the time everywhere. But the head coach of the Panthers Kevin Stallings apparently took offense to the comments this time, and allegedly made a statement to the likes of “at least we don’t pay $100,000 to our players.”

The $100,000 comment was in reference to the FBI Investigation that impaled the University of Louisville in a way no other program has been affected. In the end, Hall of Fame coach Rick Pitino and most of his staff was fired, along with Athletic Director Tom Jurich.

Stallings himself wouldn’t confirm the comments, but numerous reporters who were present at the game have reported that the statement above was what he said. What he did say at the press conference, was that he felt the need to defend his players after comments he didn’t like.

As a Pittsburgh native and a Panthers fan, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Stallings since he arrived a year and a half ago to the Steel City. At the very beginning of the year, I was wondering whether the program needed to cut ties with him altogether.

But before conference play, Pitt was playing well without the team’s best player, and I gave Stallings credit for it. All fans of this team know what time it is when it came to this season, and the main goal was just to be competitive and win a couple of conference games.

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I’m not interested in going the “he’s supposed to be professional”, or “he doesn’t need to be talking to fans” route. Others can do that. What I’m concerned with is how it affects both him and the current players on the roster.

Those players know the position they’re in, and that there will be a ton of mocking and attacks, especially from schools from the former Big East Conference like Syracuse and Louisville. But now, it’s given bulletin board material to every ACC home fan when Pitt goes to town. Now that people know that Stallings is sensitive to comments from fans, expect Pittsburgh to get a ton heckling from opposing fans, especially late when the game is out of hand.

This will make things harder for the players, but they seem like a good group of kids who will grind through league play and play hard every night, despite being overmatched in talent.

The question now shouldn’t be about whether the players can handle the adversity in the coming weeks, but how Stallings himself will. He didn’t show himself too well in last year’s disappointing campaign when it came to his own players. Those guys certainly deserve blame in their handling of the situation, but no one handled adversity last season.

It’s only the second conference game out of 18, and the Panthers will not be favored in any of them, with only the home game versus the disappointing Georgia Tech being the likeliest win on the schedule. There’s a legitimate chance that the Panthers will go 0-18 in league play, but things could get so much worse if Stallings struggles to handle this and keep his emotions in check.

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Despite the struggles, there’s still points of optimism for the program’s future, including the most of the rotation of the team being underclassmen. But if there was ever a time for mental toughness to be a core value for a team, it’s now for Pittsburgh. And that involves everyone, from the fans to the players, and especially the coach.