Assuming Chryst will leave Pitt to return home for his dream job, the theory goes that coaching the Panthers has been downgraded to an intermediate step in a coaching career.
If that's the case, what's new about it?
Johnny Majors came to town in 1972 and made Pitt football relevant after a decade of dormancy. His fourth team won the 1976 national championship, and Majors was soon gone.
He left for his dream job, coaching at Tennessee, his alma mater.
Majors was succeeded by Jackie Sherrill, whose success at Pitt over five seasons (50-9-1) led to an offer from Texas A & M. That wasn't a homecoming for Sherrill, a native of Oklahoma who played at Alabama, but there was a dreamy aspect to the job: He got a six-year contract worth $1.7 million. That may seem quaint by today's standards, but it was a record amount when it was offered in 1982.
Then Pitt football settled into a pattern where most coaching departures were non-voluntary. Some of them won, but not enough. Mike Gottfried had the best winning percentage (.622) in the post-Sherrill years, but he was ousted as the team was preparing for a bowl appearance in 1989. That was just about a year after the university cooked up a rollover contract that promised to make him coach for life.
Dave Wannstedt got fired after a .575 winning percentage, which almost duplicated the .576 figure that got Foge Fazio dismissed after five seasons when he had followed Sherrill.
Most coaches don't stay in one spot too long these days. There is restlessness on both sides of contracts that always seem to have escape clauses built in. It's harder for coaches to move in the private enterprise world of the NFL than it is while working for institutions of higher learning that are supposed to have a more lofty purpose than winning football games.
It's just reality. You wouldn't expect the bulky Chryst to be much of a dancer, but there he is, doing the tango with Wisconsin even as Pitt's team prepares for another obscure bowl game.
Meanwhile, Pitt is tasked with finding yet another coach, a project that took so many bizarre turns when Wannstedt was canned in 2010, less than nine months after he'd been given a two-year contract extension.
If there's a new guy, he might well view Pitt as a stepping stone to something bigger and better. It's been that way for almost 40 years.
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--LET'S MAKE A DEAL
The Pirates opened the 2015 ticket-selling season this weekend with a new policy they call a "real time pricing model."
They've taken steps in this direction over the past few seasons. The idea is to link prices to demand, leading to a structure that could potentially be as complex as shopping for airline fares.
You'll pay more for opening day. You'll pay more for weekend games. That Tuesday, July 7 date against the Padres? Maybe not so much.
The idea is to push more people into some sort of season ticket plan. The customer gets to lock in a price, and the team gets the commitment backed with money. Selling those tickets in advance is the ultimate hedge against bad weather or a disappointing season.
It's a common strategy, and one the Penguins used quite effectively when Mario Lemieux's arrival and an improved team suddenly increased demand for tickets.
Still, you get the feeling that some day a person will walk up to a window and ask how much tickets are, only to get the response, "How much you got?"
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--WHO STAYS HOME?
If a team can go to a bowl game at 6-6, how bad do you have to be to not get an invitation?
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--THE VERY LATE SHOW
If you ever wondered what happened to longtime TV reporter Dee Thompson, he's part of a Steelers show, "Championship Chase" that airs on WPXI-TV at 2:30 a.m. on Sundays.
The only thing more strange than having a Steelers show at 2:30 a.m. is it probably has an audience.
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