Pitt coach Jeff Capel is extremely rare in one regard. He knows what it's like to lose.

At Duke.

That doesn't happen often in Durham, N.C. But during Capel's sophomore season — when head coach Mike Krzyzewski was absent due to a medical leave — the Blue Devils went 13-18 and 2-14 in ACC play. So Capel knows what it is like to rebuild in the ACC.

It's not easy.

Capel says the formula of rebuilding the current Panthers team has some similar traits to what he experienced with the Blue Devils when they tried to bounce back his junior season.

"Being 2-14 at Duke is the equivalent of being 0-and-whatever in this league," Capel said, referencing Pitt's 0-18 ACC season a year ago.

The next season, 1995-96, Capel said the roster was less talented. Yet, it went 8-8 in conference play and climbed back into the NCAA tournament.

"We fought. We understood how much we needed each other. We understood we didn't have the most talent. But we fought."

By 1997, they were conference champs again. No one is asking for that yet in Oakland. But someday, maybe.

"I talked to coach (Krzyzewski) about those things. He talked about how you have to re-establish," Capel said. "You had to learn. Sometimes success can make you soft. Maybe the program got a little spoiled."

That may have happened at Pitt, too. I'd characterize it less as being spoiled and more of a malaise that set in toward the end of the Jamie Dixon era. That resulted in a collapse for two years under Kevin Stallings.

Now Krzyzewski will get to see his pupil's attempt to rebuild with players scrapping in that same manner tonight when his 15-2 Blue Devils visit the Petersen Events Center Tuesday at 9 p.m.

Capel's group seems to be heeding their coach's message. Saturday, the squad lost 74-63 in the Carrier Dome to a Syracuse team with seven returning players from a Sweet 16 unit of a year ago. However, Orange players showered Pitt with praise for how much effort they displayed while keeping a game close, that had been teetering on becoming a blowout.

"That's pretty cool to hear that they did that," Capel said of the quotes from the Syracuse locker room. "I can see it. I know what's happening. Every game this year we've fought. We haven't been smart at times. By for the most part we have played hard."

On a few occasions this season, Capel has referenced the need to shake out an old sense of the team "feeling sorry for itself" in the wake of last year's winless campaign in conference play. It's a message that appears to have hit home.

"We were playing angry during the summer," guard Jared Wilson-Frame said. "During the summer, every day, we were working super hard. You look up in that gym, and you see (logos) of all those ACC teams. And you can't say, 'Well, we beat that team.' We lost to all of them. It was a sense of motivation."

One of those logos belongs to Duke, a team that beat Pitt by a combined total of 62 points over two games last year.

"This team, this year, we know how to fight now," guard Xavier Johnson said. "We had some experiences where we learned you can't get down on yourself. I don't think we do that anymore."

Evidence of that was getting down 20 points Saturday in the Carrier Dome and scrambling back to get the game within eight at the three-minute mark.

Given Duke's overwhelming talent, the task could be even more daunting in this game. But it's nowhere near as vast as the task of reshaping the entire program.

And with two conference wins already this season, that's something these Panthers appear to be doing ahead of schedule.

---

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---