By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — Dave Wannstedt had to do something. The Pitt coach had just watched his team suffer through a miserable 3-0 Sun Bowl loss in which his quarterback, Bill Stull, had to be ingloriously yanked.
His offensive coordinator, Matt Cavanaugh, a hero from Pitt’s national championship team in the 70s, was leaving to join the New York Jets, leaving open a job that had to be filled by the right person.
“I talked to several people, five or six candidates,” Wannstedt recalled. “Generally, I’m one who has someone ready to hire on the spot, but the process took two or three weeks.”
Somewhere along the way the name of Frank Cignetti Jr. came up and it proved to be a blessing for the Panthers find themselves ranked No. 9 in the country behind a high-powered offense engineered by Cignetti Jr.
The name is familiar in these parts, Frank Cignetti Sr. having been the head football coach at West Virginia between Bobby Bowden and Don Nehlen, a much-maligned but brave coach who tried to fight cancer while coaching the team.
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While at West Virginia as an assistant coach, Frank Cignetti Sr. had tried to recruit an offensive lineman from the Pittsburgh area.
His name was Dave Wannstedt and he stayed home and attended Pitt.
Also at the time Cignetti was raising a couple of sons, one of whom was Frank Cignetti Jr., who spent 12 years in the town.
“There are a lot of great memories,” Cignetti Jr. said. “I played Little League baseball there, played football, had a lot of friends.”
But it was only a temporary stop, for at heart Cignetti Jr. wasn’t really a Mountaineer.
“Make no mistake, we’re Pittsburgh Panther fans,” he said. “Look at the biographies of my family. My dad was born in western Pennsylvania, his first job was at the University of Pittsburgh for Dan Hart. It just so happened that Dad got a tremendous opportunity to go be Bobby Bowden’s offensive coordinator at West Virginia.”
“Oh, I’ve been a West Virginia fan since I coached there,” Frank Sr. said from his home in Indiana, Pa., where at 72 he is finally able to enjoy retirement. “I watch them when they are on television. I’ve followed them through Coach Nehlen and Rich Rodriguez and now Bill Stewart.”
But it changed when his son home came to Pitt.
“I can’t say I was trying to find a job in the area, but it was always a dream,” Cignetti Jr. said. “Anyone who knew me knew I loved western Pennsylvania, loved Pittsburgh, that I’d gone to IUP (Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where his dad had coached for 20 years after West Virginia) and had started my career at Pitt as a graduate assistant under Mike Gottfried.”
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Whereas Wannstedt had been recruited at Pitt by Cignetti, he found himself focusing on Cignetti Jr., who was the offensive coordinator at Cal-Berkley.
“We had a conversation and once he knew I was seriously interested in talking to him and that I was serious about the possibilities, we learned it was a good fit,” Wannstedt said.
Wannstedt requirements were for a coordinator who wanted to run a pro-style offense, a commitment to running the football and who could get more out of his quarterback.
That defined Frank Cignetti Jr.
As the two talked, Cignetti Jr. realized he and Wannstedt possessed the same offensive philosophies. He, like Wannstedt, who was head coach of both the Chicago Bears and the Miami Dolphins, had a history in the NFL, having served as an assistant in Kansas City and San Francisco.
“My goodness, we talked about offensive football, and there are three things. 1. Protect the ball. There’s certain things that win games, certain things that lose them and losing the ball is one of the things that loses game. 2. Be error free, and by that I mean minimize penalties, sacks, dropped balls and missed assignments. And the third thing is to a physical team and to do that you have to have a commitment to running the ball. You go with a lead back and are committed to handing the ball off,” Cignetti said, espousing the philosophies of both coaches.
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Wannstedt, of course, was criticized heavily during his first few years at Pitt for the unimaginative offense he was running in an era of college football where the spread was proliferating everywhere and where the emphasis was on running quarterbacks.
“We’re probably one of the dinosaurs left, lining up with a fullback and tailback and trying to pound people and using play-action passes, but that’s what I believe in,” Wannstedt said. “Football goes through cycles. You have to go with what you believe in and what you really understand.”
It was exactly the kind of football Frank Jr. had learned from Frank Sr., not that the father was pushing the son into coaching.
“I tried to discourage both of them (brother Curt is an assistant at No. 1 Alabama) from going into coaching. I wanted them to get an education, but when he graduated he expressed a desire to coach to coach so I said, ‘Fine, go be a graduate assistant, get another degree, then make a decision from there.’ My point was, you have to be sure coaching is what you want to do, that you can’t live without it. It’s basically a terminal experience for 90 percent of the people who go into it.”
Losing certainly can kill you in this profession.
But Frank Cignetti Jr. has not been losing very much, in part because of the job he has done with quarterbacks and certainly he had a project with Stull, who was about to enter his senior year and was highly unpopular with the fans.
The construction of Bill Stull into a big time quarterback began shortly after Cignetti was hired, in a voluntary meeting over spring break.
“It lasted six hours,” Stull recalls. “We were excited to meet the new coach, we wanted to see what the offense was going to look like and he wanted to get a feel for us.”
He told them about the NFL and about how his offense would be based on NFL principles.
“It was tough for me. Having a system for four years and knowing it like it was the back of my hand, it was tough. There was some doubt whether I was going to be able to pick it up and feel comfortable with it but the way he presented it fit my learning style and the way I play,” Stull said.
If anything, Cignetti is a teacher first and coach second.
“You mentor the quarterback in the NFL the same way you do here,” Cignetti said. “It comes in three parts: from the neck up in the classroom, from the waist up, which is the mechanics; and from the feet up, which is footwork,” he said.
Learn the plays the system, learn the fundamentals and the footwork, then put it together.
Take the footwork, which has been crucial in turning Stull into the fourth most efficient passer in the NCAA.
“I won’t say we didn’t work on it before, but it’s emphasized more now,” Stull said.
Wannstedt explained what had happened with Stull.
“It’s been a combination of three things. Bill worked extremely hard in the offseason and summer. He matured as a person. Then we are doing things that are giving him a chance to be successful, having him get rid of the ball quick, not sit back there and make a thousand decisions. And finally, he has a great supporting cast with the running of Dion Lewis and Jonathan Baldwin to catch the ball. He has guys who can make plays for him,” Wannstedt said.
“You can see Bill grow every day,” Cignetti said. “You could see it in training camp, see him grow from game to game. Some of the throws he made in the Rutgers game, under pressure, you saw he was really playing the game.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
