Pitt taps Mike Haywood to pick up its stalled BCS push

This time last year, Mike Haywood was sifting through the wreckage of a 1-11 head coaching debut and no doubt wondering if he'd committed career suicide by agreeing to take on the rebuilding job at Miami (Ohio) in late 2008. Today, he's moving on up to the top job at Pittsburgh, per sources in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and ESPN, after bringing back a MAC championship to cap the most dramatic U-turn of the season.

The RedHawks opened year two under Haywood by giving bumbling Florida a run for its money in the Swamp, and went on to win seven of eight in the MAC before its wild comeback to upend heavily favored Northern Illinois in the conference title game. That run included a 4-0 road mark in a five-week span in October and November, on the heels of an 11-game road losing streak dating back to 2008. With the championship upset, Miami moved to 9-4 on the year – a full eight games better than the last-place disaster of 2009, good for the most extreme single-season swing in the nation.

Make no mistake: Haywood is no stranger to the big time. He played at Notre Dame, and eventually returned to South Bend as offensive coordinator under Charlie Weis after stints at Texas and LSU, where he was part of a staff that included future head coaches Jimbo Fisher, Derek Dooley and Will Muschamp under boss Nick Saban in 2002. It's only by an accident of timing that he doesn't have a pair of championship rings: He left Baton Rouge for Austin just in time to miss the Tigers' BCS title run in 2003, and Texas for Notre Dame as the Longhorns were preparing to embark on their scorched-earth march to the championship in 2005. But Haywood was on the sideline for four BCS games in eight years before taking on the rebuilding project at Miami, three more than Pitt can claim in a ripe-for-the-taking Big East.

Now, the hard part: Getting the Panthers over the hump where Dave Wannstedt could not, despite a general upward slope over his first five seasons and a share of the conference title in his sixth. The 2008 Panthers won nine games and finished with the highest ranking (No. 15) of any Pitt team since it joined the Big East in 1991. The '09 team was 33 seconds away from a conference championship and ultimately turned in the first 10-win campaign since 1981.

This year's team, with All-Americans Dion Lewis, Jonathan Baldwin and Greg Romeus en tow, had the nucleus for a BCS breakthrough. Instead, it went down in flames in three high-profile non-conference games against Utah, Miami (a home blowout in front of a national audience on Thursday night) and Notre Dame, and blew a chance to take a wide open Big East race with losses to UConn (another Thursday night flop) and rival West Virginia. The icy win at Cincinnati in the regular season finale ensured the Panthers of another winning record at 7-5, but it couldn't cover up the obvious regression in a season that offered a golden opportunity to break back into the big time.

Five years of steady progress under Wannstedt ultimately signified nothing. If the mandate for Haywood is a big-money bowl, the opportunity is certainly there in a mediocre conference won the last three years by Cincinnati and UConn. But with spread master Dana Holgorsen preparing to take over for Bill Stewart at West Virginia and TCU coming aboard in 2012, the window is going to get significantly narrower after next year.

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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