Bill Raftery discusses Kevin Stallings, Pitt basketball's potential

I don’t know how it is for others, and whether this is just a product of my relatively young age, but Bill Raftery is a name that I associate with college basketball as much as almost anyone. He’s endlessly entertaining as a broadcaster and his catchphrases — ”Onions!”, ”With a kiss” and, of course, ”Send it in, Jerome!” -— are an unavoidable part of the sport’s lexicon and history.

Perhaps more than anything, though, Raftery’s career as a broadcaster and coach has turned him into something of a walking encyclopedia of the game, someone who can break matchups down in the detail many of us can’t replicate and place recent developments into a proper historical context. In short, he’s pretty awesome.

Raftery was an emcee at Pitt’s ”Throwback Throwdown” Saturday morning at Stage AE. The event reunited him with former Pitt great Jerome Lane, the subject of the aforementioned call, marking what he guessed to be the second time they met in person since his now-iconic dunk in 1988. While we didn’t get the opportunity to speak with Lane, who had to leave quickly to get back to his hometown of Akron to watch his son’s football game this afternoon, the media members present did get the chance to speak for about 10 minutes with Raftery, who offered his opinion and perspective on the trajectory of the Pitt program, whether it can reach the upper echelon of the sport, and how he and others view new Panthers coach Kevin Stallings.

Below are highlights from that talk, which, given Raftery’s personality, means this is most of the conversation.

On the ”Send it in, Jerome!” call:

“It’s probably the first time people knew my name. I heard it in airports. At first it was like ‘I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about’, that kind of a deal, which happened with a lot of the things I’ve said. They’d repeat them. I was on a two-way [call] once with ESPN with Jerome where I was in Charlotte and he was in Akron. It was the 25th anniversary of the dunk. He was ready to get off and he said ‘Thanks for making me famous, Mr. Raf.’ I said ‘Jerome, thanks for making me famous.’”

On Kevin Stallings’ reputation in the world of college basketball:

“If I say offense, everybody will say ‘Well, he doesn’t coach defense.’ I think he’s on a level of offense where he gets easy baskets and he’s been able to do it with restrictions, with the types of kids they get at Vanderbilt and the demands on them. I don’t mean the academic angle; it’s just getting into the school and being able to be on that level academically, not that Pitt is a second sister. He just knows how to get easy baskets. I think most of the respect for him is he’s got a great mind for offense, with back cuts and early 3s. Those are a lot of the things that have made him good to compete at that level, with Kentucky and Billy Donovan at Florida. He was hanging in there with, what, seven NCAAs. It’s uncanny, in a league that’s not near the top and in the last few years hasn’t had a lot of teams in the tournament.”

On how difficult the transition to the ACC is for a quintessential Big East team like Pitt:

“I guess the answer is the type of kids you attract and where you attract them from. It’d be great if Pittsburgh had more and better players because they would get their fair share, but I don’t know if they have that. There’s not 10 kids that could go a lot of places. That’s my guess from what I’ve been told. That hurts. Now you’ve got to find an area. Is it Philly? Is it New York? Is it Washington? That’s part of your staff makeup. [Assistant coach Kevin] Sutton is a guy that’s been around the DC area. The other kid, [assistant coach Jeremy] Ballard, has a little New York taste. That’s all the trial and error now about ‘Where do we go?’”

On the Petersen Events Center:

“The atmosphere at the game, it’s maybe the best building in the east on campus. I consider Maryland south. This is right up there with some of the best in the country. The atmosphere is pretty consistent.”

On whether Pitt can reach the top rung of college basketball:

“I’m smiling because can Seton Hall get there? Can Northwestern get there? Nobody’s going to get there. If you watch the Jordan and McDonald’s games, there are three or four schools that have the top 23 kids. But that doesn’t mean you can’t win a championship. Look at Villanova. Look at Butler getting there a few years ago. They had tough kids, though [Utah Jazz guard Gordon] Hayward was a big-time player, as it turned out. George Mason back in ’06. I don’t know if you can [get there], philosophically or realistically, but it’s all about trying to get a group together that can win it all. I don’t know if you can get that one-and-done kid. You can’t get four of them. And maybe they [Pitt] don’t want them, either.”

“You want to be good consistently and every couple of years, you might be fortunate to get to that point if you get a break or you win a close game. It’s unrealistic to say it’s going to be Kansas, Kentucky, Duke or North Carolina.”

On whether that’s true even just within the ACC:

“They’re probably going to get eight to 10 teams in every year. Rollie Massimino in 1985, he was the highest seed to ever win a championship. You always would like to be like that, but you want to be able to compete with them and that’s what I think he’ll do. He’ll get players who can score, compete and work hard. That’s it. Ben [Howland] did it, Jamie [Dixon] did it. He’s going to do it different offensively.”

On whether a sense of stagnation develops during a long coaching tenure like Jamie Dixon’s at Pitt:

“No question. I used to say Bill Foster was one of the first…he coached at Bloomsburg, Rutgers, Utah, Duke, Northwestern and South Carolina. He used to say the jokes aren’t as funny, they don’t like your hair or your tie anymore. It’s hard anymore to be a John Wooden or Mike Krzyzewski, to be at the same place. There’s always a new president, a new AD, a new faculty rep. It’s hard. You just try and do your job. Jamie’s family loved this area. That was the hard thing for him. I haven’t talked to him since he left. But I knew he loved it here.”

Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG