"Lyke was fired in September 2024. And she left quite the mess behind.
Today, Pitt’s athletic department is in shambles. The football team is
losing some of its top players in the transfer portal. The men’s basketball team is unwatchable. The women’s team is equally bad and
is allegedly an even a bigger issue off the court. And some non-revenue sports might not be around much longer.
What went wrong
Lyke had a noted desire for “comprehensive excellence,” treating every Pitt athletic team with equal importance. While in theory this was a fair stance, in reality, that’s simply not how the world of college athletics works.
Two sports matter above all else: football and men’s basketball. If those two programs do well, there is more money for all. Lyke’s inability to appropriately allocate resources toward what actually mattered has brought Pitt to where it is now.
Her most notable misstep was the Victory Heights initiative, an ambitious multi-sport facility that would serve as a replacement to the aging Fitzgerald Field House."
“For far too long, a significant percentage of our student-athletes have been forced to compete in facilities that do not reflect the lofty standards and aspirations of the University of Pittsburgh,” Lyke said in a university issued press release in 2023. “Today’s announcement is the first step in transforming that liability into a game-changing asset in our quest for comprehensive excellence.”
Lyke’s heart was in the right place. She wasn’t wrong to believe Pitt’s current athletic facility for those sports was outdated. But she ignored one key component that makes or breaks every major decision made in today’s world of college athletics: money.
Lyke signed up for a $240 million project with little to no funding secured beforehand. She hoped her big swing would inspire alumni to donate more. It did not. And to make things worse, that facility, whenever it is finished, will add no legitimate revenue moving forward.
Lyke also wasted money on her numerous coaching hires and firings. She gained notoriety in town for canning nine head coaches in her first two years in Oakland. Some coaches were dismissed with remaining years on their contract, meaning Pitt was paying two head-coach salaries for one non-revenue sport — again, meaning that the additional money spent wasn’t ever going to be recuperated.
Her final major sin pertains to NIL, the biggest determining factor of success in today’s college sports. Some athletic directors immediately embraced the concept when it was legalized in 2021. Lyke, instead, pushed back.
When seeking donation money from alumni, the Victory Heights project or other athletic facility upgrades took priority over laying the foundation of a productive and competitive NIL collective. Rather than learning innovative ways for Pitt to compete in the NIL space, Lyke was known to speak against the concept as a whole, at times even encouraging other ACC athletic directors to do the same, per multiple sources.
Even when things seemed great during Lyke’s tenure, time would eventually prove those days to be nothing more than a house of cards. Pitt athletics fell way behind the times under her leadership, and by the time the university acted, it was already too late."
In the summer of 2023, I crafted an extensive profile on then-Pitt athletic director Heather Lyke. At that time, she could do no wrong. The football program...
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