Kovacevic: Ask anti-Dixon donors to pay up

Brief and to the Point ...

• Word is filtering this way that the frustration with Kevin Stallings at Pitt has reached all the way up the university ladder, and there are folks up there already trying to find a way out of the final five years of his contract.

Problem No. 1 with that: It's a lot of money to eat for a state-supported school. We don't know how much because, for some reason, the basketball coach's salary doesn't fall under public records laws at a state-supported school. But we can safely presume it's a lot.



Problem No. 2: There's no AD, you might have heard. And there's also a strong sentiment up the university ladder that the new AD should have a say in this decision so as not to bungle the next hire the way Scott Barnes bungled this one.

Problem No. 3: So many donors and diehards are dismayed, from what I'm being told, that patience is thin. The average crowd has been a once-unthinkable 7,868 in the 12,501-seat Petersen Events Center. That includes 9,691 for ACC games, a plunge from 10,566 just a year to watch essentially the same group of players.

Problem No. 4: The equally once-unthinkable sight of the head coach being booed upon being ejected during that Louisville debacle really hit home with some. As one of those donors told me, "I've never, ever seen the Oakland Zoo booing one of our own. And I don't blame them at all."

My opinion counts infinitely less than those of the donors and diehards and, for that matter, the Zoo. But here it is, anyway: Get about hiring the right AD, this time without the stupid robo-search firms. Work with that AD to reach a fair conclusion about Stallings, but don't let money be the deciding factor. And if it's determined by all concerned that Stallings should go, then approach all those donors who relentlessly complained about Jamie Dixon to be the ones who step up for the buyout.

• Dixon left behind the NCAA's highest-scoring duo, Mike Young and Jamel Artis, but those guys are seniors. So to all those Pitt fans fretting about having to tolerate a long rebuild if Stallings is gone, know this: A rebuild is coming, anyway, no matter the coach. Might as well find a fresh coach who can disassociate himself from the current mess in every way.

• Think Louisville ever could have happened under Brandin Knight?

• The next coach who isn't responsible when his or her players lay down will be the first. Any sport. Any era. Anywhere.

• There's no such thing as a pivotal NHL game on the final day of January, though I'll say the Penguins would do very well tonight against the visiting Predators. Not because of any divisional race or anything like that. But because that weird thing last week where they suddenly lost their legs against the Bruins ... man, that had an alarming look to it.

Let's remember, this team logged 106 games into mid-June last season. Also, there's a reason the Kings and Blackhawks alternated Cups for half a decade. And a team that's only effective when it's flying might be all the more prone to this trend.

• Kris Letang's return will help. The only people who ever underestimate his impact on the collective are well outside the company walls.

• To understand why Canadian voters would ensure Evgeni Malkin was left off the NHL's all-time top 100 list, it's necessary to know these two things:

1. Not all Canadians feel that way. A Montreal radio station spent all of Monday morning blistering the omission. The Canadians who love and appreciate hockey, regardless of national origin, embrace Malkin as a true great of the game.

2. Some older Canadians, in my experience, holds this weird resentment toward Russians and fancy them, almost wistfully, as some kind of enemy. And to repeat the adjective, that's weird. It's always been weird, as the only actual head-to-head rivalry the countries have ever had -- in any walk of life -- have been hockey games.

Suffice it to say, in the dinosaur-run NHL, that's mostly the bio description.

• The Islanders failing in Brooklyn was the most easily predictable failure in NHL history, aside from hockey in Atlanta.

Get a team to Quebec City already. Anything else is delaying the inevitable.

• Gary Bettman's coy act toward the International Olympic Committee is so very clearly aimed at finances, his protestations over the weekend in L.A. notwithstanding, that he'd be so much better served by just coming out and saying that. Put up a price tag for the IOC, put forth a deadline, and call it make-or-break.

Know why he won't do that?

Because he's bluffing.

He knows the NHL's players want to represent their countries, and he knows Donald Fehr is carrying their case with appropriate zeal. He's got no choice. None. He just wants everyone to think he does.

See everyone in PyeongChang!

• Think the Steelers should make Antonio Brown go through another season without a long-term extension?

That might sound good, considering some of his oddball behavior the past few months, but it's not living in the real world.

Brown's contract, going into the last year of a six-year, $43 million extension signed in 2012, calls for a $4.7 million salary. That would be half of the $10.25 million he just made this past season, as a good chunk of the 2017 money was moved up to 2016 as part of a restructuring last summer.

That won't hold. No chance. A new contract has to get done.

What's more, the Steelers have told AB and his super-agent, Drew Rosenhaus, for two summers now that they'll pay up on their terms, meaning they hate negotiating extensions until one year remains on a deal. Well, that's now. Any reneging on that looks awful across the industry and even in their own world.

What can AB himself do?

He could hold out for as long as eight games next season without losing his free-agency ability the following season.

NFL teams hold most of the cards against their relatively weak union, but not all.

• The Raiders announce they're moving from Oakland to Vegas, thanks to a $650 million pledge from a casino tycoon, then find out the tycoon wants nothing to do with the project. The Chargers announce they're moving to a 30,000-seat college field near Los Angeles, with hints dropping that they just might move back to San Diego in a couple years. The Jaguars continue to get dragged back and forth across the Atlantic with clear, if silent, intentions of having them wind up in London. And all this after the Rams left St. Louis to return to L.A.

Say this for Bettman: He's kept franchises put, including the Penguins, and he only gave in to the Thrashers leaving for Winnipeg when the situation in Atlanta was very, very visibly going nowhere.

Roger Goodell, by contrast, has lost all control.

• Wow, Joey Porter really needs to go, assuming even a fraction of this content in John Steigerwald's column for the Indiana Gazette is accurate. And John and I spoke at length about it after publication Sunday, and his sources and information were very compelling, to put it mildly.

Oh, and the head coach doesn't come across great in there, either.

• Very heartening to see these tweets Monday night from Giselle Rodriguez, wife of Sean Rodriguez, updating the family's status after their serious car accident over the weekend in Miami. Sounds like they'll all be OK.

S-Rod was among the most beloved players in the Pirates' clubhouse, and the outpouring of love and prayers from Pittsburgh is precisely what happens to good people.

• On a personal note, my father passed away Sunday near Belgrade, Serbia.

I never got a chance to know him well. He was an ambassador to the United States representing the former Yugoslavia when he was assigned to the Pittsburgh consulate in the 1960s. That's how I was born here, actually, in 1966, and it's why I wasn't taught English as a child, because the family was sure our stay here was temporary. Mine wasn't, as it turned out. The parents split up when I was 6, and my father went back overseas.

He took me to Serbia, too, but my mother talked him out of that a year later, and I was back in Pittsburgh to live with her and her new husband. I was 7. I had no idea where I belonged or with whom I belonged, which might or might not explain why I began immersing myself in following all three of Pittsburgh's sports teams. It brought a sense of belonging, for sure. That same year, 1973, I started being taught English as a second language, and all the rest unfolded as it did.

I did go to visit him in some of the other countries where he served in their embassies. I flew by myself at age 9 to spend three months in eastern Africa, specifically Tanzania and Kenya. Cyprus would come later, plus others.

But distance, like time, can't be overcome. I hadn't seen him for the past 10 years and hadn't really communicated all that much, with all the 24/7 that goes into my current life. So when I heard from him last week with what sure sounded like a final message -- this was during the second half of the AFC Championship Game in Foxborough -- I responded as best I could. And as quickly. And as honestly.

The gist: Everything worked out for the best.

As I wrote to him, I'd found the family of my dreams, the job of my dreams and the most beautiful city in the world, the one to which he was assigned all those years ago to help Serbs, Croats and Slovenes assimilate here in Western Pennsylvania. It all went how I wanted, I told him, and how I hoped he'd have wanted.

He sent back a silent thumbs-up.

I really wanted to finish the Top 25 Pittsburgh project, and I always feel committed to doing these Takes, but I think I'm going to shut it down for the rest of this week. That's not being dramatic. I'm confused. I'm angry. I'm lost, to a degree. I didn't know him well, but there was never any resentment. There was nothing but respect. He was an orphan at a very young age, having watched his parents killed by Nazis in Sarajevo during World War II, but he raised himself and his sister, he pushed himself to move to Belgrade for an education, and he rose up into a global ambassador who could fluently speak eight languages and who had achieved so much more than he was ever allowed to discuss.

At the same time, I'm as confident as ever that all that whirling all over the world as a youngster made me appreciate all the more what I've got here in Pittsburgh and all that's happened since.

Give someone you love a hug today. The closer they are, the better.