Three years ago, former Pitt coach Walt Harris met a $120 million man for dinner at the downtown Marriott City Center. Joe Flacco, briefly a Panther, known as a Blue Hen, was in town as his Baltimore Ravens faced a familiar foe. So, the night before yet another tense divisional matchup at Heinz Field, Harris and Flacco broke bread.
“I called him,” Harris said earlier this week, before laughing a bit. “And I paid.”
The dinner was a gratifying experience for the former coach-quarterback tandem. When Harris last saw Flacco, it was 2004. Harris, after eight seasons with the Panthers, was pushed out of his position in favor of incoming coach Dave Wannstedt. “There really wasn’t a lot of time to say goodbye to everybody,” Harris added. “It wasn’t very pretty.”
Meanwhile, Flacco was a backup quarterback itching for a chance, staring an uncertain offseason in the face. Flacco, stuck behind starter Tyler Palko for the foreseeable future, transferred to Delaware, where he starred in 2006 and 2007 before being drafted in the first round by the Ravens.
No one can blame Flacco — a Super Bowl champion and one of the highest-paid players of all-time — for betting on himself. It obviously worked out. And, really, it’s hard to blame Harris or Wannstedt after Palko threw for over 3,000 yards, beat Notre Dame on the road and guided Pitt to a Fiesta Bowl berth in 2004. Plus, it’s not as if the coaches had the benefit of hindsight to know Flacco would turn out to be a 12-year NFL veteran. Who knows if that happens if he stays at Pitt, anyway?
Harris isn’t here to play the “what if...” game. Instead, as Delaware visits Pitt and Panther fans think back on what could have been, the former coach spent time this week reminiscing on the times that were had. As opposed to the ones some only dream of.
(This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Q: Flacco wasn’t a highly recruited guy at all. How did you find out about him?
A: Once you watch the film, if you watch it close, it was interesting. ... He had a good arm. We liked his size. We liked his toughness. He was not in a very sophisticated pass offense in high school. In the red zone, they moved him to wide receiver, and they’d throw fades to him. When we offered him, we were the only ones to have offered him a Power 5 scholarship.
Q: Were you surprised that he didn’t have a major college offer at the time?
A: I’ve never been a guy who looks at the ratings. Those guys who rate guys, their livelihood is not dependent on players being successful. If a quarterback is the No. 1 quarterback in America and he turns out to flop, that guy doesn’t lose his job. So I never paid much attention to it. I tried to evaluate what we thought of the guy and what we felt about his potential. ... We knew at the time he was going to be good.
Q: What do you remember about his first year there?
A: So this might shock you a little bit. ... In November, I’m standing over there catching balls [in practice during a drill]. And, well, it’s cold. Joe throws a fireball down low by my ankles. This tells you how fast the mind is. I said to myself, ‘If I reach down, he could really hurt my hands.’ I have to stay out here for the rest of practice, you know? So I’m not going to do that. What I did was, I put my foot up to knock the ball down. You know, when someone throws a bad pass, you stick your foot out, and that stops it. I had, up until a year ago, pain in my foot, all the time, in the winter. He threw the ball so hard.
Q: Hold up.
A: Yep. So there would be moments where I’d walk or step on something, and the pain came back. Just a reminder pain. Oh yeah, that’s my ‘Flacco foot’. In fact, when my wife and I went out to dinner with him, I finally told him about it. I had never told him about the ‘Flacco toe.’
Q: So he threw it so hard that it messed up your foot?
A: He hammered it. And the pain lasted for a long, long time. I’m not mad. It just hurt. Bottom line, though, he could throw.
Q: Well, that’s one way to find out.
A: The tough thing about his redshirt freshman year is, we were a good team. Ended up going to the Fiesta Bowl and all that good stuff. Beat the right teams, so we got to go. But every game was a game. Every game was a battle. We didn’t get ahead that often. What happened is, I didn’t get a chance to play him that much. Normally, our backups, I would play. He was very raw and inexperienced. Talented, but inexperienced.
Q: Of course, in 2004, Tyler Palko is named the starter, and Luke Getsy transfers to Akron. What kind of a competition was there in 2004?
A: That was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make as the head coach at Pitt, choosing between Luke Getsy and Tyler Palko. It wasn’t clear-cut. ... It went right down to the wire.
Q: Was there any chance for Joe to compete for the starting job?
A: There was no competition there. Luke was the competition. That made it difficult to play Joe because he wasn’t in the two-deep. He was in the three-deep.
Q: When you guys started 2-2 that season, did you ever think about giving Flacco a shot?
A: Starting as a sophomore quarterback, it was not that easy. But Tyler was showing progress. And Joe had miles to go. There wasn’t any thought of replacing Tyler.
Q: You weren’t in charge of the program at the time, but were you surprised when Joe transferred?
A: Am I surprised Joe transferred? No. Because Joe believed in Joe.
Q: Wrapping up here, I want to double back to the dinner that you and Joe had a few years ago. So you hadn’t seen him at all between 2004 and then?
A: Well, I had kept in contact with him over the years. I was playing golf in the winter one year in the Marcos Islands with my wife’s sister’s husband. The day after the Super Bowl, I get a call while I’m on the tee box. He gave me a call thanking me for the call I gave him. And my brother-in-law said, ‘Damn, you’ve got a call from the MVP of the Super Bowl. You’re a terrible golfer, but at least you know some of the right people.’ So yeah, that was cool.
John McGonigal: jmcgonigal@post-gazette.com and Twitter @jmcgonigal9
First Published: September 27, 2019, 3:12 p.m.
