NEWPORT, R.I. -- If you want to know who the new Pittsburgh coach is, you must hear about his summer road trip.

Earlier this month, Paul Chryst drove 14 hours from his old home in Wisconsin to his new home with his golden retriever, Riley.

"Somebody had to do it," Chryst said with a smile.

AP Photo/Stew MilnePaul Chryst hopes to provide Pittsburgh with some coaching stability.

Plenty of head coaches would see that duty as perfect for a spouse or a graduate assistant. Chryst doesn't yet see himself as the coach-cum-CEO with assistants at his beck and call. He is who he always has been: a coach's kid, a guy who met his wife, Robin, in high school in Platteville, Wis.

Chryst is used to the business, and as the fourth of five children, he is used to not getting the attention. His brother Geep, the 49ers' quarterbacks coach, played two sports at Princeton. His brother Rick, the former commissioner of the Mid-American Conference, played baseball at Notre Dame.

"I think by the time they got to me, my parents were tired of reading to us," Paul Chryst said.

Don't let him fool you. Chryst played quarterback at Wisconsin, one of the top public universities in the nation. But the larger point is that Chryst is comfortable in his own skin. He wants to be at Pittsburgh. Those are qualities that the Panthers need running their football program. When Pittsburgh hired him in December, Chryst became the school's fourth head coach in little more than a year.

Pitt fired Dave Wannstedt, one of its own, for being stuck in mediocrity. Pitt fired Mike Haywood after less than three weeks for getting in trouble with the law. His successor, Todd Graham, the human news conference, stayed for 11 months and left for Arizona State.

Pitt players go through coaches like some teams go through socks. Chryst has never been a head coach. He didn't recruit his players. Yet he didn't arrive and try to wow them. He didn't try to woo them either. He just came in and started coaching.

"He's a laid-back dude," running back Ray Graham said. "He's more chilled, relaxed."

Graham, no relation to Todd Graham, has a hard-eyed view of football life for a college senior.

"Man, it's a business," Graham said. "At the end of the day, you're going to do what's best for you. That's what I look at it as. Coach Graham said he wanted to put himself and his family in a better position. That's why he left. Best of luck to him. We have a great coach here now. I think we're going to move on from here."

Chryst said the players have a short time frame within college life. A new coach can make that even more chaotic. "You know you have a four- or five-year window," he said. "'What's this doing to my window? How does this impact me?' For some, it's devastating. Some, it's 'I got a new chance.' There's always that, 'Geez, I've got to prove myself again?'

"The only thing we decided was to be consistent. Try not to make too big a deal of it. Just be who you are. I think actions are always more powerful than words."

Chryst's mentors in coaching have been Don Nehlen, the Hall of Fame coach from West Virginia who hired him as a graduate assistant, and Oregon State coach Mike Riley, who gave him his first paid job. Chryst worked for Riley for more than a decade, in the World League of American Football, the CFL, the NFL and at Oregon State.

Now you know why the golden retriever is named Riley.

NEWPORT, R.I. -- For a league in desperate need of clarity, not many questions were answered during Big East media day.

No announcement on future divisional alignment. No announcement on a commissioner or the names of the five finalists. No decisions on a bowl home for its champion. No ideas on what the Big East can get from its future TV deal.

Then there were Syracuse and Pitt, sitting on opposite corners of the room, a clear reminder the Big East cannot truly move forward until it can move away from its past.

For their part, Syracuse coach Doug Marrone and Pitt coach Paul Chryst both said there was nothing awkward about being at media day. Though keep in mind, both were at ACC spring meetings, straddling both worlds.

"This is new for me, so it's not like I'm comparing this to something else," said Chryst, in his first year as a head coach. "Our job is to coach the team, and the team as this group of guys will only be together for one year. Even one year's a long time. It's this week what are we doing, this day what are we going to focus on? So it's not hard for us to just play with that shortsightedness. You know and you respect the league and the opponents."

Marrone said, "We've got a schedule; we've got a challenge, I've been here before; let's go play. I have a low sense of empathy. People have told me that. Now if somebody wanted to give me a Harley-Davidson or something like that, that would be pretty cool. Maybe it's because of the way I was brought up. I played at Syracuse; I was raised on Eastern football.

"My vision when I was a kid of what football should be in the East is quite different than other people's. When I was growing up, I knew what Eastern football was. I could define that for you. Now, we all know the culture we're in, and we're looking forward to the challenges of this year."

Marrone alludes to the seismic shift in college football, one that has stripped the Big East of three prominent members in Pitt, Syracuse and West Virginia. With seven schools headed in the door and a new look set for 2013, nobody really knows what to make of the Big East -- especially without a commissioner, a pristine national image to cling to and no true idea about how the Big East is positioned in the future postseason beginning in 2014.