When Pitt joined the ACC, Mike DeCourcy of The Sporting News said that Pitt was going to decline because the ACC would make it harder to recruit New York and the Northeast as Jamie Dixon did, and he was more or less correct about that.
However, he didn’t imagine an alternative and now that Jeff Capel has the job, he’s clearly not limiting himself to Dixon’s previous territory.
There are some precedents for this, not least of all Indiana. By the time Bob Knight departed, his recruiting territory was mostly limited to Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Michigan.