No, not you John (inside joke).

At the start of the basketball season there were questions about which of the 3 new players on Pitt’s team would have the earliest impact, i.e., earn major minutes either off the bench or even as a starter. If you put a gun to my head back then, I would have gone with John DeGroat. I figured as a JUCO and playing Forward he would be the first option to sub for McCarroll and Troutman or even supplant McCarroll.

To quote a far better writer than myself, “The lesson, as always, I’m an idiot.”

Both papers do pieces on Ronald “Razor” Ramon. This one focuses on his play, especially how he helped keep Pitt in the first half of the South Carolina game. Ramon hitting outside shots in the first half was very important not just in keeping Pitt close, but because it eventually started stretching the Gamecock’s zone to allow passes inside to Troutman and Taft. The thing that was often missing from Pitt’s game last year.

The other is more of the puff-type dealing more with his relationship with his father Ricardo Ramon. His father was a star player in the Dominican Republic and played ball in parts of South America, before they came to the US. The story, though, also contains a key comment from Ramon, showing why he is playing so much:

“I just come in and try to play hard,” Ramon said. “My role is to play defense, try and stop somebody. The offense just comes. At that time it was tough. It was a tight game. I just wanted to play great defense. Defense wins games. If we get stops, the offense will come.”

He appears not only to have been the first to grasp that, but the first to play it. I think the others will get their chance, as they more fully understand how much they have to give on defense first.