Is the glass half-full or half-empty? The headlines from the Pittsburgh dailies sum it up:

Big East lightens Pitt’s conference schedule

Panthers taken away from Big East limelight

It depends on how you look at the meaning of the schedule.

From the half-full article:

The Pitt basketball team, which is likely to be without its top three scorers from last season, appears to have received a break on its 2005-06 Big East Conference schedule.
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It marks the third consecutive year that ESPN, CBS and the Big East have agreed on which Big East teams will play each other twice. In the past two years, Pitt was deemed a so-called “first-tier” Big East team and, thus, played home-and-home games against Connecticut, Syracuse and Notre Dame. The remaining conference teams were not required to play those teams twice.

For Pitt and other top-tier schools, the tradeoff for a difficult schedule reasulted in more national TV exposure.

Big East associate commissioner Tom Odjakjian, who assembled the schedule, said Connecticut, Syracuse, Villanova, West Virginia and Cincinnati were “highest on television’s interest list” for next season.

However, Odjakjian said, “ESPN will be doing a lot more of our games this year, so a team like Pitt could get just as much as exposure. Maybe (instead of) a second Pitt-UConn game, Pitt against Cincinnati will be televised.”

The actual dates and TV selections will be announced in the next month or two.

And then, the half-empty:

For the past two seasons, Pitt had to play conference powers Connecticut, Notre Dame and Syracuse in home-and-home series because Big East officials deemed the Panthers one of the league’s best teams and wanted to showcase them in national television games.

Since the Big East began arranging its schedule around television before the 2001-02 season, Pitt has played on national television 50 times, including a record 15 appearances last season. Although the Big East did not release the league’s national television schedule yesterday — it will be announced in a month or two — Pitt is not is expected to be on nearly as much this season because of the departure of Chevon Troutman and Chris Taft and the likely departure of point guard Carl Krauser, who is strongly considering a professional career in Europe.
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It’s a trade-off for the top teams. They get the more difficult schedule in return for national exposure and the recruiting benefits that go along with it. The other teams are given a more manageable schedule, if there is such a thing in the newly configured super conference, which placed seven teams in the NCAA tournament last season: Pitt, Connecticut, Syracuse, Villanova and West Virginia from the old guard and Cincinnati and Louisville as Conference USA members.

The article also notes that Pitt’s non-conference schedule will be announced sometime in August. Pitt won’t have the excuse of the last few years that its conference schedule justifies going easy on the non-con. Instead, if it is a patsy-filled non-con once more, the excuse will be based on the rebuilding aspect.

Up in Wisconsin, the paper there, calls the Marquette schedule a “stern test.” That’s a bit of a stretch.