Slow and steady wins the race. That may have been one of the most grinding 79-66 games I can remember. When you see a halftime score of 40-33, you think Pitt must have been running a bit. Instead, it was just good shooting. Pitt shot over 50% in both halves. They withstood runs, and kept scoring. Other than the final couple minutes Pitt’s longest stretch without scoring a point the entire game was a little under two minutes midway through the first half — when Pitt went from being up 22-17 to being tied 22 all. That was also the last time Pitt was tied or trailed the Bulls.

I think the big thing for most Pitt fans was Gary McGhee. I happened to watch the Monday edition of the Jamie Dixon Show of Panthers Weekly today. He said that McGhee and Diggs have been battling little injuries, but getting better and could expect them to be playing soon. To be honest, I assumed he was blowing a little smoke to excuse not playing Diggs and laying the groundwork to claim a medical redshirt for McGhee. Maybe not.

McGhee looked surprisingly good. I guess he has been coming along in practice. It helped that the Bulls were totally unprepared for him. They seemed to expect him to be a space and foul eater for Pitt. As such they ignored him on offense, which helped free him up for a couple easy baskets that really gave him confidence. After his second score, Doris Burke had a couple minutes to pour through her notes to observe that the Pitt coaches said regarding McGhee: “They say he’s more developed as a freshman than Aaron Gray was.”

Um, context please. Gray played practically no minutes as a freshman. Was completely raw and doughy. Talk about damning with faint praise. Gray came in as a project, not a McDonald’s All-American.

Late in the first half, Keith Benjamin began feeling it. By the 3:33 mark in the first half he had 11 of his 20 points.

Most of Pitt’s turnovers came in the 1st half. In this game, I don’t think Ramon was as big a culprit. I saw a lot of the early turnovers happen because the players are just not familiar enough with each other on the court. Spacing was off, Brown and Benjamin each had at least one turnover because they got too deep and there was no one where they assumed/expected to pass off the ball. Shockingly, Pitt only had 10 turnovers.

Holy crap, assists. Ramon had 7, Brown had 4 and Wanamaker and Benjamin each had 3.

Gilbert Brown looked a lot more confident in his shooting in this game and it translated to 10 points on 4-7 shooting (2-4 on 3s). Less tentative especially in the second half. Making a couple early baskets definitely encouraged him.

USF is an improving team, but they just aren’t good enough. It took a little longer, and the difference wasn’t as vast, but there was a lot in the way this game went that reminded me of what I saw from the Bulls in their loss to Syracuse on Saturday. They hung tight for the first 10 minutes or so, then started drifting off the pace. A couple minor runs to make it look like they might challenge; but then fading out. The major difference was that USF shot pitifully at the Carrier Dome, unlike tonight.

Something for Coach Dixon and the assistants to work with the players on. Not getting burned on screens. For the last 4 games, I have been seeing a lot of single, double and even triple screens being run against Pitt to free up shooters. Maybe some more of the 2-3 zone will help, but it seems to me that teams are really using the screen against Pitt’s man defense a lot more. And quite effectively.

Yeah, Wednesday nights are lousy for me. I’ll be back later with DVR Delayed Thoughts.

Regardless of Pitt’s injuries, they are still a ranked team, and teams like USF dream of knocking off ranked teams.

“When you beat a ranked team at home, it goes on your resume for the NCAA Tournament committee,” Gransberry said. “It’s possible to get there with nine nonconference wins and I think 18 wins is possible to get a bid to the NIT or NCAA.”

…

Gransberry and point guard Chris Howard said the Bulls expect more.

“It’s going to take a win against a nationally ranked team to gain the respect from the analysts,” Howard said.

And Gransberry said the push for the postseason begins tonight.

“This is the starting point for the rest of the season,” Gransberry said. “Playing a ranked opponent and protecting the home court.”

The Bulls have played two Big East games. Beating woeful Rutgers and losing handily at Syracuse. There should be a good match-up inside between DeJuan Blair and Kantrell Gransberry.

Gransberry is a taller, more experienced version of Blair. One season after being the only player in the Big East to average a double-double, the 6-foot-9, 270-pound Gransberry is averaging 15.1 points and 11.6 rebounds. The former LSU transfer is a projected late second-round NBA draft pick.

“He’s a big, physical guy,” Dixon said. “He’s an inside force for them. He’s a good rebounder. He has great hands. Anything he touches he seems to hold onto. He’s a presence.”

The guy who scares me, though, is one of the players who will be right there with Blair for Big East Newcomer of the Year — guard Dominique Jones.

The Bulls are a better team than last year. With some improved talent and a better coach. USF got extremely lucky when their coaching search completely floundered with targets like Gregg Marshall refusing USF in favor of Wichita State. It looked only retreads were willing to consider the job. That was until Akransas decided to toss Stan Heath over expecting to be able to land then Texas A&M and now Kentucky coach Billy Gillispie. Whoops.

USF was able to swoop in and get Heath, who after some early struggles and injuries has looked a lot better. Really, though, who is saying Pitt despises him?

South Florida coach Stan Heath laughed over the phone yesterday when he was told that he was still despised at the University of Pittsburgh six years after he handed Pitt a devastating defeat in the NCAA tournament.

“Let it go, Pittsburgh,” Heath said good-naturedly. “I’m at South Florida and the other coach [Ben Howland] is at UCLA.”

In March 2002, Heath was the coach at Kent State when he and forward Antonio Gates spoiled Pitt’s hopes of reaching the Final Four in an NCAA third-round game in Lexington, Ky.

The game is on ESPN2 at 7:30, here are Pitt’s game notes (PDF).

Late to just get through some things.

Shockingly, Doug Gottlieb might be reconsidering a slightly hyperbolic statement (Insider subs.).

I may have overreacted on ESPN News when declaring Pitt an NIT team due to injuries. Pitt played its tail off in its loss to Nova on Sunday. Jamie Dixon had great depth early on, and his style of preaching mental toughness helps the Panthers battle through this incredibly tough time.

From a basketball tournament in Houston last week, one of Pitt’s late recruits, Dwight Miller was playing. He made Van Coleman’s list of players that stood out.

This active rebounder and low block scorer had some moments in Houston, scoring 13 points and grabbing eight rebounds in the game we watched. If he ups his intensity he will be a force.

Seth Davis at SI.com, unsurprisingly puts Pitt in his “sell” category in his annual “Stock report” on NCAA Tournament Teams. I think the reasons are well known at this point.

You’ll want to keep an eye on this one because there’s still some talent here, but even though the Panthers put up a good fight at Villanova on Sunday before losing, the reality is they have lost two starters to injury, including the one guy they could least afford to lose in point guard Levance Fields. Not only is Ronald Ramon not a point guard, but if Ramon is running the offense, that means he isn’t catching the ball on the wing. They’re saying Fields might come back from his foot injury at the end of the season, but I doubt that will leave him enough time to take the Panthers deep into the NCAA tournament.

There’s a good chance Pitt will use a little more zone, as they did late against ‘Nova. Just don’t expect too much.

Ramon is going to have a hard time getting shots running the point. That was already rather obvious. Not sure he should try too hard to force it.

Ron Cook felt Pitt at least had a mental victory in Philly. Coach Dixon, though, doesn’t buy that stuff.

“Our guys feel they should have won this game — no matter how many players we have,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said, the deafening roar from the home crowd after Villanova’s 64-63 win still ringing in his aching ears.

“We still have the guys to get it done.”

Dixon seemed more disappointed, more frustrated, maybe even angrier after this game than he has been after other losses, although the truth is he has been so successful that there really hasn’t been much of a sampling to gauge. Maybe it was because he knows Pitt wasted a big chance to get a precious conference road win mostly because of 22 turnovers, some of which could be attributed to being without Fields — the team’s best player — and others to fatigue from having to play with such a short bench. More likely, though, it was because he knows this game quite likely provided a damning glimpse of how this Big East season will play out.

Contrast this approach with the poor mouthing and moaning by the coach of Pitt’s opponent on Saturday.

But Gonzalez, whose team is in Milwaukee to face No. 15 Marquette tonight in its second Big East game of the season, would argue that the loss of guard Paul Gause is more devastating to Seton Hall than Pittsburgh’s losses are to the Panthers.

“Pittsburgh loses Mike Cook and Levance Fields and they put in Terrell Biggs and Keith Benjamin — now, we would kill for those guys,” Gonzalez said after the Pirates’ victory over Morgan State on Saturday. “When Seton Hall loses Paul Gause, we can’t absorb that loss, like some of the rich people in the conference. We don’t have enough players, enough talent. So, it’s a fight. For us to win any game from here on out without Paul is going to be tough. Because it’s tough to win a league game on the road with him, it’s going to be really tough without him.”

Whether that is some sort of blunt assessment or a motivating tool to send a message to his players in the media, I don’t think much of it. It’s one thing to pull a Lou Holtz and puff an opponent. It’s another to essentially tell your team, they don’t have the talent to compete.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Pirates lost tonight to Marquette. It was a good effort by Seton Hall, and they were definitely helped by the fact that the refs swallowed their whistles on a lot of inside stuff — we can only hope for similar officiating when Pitt faces Marquette.