Several little bits and stories that I had collected but not posted before the Cinci loss.

SI On Campus sings the praises of how Pitt responded to all of the injuries.

In college basketball, depth is the great unknown. Coaches don’t know if they’ll need it and fans don’t really know if their teams have it — until a player or two gets injured and everybody finds out.

…

Jamie Dixon, on the other hand, is in finding out what his Pitt squad is made of. December injuries to starters Mike Cook (torn ACL) and Levance Fields (broken foot) seemed to decimate the Panthers, who struggled in a subsequent loss to Villanova. National pundits piled on, all but banishing Pittsburgh from March Madness months before Selection Sunday. But then a funny thing happened. Ronald Ramon and Keith Benjamin — Dixon’s replacements at point guard and small forward, respectively — each scored 18 points in Monday’s upset of No. 5 Georgetown. Happy days were back again.

Similar theme in the Hartford Courant‘s BE Notebook story.

“We’ve had to change, but change is part of the game,” Dixon said. “We’ve lost two or three starters every year for the last four or five years. You have to make adjustments and play to your strengths.”

While Pittsburgh is running more, the biggest changes have come in practice, Dixon said. The Panthers are essentially down to a seven-man rotation and, depending on the turnout of walk-ons on a given day, often don’t have enough players to go 5-on-5 in practice. The emphasis has been on preservation — avoiding injury and resting overworked players — and on skill and instruction.

“We have limited the contact,” Dixon said. “We’ve probably done more conditioning but less 5-on-5 because we don’t have the bodies. We’ve had very good intensity and very good focus.”

That part about the practice, probably came from a story in the P-G last week about having to lighten the intensity of practice.

I do wonder about how DeJuan Blair keeps getting considered a “lightly recruited” player. He wasn’t heavily recruited as a sophomore if that’s what they mean. His recruitment was anything but light in his senior year, as he showed full recovery from knee surgeries.