So, yes, Pitt re-entered the AP poll at #24 this week, while remaining outside the Coaches — at roughly #33. The oh-so vital blogpoll has Pitt outside the top-25 at roughly #32.
For those of you ticked that I don’t have Pitt in my top-25, well tough. I’m a homer, but that doesn’t mean I have to vote for them when I don’t think they are a top-25 team right now. Yes, some bloggers who vote are probably pushing their team higher. That’s fine. If their biases are that strong, they can go that way. I don’t particularly like it, and the “everybody else is doing it” argument is weak.
I need to see them show another effort like the USF game. It took until Game 5 for the entire squad — from the coaches to the players — to play a full 4-quarters. That’s a serious issue. Everything is there, but the consistency. Maybe I’m being harder on them because I watch this team so closely, but I am still not sure what I will see from Pitt on the 18th.
One other thing. It’s been pointed out that Pitt isn’t going to kill a lot of teams in the final score. That is very true. It also means that it will be hard for Pitt to get too high in the polls without a lot of teams in front losing — big. Grinding games, where Pitt scores in the mid-20s and opposing teams score around 20 just does not look like a team that can be trusted to win every week by voters (presently Pitt’s averaging 25 ppg while allowing 21.6).
In that respect, Pitt is a lot like UConn and Wake Forest. The result is also going to be the same. When the team wins, it will be a incremental climb. A loss and the drop is substantial — because the lack of trust in the team is confirmed.
The value of winning the game on a Thursday night is tremendous in attention. Just as Pitt has learned the previous years how negatively it is viewed when you lose. If Pitt had beaten USF on Saturday without national coverage, they would not have gotten into the top-25 in any poll.
