I’m rather cynical about most things. Especially when it comes to sports. Yet, I have to admit to being taken aback by the way Coach Wannstedt is acting.

Then Pitt’s administration tried to do the right thing by giving him a few days to decide if he wanted to coach the bowl game. As of today, he still has not given Steve Pederson his final decision. And the times I have talked to him over the past two weeks – the last time being Thursday – he said he was “going to work with the team, get them prepared, run practices and then wait to see where he is at and how he feels next week” before he makes his decision. Now, that is what he has said and that is what he is saying on the record.

Unfortunately, he has also told a number of people around him he is not likely to coach in the game and that he doesn’t want to go through a week of news conferences and luncheons and all of that “play happy” stuff. If it was just about the game, he would coach but all the other stuff he’s not sure he wants to go through.

I do know this – if he doesn’t coach, it will be defensive coordinator Phil Bennett who will be in charge and run things through the bowl. And while Hafley is gone and at least one more is likely to be gone shortly, for the most part the current assistants will coach through the bowl game.

I get that he is probably a bit bitter about the whole thing. I am sure he still feels blindsinded and never saw the firing coming. It’s seems obvious that he feels betrayed by AD Pederson, and this kind of putting off the decision is as much to get back at Pederson as anything else.

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Plenty to run through as UConn-Pitt was the marquee game in college basketball last night. The overarching theme is that  UConn had the best player on the court, but Pitt was so clearly the better team. Not to mention the argument in favor of experience over a young team.

Pitt, the Big East preseason favorite, never trailed and led by as many as 17 points in the second half to improve to 48-1 in its past 49 home games.

“I think we showed what a veteran team we are,” Gibbs said. “I think it was more of us being an experienced team rather than them being a young team.”

The past 11 meetings between the two Big East rivals have been decided by 10 points or fewer, but the over-capacity crowd of 12,725 saw Pitt’s most lopsided regular-season victory over Connecticut in 23 years.

A point that even Jim Calhoun had to acknowledge.

I thought they just locked us up defensively. … We thought the bailout would be a fall away three pointer or some tough shots. The only thing we did was rebound. … I thought we didn’t react well to being manhandled defensively. I think a lot of players, young players in particular, predicate their whole game [making jump shots]. They weren’t allowing us to get good shots. We took some ill-advised ones.

When you look at the box score — whether the basic or advanced — UConn’s shot numbers jump out. Pitt held the Huskies overall to 19 of 60 (31.7%). It gets more absurd when you see that Kemba Walker shot 10-27 (37%) and the rest of the UConn squad shot 9-33 (27.3%).

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