Perhaps it is fitting that Pitt plays at Marquette for the final time on this day. Pitt leaves for the ACC and Marquette prepares for being in the Big Priest in 2014, it is unlikely the two shall see much of each other beyond the rare tournament meeting.
The history of both schools very rarely crossed until that fateful Sweet Sixteen game in 2003. That followed their joining the Big East and the games became battles. Was it a rivalry? I can’t say that. But the games were always tough. Few were sure things one way or another. And today as it ends it happens to be on the game where the Golden Eagles honor their 2003 team.
Bastards.
Pitt is feeling more confident going into this game. Playing well. Healthy and liking their chances.
“We feel we’re a better team now than we were then, but we’ve got to show that and put that out on the floor,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. “We’ve got to guard the penetration and rebound. We got outrebounded the last game, but I made it clear to the guys that we haven’t won many games when we were outrebounded.”
Not only did Marquette hold a 38-33 rebounding edge, but Pitt also had no answer for Golden Eagles guard Vander Blue, who made 9-of-10 free throws and scored 22 points.
Blue, a 6-foot-4 junior, leads Marquette in scoring at 14.6 points a game. Stopping his dribble penetration will be key.
To that end, Pitt will probably throw out a zone more frequently.
Dixon’s 2-3 zone defense could be a key for the Panthers in the final weeks of the season, and especially so in a game at 1 p.m. today at No. 18 Marquette.
For one, the Panthers had trouble stopping the penetration of Marquette’s guards in the first game Jan. 12 against the Golden Eagles at Petersen Events Center. Vander Blue, who scored 22 points in Marquette’s 74-67 overtime victory, got past Pitt defenders repeatedly for easy buckets. The other reason for using a zone against the Golden Eagles is their poor outside shooting.
Marquette enters the game last in the Big East Conference in 3-point shooting percentage. The Golden Eagles make just 29.5 percent of their attempts from behind the arc.
Part of what Marquette does will center on the battles inside. Not simply the penetration by the perimeter players but how Pitt’s frontcourt is positioned for rebounds and simply clogging the lane. Marquette has actually been getting some production of their own inside as Chris Otule has finally had a healthy season.
To put Otule’s career in perspective, he has played 79 games in five years. Twenty-two of those games, all starts, have occurred this season. For the first time since 2010, his body is not betraying him.
As a result, Otule has been quite effective lately. In the loss Monday night to No. 15 Georgetown, he scored eight of Marquette’s first 11 points. Before that, he dropped six quick points on DePaul with short hooks, almost before the Blue Demons knew what hit them.
“I think a lot of it has to do with how hard you want to go on the court,” Otule said. “Like I said at Georgetown, you can’t go into every game thinking about how many points I’m going to score and how many rebounds I’m going to get. You’ve got off what you’re in control of, and you’re in control of your energy every game.
Otule is 6-11. In his time at Marquette he has broken both feet and last year suffered a major knee injury. This is his fifth year at Marquette and is eligible for a sixth. That is an injury ravaged career.
It also means Otule does not play for long stretches. He can go hard, but only for about a max of four minutes.
As for this game, it matters for Pitt in more than simply the Big East standings. It has implications for seeding in the NCAA Tournament.
Marquette’s RPI is 15, compared to Pitt’s 31. That’s the highest RPI of any of the Panthers’ final five regular-season opponents.
“It is not just critical for their RPI, but their NCAA Tournament seeding,” said CBS Sports bracketology analyst Jerry Palm, an RPI expert. “This is a team that Pittsburgh would be competing with in roughly the same part of the bracket. If they can win games like that, it helps them in terms of the seeding.”
Palm projects Pitt as a No. 5 seed and Marquette No. 6, as does Sporting News in its most recent field of 68 prediction.
That the Panthers are starting to gain national notice has something to do with their ranking among the nation’s leaders in both offensive efficiency (seventh, 1.133) and defensive efficiency (12th, 0.869).
“That’s something the national writers pay close attention to, and people are going to think there’s something behind it,” Sporting News national college basketball analyst Mike DeCourcy said. “They have great ability and potential to be in good shape when selection time comes. I certainly don’t think a 5-seed is their ceiling, or their floor.”
…
With St. John’s (15-9) and DePaul (10-14) the only other remaining road games, the Marquette game also is Pitt’s last chance to beat a ranked team away from Petersen Events Center. And every win away from home, including neutral sites, helps with the NCAA Selection Committee. The Panthers are 4-2 on the road and 2-1 at neutral venues this season.
As for Marquette, they are coming off an embarrassing loss to Georgetown. One where they managed to turn the ball over 19 times. Against a team that doesn’t force turnovers. There is no doubt they will be trying to put that game behind them.
1 pm game on CBS.
Palermo to be LB coach, I assume Haering moves to DB
Now, I will just have to force myself to avoid the blog for the next week or so to avoid the “I’m selling my tickets and will never be a Pitt fan again” hyperbole!
It is imperative they get to finally build on the previous year.
A double bye would be huge. They would only have to win two games to get to the final. They will be favored to win the first game, and depending on the match up, maybe a big favorite.
But for the to happen, Pitt is going to need to run the table and get some help to get into the top four.
‘cuse 9-3
Gtown 9-3
Marq 9-3
‘ville 9-4
Pitt 8-5
Pitt loses the tie breaker to L-ville and Marquette. Has it on ‘cuse and Gtown. For Pitt to jump any of them, they need them to lose 2.
They all have tougher schedules than Pitt. Pitt will be a double digit favorite from here on. Syracuse is the key. They play G-town twice, at Marquette, and Louisville. Georgetown also has to go to Nova and UConn, not easy wins. It is likely (very likely) that at least one of those teams will lose two.
Starts tonight, run the table. Tonight is HUGE.
Dixon should be hung for playing him 21 minutes.
All in all, though, if I have the choice, I’ll take the double bye!
I’m behind HCPC. I have no problem if he couldn’t get his guy at SF or maybe his 2nd from somewhere else.
Only problem I’d have, if he had other choices, and S.P. told him they’re not in the budget.
A.K.A. Pitt going cheap again.
If that’s not the case, then good luck to the DC.
and i thought they were serious abought football when we moved to the ACC.
he could have hired house 6 weeks ago i guess
they did not want to spend the money on a real
DC .
we are fucked maybe 3 wins next year if we are lucky.
I was hoping for a split between Marquette and Cincy and we got it. No one in the country would have beat Marquette on Saturday. They were hitting everything. Marquette was always going to be extra ready for that game because they were coming off a double digit loss against G-Town.
Expect a much better effort from ND today because they are coming off a bad loss (all Pitt does is play teams coming off of losses this year). Also, expect a really ugly game because Mike Brey always mucks up the game against Pitt. That is his formula for beating Dixon. I hope I won’t be too disgusted with the ugliness at the Pete tonight.
And for this Pitt team, which is not as talented as Louisville and UConn were, a double bye is critical. Pitt is going to have to grind out wins. They don’t have a Kemba or Peyton Siva who can get hot and take over a tournament.
Anyone who questions Adams toughness isn’t seeing what I’m seeing, especially LATELY. Of the problems Pitt has, Adams toughness is about 20th on the list.
It is easier to get a sense for what is going on IN PERSON than it is on TV. In the Seton Hall game, Adams was a beast. Not only didn’t he shy away from contact with their big guys, he initiated it and worked them over.
The game changes when Adams is in there, he alters many more shots than he blocks. He influences many more rebounds than he gets.
Without him, Pitt is just a little bit better than last year’s team.
On Patterson, good to see him being more vocal. But I would rather see him play better defense. Lead by example. His defense (or lack thereof) was as much a factor in losing the game at Marquette as anything else.
At face value, this is a meh move. It’s a reach to say that the staff was improved, going from experience to no experience at coordinator, and seemingly not upgrading the southern recruiting ties much if at all with Palermo. I guess time will tell, but I was certainly hoping for more. Maybe in 2 years this will be genius, but I fear it is yet another case with Pitt of “you get what you pay for”.
Lets kick some Domer ass tonight. Sick of losing to inferior ND teams. If karma is anything, we come back late from down 14, get a couple of bad calls to go our way, and win in 3 OTs after their best FT shooter misses the game winner at the end of the second OT. H2P
Maybe House will surprise and be a good DC, BUT Pitt should NOT be the place where a young kid cuts his DC teeth.
Pitt needed a proven experienced DC with ties to the South. They were probably too cheap and Chryst was not comfortable with people he doesn’t know.
Well sometimes if you pay strangers good money, you get fantastic results. Chryst and Pitt should try that sometime.
“it would smell of desperation and cheapness”.
I’m trying to keep a brave face on.
Cuse was coming off an OT loss at Nova when we beat them at the Pete.
Nova was coming off a road loss to Cuse when we beat them at their place.
So the loss Saturday was an anomaly that we can reverse tonight.
How is Chryst as a boss? Is he too controlling?
How is Pitt in terms of pay? Is our AD too cheap?
How much differnce in his game we’ll see is if the coaching staff encourages him to take his best offensive weapon (15ft. jumper) and how ready Yong is to start at the 4.
Playing for a team with no offensive weapons is difficult enough but when the 4 on your team is ignored so Adams is always doubled teamed it’s impossible.
And despite all of the above pro-Chryst comments (or whoever is the current coach as this site has shown time and again) it shoud be apparent that there are issues here … whether it be monet or that the current hed coach has control and/or trust problems.
I have no doubt that House is a promising coaching prospect but the fact that 2 of the coaches on his staff has 3 years cfb experience combined, while the 3rd is completely new to the program should be troubling even to those wearing the thickest blue and gold glasses.
Marquette (17), tOSU (18), Wisky (19), Pitt (20).
Ugh, this doesn’t give me much comfort that PC’s learning curve is any less steep after his first year.
Realistic. If House is the guy for the job now, why wasn’t he two months ago???
Maybe he’ll suprise me and some others, I hope.
Again, while House may well be a great coach in the future, he is clearly not as accomplished as the Bowling Green DC …. not even close!!
Like Dan, I hope I am proven wrong but right now, we have every reason to be cynical
There are many far more qualified candidates out there with the experience and results.
House is a 34 year old baby with very little experience at coaching anything. And now he is the DC of a ‘major’ program.
He in all likelihood was hired because he has an easy time saying ‘yes’ Paul and because he didn’t break Stevie’s bank.
Same ole Pitt being cheap. Same ole Pitt fans accepting flawed reasoning and bad results.
And, I’m supposed to take Pitt serious and give them my hard earned money. Fuck em!
then i will post more on this DC hire
i cant see how we are serious abought football
with this hire it reeks of desperation
or as Wbb has said in the past a total mistrust of any one he is not connected with.
if you think this was the best DC out there
you have drunk to much koolaid
he does not say he was the best coach for the job you and i know he cant say that with out lieing.
this is house experence 3 years as a strenth and conditioing coach 1 year as a qulity control coach and 1 year as a db coach sure he is really ready for this job we are fucked.
Pomeroy has this column behind the INSIDER paywall.
That being said, I don’t see this as a money related hire. I see this being a Chryst I only hire my guys hire. Like someone point out, Orlando was hired as the DC at Utah St. No way Utah St. pays their coordinator more than Pitt. Also, Randy Shannon was hired as the LB coach at Arkansas. Even if a LB coach at Arkansas makes the same as a DC at Pitt, Randy Shannon was begging to be a DC somewhere. I’m sure if the money was about the same he would have went to Pitt to be DC. Look at his staff, they all have past connections to Chryst or someone he knows. Inoke Breckterfield is a perfect example of Chryst just taking one of his guys to be coach. The guy has no east coast ties, it’s no wonder he only got 2 recruits in the 2013 class. I don’t care if Brecterfield is a great D-line coach, the program would be much better off with a mediocre D-line coach who could recruit with the best of them.
The fact that not every fan is outraged by the Pitt football program’s latest flub is why the administration continues to not give a damn
Dokish has a handful of other choice tweets — he clearly is not drinking the koolaid
We win tonight and I’m happy. It will be our RPI and not the polls that determine our seeding.
Maybe Chryst is a good fit here for the wrong reasons; that is, he too is willing to accept less than the best for a certain level of personal comfort. I hope I’m wrong, but this “hire” doesn’t look good from where I sit in Section 532.
it is on him.
and if the AD was not cheap but he let chryst hire him then it is his fault for not steping
in and telling him to hire some one better.
so eather way the AD is to blame as is chryst.
Fundamentally I will go with Chryst’s judgment because it is just his second year and until he proves himself a genius or an idiot I am backing the guy.
It is not money matters, stevie or anything other than this is a HC who is making his decisions to build his program the way in envisions.. and he will live and die by the results. He made his decision based on his options (whatever they really were… would be good to know).
Jamie Dixon but more so Mike Tomlin are examples of many who made the jump… and most comments here if you replaced Steelers and Tomlin it would be a rerun…. he is still a ‘Kid’ at 35ish? Steelers a ‘destination’ job… etc. etc…
– PC made the tougher choice for public opinion/cover-my-ass point of view, so that shows he is building this the way he wants to and will not play to the media or public…
– his ‘safe’ choice would have been a “seasoned” DC with Pitt ties (Orlando) and then if the D blew up he blames him… good way to go if you are CYA kinda guy.
– Here PC made HIS choice and he is going to own it… live or die by it.
– I am not a fan of ‘retread’ coaching hires. Orlando and all these guys are out of work and bouncing around for a reason…
– I wonder if this regime is also counter-trend in terms of recruiting and is not going to fight it out in the southeast where there is a ton of competition… rather going for other parts of the country. And that is not a bad thing… check out U of Miami blogs, etc. and you see how tough it is for them to get Florida talent and how they are complaining.
Bottom line Chryst makes his calls on his timeline and he is not concerned about media and popular opinion… frankly that is the main reason to be optimistic.
W-L next year is all that matters.
Pitt is nation’s most underrated
By Ken Pomeroy
Special to ESPN Insider
J.J. Moore and Pittsburgh rank fourth in the Big East in adjusted defensive efficiency.
I think it’s safe to say that no team has underachieved its numbers more than the Pittsburgh Panthers. Even after losing at Marquette on Saturday, Pitt has outscored its Big East opponents by 89 points, which suggests it’s more like a 10-3 Big East team than the 8-5 record it currently owns.
And it’s not as though Jamie Dixon’s team has done this against a weak conference schedule. To the contrary, they have drawn the short straw schedule-wise. Among teams in the top half of the Big East, they’ve played easily the toughest conference slate so far, already racking up games against Syracuse, Louisville and Georgetown, with two each against Marquette and Cincinnati. That represents over half of their Big East games to this point.
The eye test, however, is not all that flattering to Pitt. In general, I feel that the eye test often fails for teams that play at a slow pace and don’t shoot particularly well. Over the past decade, Pittsburgh has often been the standard for teams that are able to score deceptively well on a per-possession basis. Dixon’s history as head coach is littered with squads that dominated the offensive boards and took care of the ball well enough to convert unspectacular shooting accuracy into an effective scoring machine.
This season is no different. The Panthers rank 84th nationally in the NCAA’s version of scoring offense, averaging 71 points per game. That’s actually impressively high considering that Pitt ranks as the 14th-slowest team in terms of adjusted tempo this season. In fact, this may end up being the slowest-paced team Dixon has put on the floor in his 10 seasons at Pitt. The Panthers have played only five games with at least 65 possessions. Two of them were in overtime, and another was against DePaul, the second-fastest team in the country in terms of adjusted tempo.
The Panthers haven’t been a great shooting team this season, but it would be unfair to say they are shooting poorly. In conference play, they rank sixth in the Big East in 2-point percentage and fourth in 3-point percentage, although they rarely take outside shots. And therein lies one of Dixon’s secrets: The ability to get a high percentage of shot attempts in the paint allows his team to retrieve a lot of those misses. The Panthers are currently third in the country in offensive rebounding percentage, and if they finish that way it would mark the fourth time in five seasons Pitt has finished in the top three in that category. While Pitt’s offense may not necessarily be feared, the combination of above average shooting and elite offensive rebounding is a good recipe to score points efficiently. And the Panthers rank fourth in the conference in points per possession even against that difficult schedule so far.
I probably don’t need to do much work to convince you that Pitt has a very good defense. The Panthers’ reputation in that area has long benefited from their slow pace of play, even in seasons where that defense might not have been so great at stopping opponents on a per-possession basis. That’s the weird thing about Dixon’s reputation as a coach. In three of his previous nine seasons coaching Pitt, the Panthers’ adjusted offensive efficiency has ranked higher than their adjusted defensive efficiency, and this season is no different.
In last year’s debacle — the first time Pitt missed the NCAA tournament under Dixon — it was the defense that cratered, ranking 151st nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency and 12th in the Big East during conference play. This season, though, the defense is back to an acceptable level for a team that has aspirations of a deep tournament run, Saturday’s Marquette loss notwithstanding. Like the offense, it ranks fourth in the conference.
Jamie Dixon’s Pitt team once again features a slew of top offensive rebounders.
For a season where scoring is down to a historic low largely because coaches have abandoned aggressive offensive rebounding in favor of preventing transition opportunities, Pitt is proving you can crash the glass and play good defense too. (In fact, there are plenty of examples of teams that crash the boards and still maintain a quality defense. Conference-mate Syracuse is another case.)
Of course, it helps to have Talib Zanna and Steven Adams, a pair of big men who are elite offensive rebounders. Dixon doesn’t have to sacrifice transition by sending a bunch of players to the glass. Those two alone do enough work to make the Panthers a formidable offensive rebounding team.
This has been the most underappreciated trait of Dixon’s coaching over the years. His teams are consistently great at offensive rebounding, but it’s not that he maniacally sends a bunch of players to the boards, or even insists on always sending as many as three. He has been able to plug guys into the power forward and center positions who gobble up second chances as well as anyone. This season, Adams has produced as a freshman, replacing what Dante Taylor gave Pitt last season. Before Taylor, there were guys such as Gary McGhee, DeJuan Blair, Aaron Gray, Chevy Troutman and Chris Taft. Every Pitt team under Dixon has featured an elite offensive rebounder and often two.
I don’t know if there’s another coach who is seemingly able to turn any big man into an offensive rebounding force, but it’s not a quality that gets enough attention. This is especially intriguing considering it’s on a team that typically plays at a fairly slow pace and therefore doesn’t rack up huge scoring numbers.
But that quality has allowed the Panthers’ offense to perform well this season, and with a defense that has returned to form, Pitt is a team that should be feared even if its record doesn’t capture your attention. I’ll admit, like most observers, classifying Pitt as one of the nation’s top teams is not something my eyes are comfortable with. But its overall production suggests it could be one of the 10 best teams in the country.
A tough conference schedule, slow pace and outstanding rebounding are hiding an offense that may be judged too harshly by human voters.
and i will post it now.
if pitt wins 6 games next year and the D plays
good and i dont count a 38 to 35 win as the D
playing well i will come on here and say i am a jack ass and chryst knew what he was doeing.
but if we win 5 games or less and the D is not playing well you koolaid drinkers come on and say chryst was wrong and he was the jackass that
as fair as it gets.
As I’ve said before, I care less about process or resumes than I do about results. So, I will judge HCPC and his hires at the end of the season. In the meantime, he and they have my support.
HTP!!!
Well said Pitt Dad on all fronts including supporting Frankcan’s passionate stand.
The junior day just happened so he must of liked how all the recruits and staff interacted? So to that most important constituency he must like how this staff is handling recruiting.
Hey, at least this is not a CYA call where he can blame the coach retread and no one would have blinked.
His team, his staff, his call… and it seems he wants it that way.
