Trying to catch up to things.

I guess it was a little unrealistic to assume Pitt would just flow immediately with the return of Fields. Even Louisville struggled to get things right when David Padgett returned. They lost to Cinci in Freedom Hall in his return, but were lucky enough not to not to be playing the best of the Big East to get things together. UConn had a stretch losing 3 of 4 including a 12 point loss at home to Providence when Calhoun was not on the bench for half the time because of the flu. I guess that’s why I’m not too freaked. There’s still time. The only thing that this is costing Pitt is seeding and some pride. They aren’t on the bubble.
The defense had been huge for the team while Fields has been out. It hasn’t been up to snuff the last few games, but it is much more correctable.

This is only the second 3-game losing streak in 5 years under Dixon. Pitt had been the only team in the Big East not to lose at least 3 games in a row in the past 3 seasons until the Louisville loss.

Jay Bilas joins with Pitt fans in wondering “what if” for this year.

Pittsburgh: It is impossible for me to watch Pitt without thinking about Mike Cook, and just how good Pitt could have been with him and a healthy Levance Fields for an entire season. It is a real tribute to that team and program that the Panthers will be in the NCAA Tournament, but the injuries have really affected what could have been a truly special season.

And in another year, only Pitt fans will remember the whole “what if” aspect.

Card Chronicle had a good recap of Louisville perspective of the win. He’s right about the number of open looks for both teams.

Generally, the Louisville view is that this was a big win especially because of how well the offense looked. Nevermind that Pitt — as we all know — has been struggling defensively in the past week, and that Pitt wasn’t bothered by their pressure defense and picked them apart. I’m not saying they shouldn’t feel good about being the first team to beat Pitt twice at the Pete, but they’d be foolish to read too much into it right now.

Overall, Pitt just needs to get more from the guards. The backcourt is a struggle.

Young and Blair each scored 20 points for the Panthers, but the guards once again failed to do their part from the outside. Pitt was 6 for 21 from 3-point range and is 14 for 57 from behind the arc in the three-game losing streak.

“I’m shooting bricks,” said Fields, who was 4 for 13 from the field and 0 for 4 from 3-point range. “I couldn’t make any shots on the perimeter. [Young and Blair] did everything they were supposed to do down low. They gave us everything we needed to win this game. As a point guard, I didn’t come up big for them down the stretch.”

Reality and stats collide.

When an opponent shot better than 40 percent from the field against Pitt in previous seasons it raised some eyebrows. Now it has become a common occurrence. Ten of the first 14 Big East teams have shot more than 40 percent.

Um, last year opposing teams shot .407 versus Pitt. This year it is .416. Oh, and in 11 of 16 Big East games, the opposing teams shot more than 40% (PDF).

The players aren’t happy about losing. Go figure.

– The game against Notre Dame is the only kickoff time known right now because NBC has exclusive rights to ND games.

– December in Connecticut will be cold.

– The Backyard Brawl is set for Friday, November 28, the day after Thanksgiving. I wouldn’t mind this game to be played on this day normally, except it could end up being a noon or afternoon game. It’s on ABC, which previously had Texas/Texas A&M in the afternoons for the past few years, but they’re moving that game to Thanksgiving night on ESPN. I’m not really too high on the idea of an afternoon Brawl. Also, it’s always odd not finishing the regular season with WVU.

– The WPIAL championship games will likely be played on Saturday the 29th of November, the day after the Pitt game. Therefore the Friday night game won’t take away from any high school games, plus Pitt would be playing before the field gets torn up by the HS games.

– The game against South Florida comes just five days after playing up in Syracuse. Between traveling across the country and a short practice week, it should be interesting to see how the team responds.

– Following the USF game, Pitt has a a bye week before Navy. That’s an 18 day(!) break. So we have five days off before one game then 18 before the next…something seems weird.

– On both August 30 (Bowling Green) and September 20 (Iowa), the Pirates play a 7:05 pm home game. Expect a noon start (ugh). Remember: a good Pitt team will be forced to play at a bad time because of a baseball team that has had 14 losing seasons and will be out of contention by mid-May. Oh, and I’m still a Buccos fan.

Updates: WPIAL finals will be played the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Pitt-WVU is a noon kickoff on ABC.

Yes, this is probably just the “exception.” That there are no WPIAL games (probably) or such. Whatever. It didn’t take long for ESPN and the Big East to force Pitt back into a Friday night home game.

Pitt’s annual Backyard Brawl rivalry game against West Virginia will be played on Friday, Nov. 28, at Heinz Field and will be televised by ABC.

Unlike last season, when Pitt upset West Virginia 13-9 on Dec. 1 to put the Mountaineers out of the national title game, the game will not end each team’s regular season. On Dec. 6, Pitt finishes at Connecticut, while West Virginia plays South Florida at home.

Pitt and West Virginia also played on the Friday following Thanksgiving in 1997, 1998 and 2000, with the 1998 and 2000 games at Three Rivers Stadium. Pitt staged a 41-38, three-overtime upset at West Virginia in 1997.

The conference schedule was announced by the Big East.

Date Opponent Time

Aug. 30 Bowling Green TBA

Sept. 6 Buffalo TBA

Sept. 20 Iowa TBA

Sept. 27 at Syracuse* TBA

Oct. 2 (Thurs.) at USF* (ESPN) TBA

Oct. 18 at Navy TBA

Oct. 25 Rutgers* TBA

Nov. 1 at Notre Dame (NBC) 2:30 p.m.

Nov. 8 Louisville* TBA

Nov. 22 at Cincinnati* TBA

Nov. 28 (Fri.) West Virginia* (ABC) TBA

Dec. 6 at Connecticut* (ESPN/ESPN2) TBA

Don’t expect a lot of late starts. ESPN Regional will likely pick up a bunch of the games.

So, yes, at long last, Pitt fell out of the top-25 in both polls. A week of doom to be sure as it’s the first time in 43 consecutive weeks that Pitt wasn’t ranked. Oh, well.

In the Q&As Fittipaldo points out a good reason for struggles in February.

Q: Coach (Jamie) Dixon always talks about continually getting better, yet Pitt seems to hit a wall every February. I was hoping this year would be different because the freshmen would improve, but they seemed to have regressed over the past few weeks. Why does this continue to happen?

FITTIPALDO: Pitt is 2-2 this February. The Panthers were 5-2 last February, 4-3 in February of 2006, 4-4 in February of ‘05 and 6-2 in ‘04. The only year the Panthers might have regressed at the end of the season was ‘05 when they lost four of their final six games and were knocked out in the first round of the Big East and NCAA tournaments.

You might be noticing that Pitt does not win as many games in February as January, but there is a reason for that. The top teams in the Big East are desired by the television networks for marquee games with other top teams. The TV networks begin to televise most of their better games in February and March, when more people are more inclined to tune in. CBS and ESPN do not want to compete with the NFL playoffs. If you noticed, the first half of Pitt’s schedule featured many of the bottom-rung teams in the league. The second half of the schedule features teams competing for NCAA tournament berths. That’s because the networks dictated which games they wanted to televise.

Good point, but it never stops sports writers from talking about how Pitt is struggling at the end of the season.

An article on Jermaine Dixon that is at least somewhat reassuring.

A Baltimore native, Dixon is one of the leading candidates for Player of the Year in the Panhandle Conference, regarded as one of the most competitive Juco conferences in the nation.

“Basically, Jermaine is a big, athletic guard who can go from A to Z very quick,” Tallahassee CC coach Eddie Barnes said. “He’s a good kid. He’s very coachable. He loves to compete. He’s going to compete at the highest level (in the Big East). He’s a dream guard. It’s going to be hard for me to replace him.”

The left-handed Dixon averages 21.0 points and about 7.0 rebounds and 4.0 assists per game.

His work ethic on the court doesn’t seem to be in question and he is apparently one of those high-motor players. Anyone familiar with what the Dixon boys have overcome should want to root for his success.

There’s more Pitt recruiting stuff here.

Suddenly the reports are that Fields might be ready by the middle of the month.

Junior point guard Levance Fields is expected to return to practice today when the Panthers begin preparations for the Providence game Tuesday night at the Petersen Events Center. Fields was cleared by team doctors Thursday afternoon to resume basketball activities.

Well, practice turned out to be delayed a day, but Fields did take part in shooting drills. He’s definitely not going to be playing on Tuesday. That just strikes me as Dixon refusing to put any timetable — moved up or back.

The win moved Pitt up to 5th in the Big East and WVU slid to 9th. So, naturally that means it’s time to worry about the NCAA Tournaments and conferences getting enough of their teams into the show.

What really matters, is how does Pitt look as the selection time is a month away?

“Look around the country and try to find me a team that doesn’t have a bad loss,” Parrish said. “They are almost nonexistent. Tennessee, the No. 1 RPI, lost to Kentucky (11-9). North Carolina lost to Maryland at home. UCLA lost to USC (at home). And those are the No. 1 or 2 seeds. Those losses aren’t as bad as Rutgers. But those are the elite teams.”

“At this point, Pitt isn’t going to be a one- or a two-seed anyway, so only one bad loss on your resume (Rutgers) is going to be fine. … I would suspect on Selection Sunday that Pitt will get a better number than most people would think. The committee is not going to forget about Levance.”

All of this assumes, of course, that Pitt qualifies for the NCAA Tournament for the seventh consecutive season.

The Panthers seem to be a good bet, provided they go .500 or better over their final eight games. That would give them 10 conference wins.

Does 10-8 in the Big East make Pitt a lock? Yes.

Yippee.  Of course that means going at least 4-4 with games that have a rather rough stretch looming. After Providence it is at ND, at Marquette, Louisville, at Syracuse (unpredictable) and at WVU before finishing with DePaul. The

The NYC media finds its two themes for the game tomorrow.

There is the previously discussed: Blair and Kennedy are close friends and played together at Schenley.

Then there is the Pitt has battled injuries, but keeps winning.

After losing two more players who play minor roles, and the Panthers’ roster reads like a sign-up sheet in the emergency room. Yet Pittsburgh has pushed ahead behind Dixon’s optimism and his mantra of no excuses, even though the extenuating circumstances are plentiful.

“Even when guys went down, he believed,” Ramon said of Dixon. “He believed in guys who hadn’t done this before. He kept teaching and put his trust out there and believed in us even more. He didn’t say we’d just do the best we can.”

There have been adjustments, which only add to the tale.

The team’s practices have become more finesse than physical, with the fear of losing another player being far too real. Dixon even had to bring aboard a Division II transfer, Ryan Tiesi, who scored 4.2 points a game for Bellarmine University last season, just to have enough bodies to practice effectively.

Dixon said that other coaches, friends of his, told him that he might as well forget about the rest of the season. “But I had seen our guys in practice and knew we had answers,” Dixon said. “You have to go with your heart. I felt we had the players to make it work.”

Pitt does need a road win. Beating USF hardly counts, and no one wants to lose two in a row.

Pitt, stinging from a 62-59 loss at Cincinnati, is 1-2 on the road in Big East games. The Panthers will need a victory at St. John’s to avoid losing two games in a row for only the sixth time under Dixon, spanning 153 games.

“This is a great time to show people that we can win on the road,” said Benjamin, averaging 16.0 points per game since moving into the starting lineup for injured Levance Fields. “You have to win games on the road and this is a good time to win one.”

Also, schedule and record-wise, this and the Rutgers games are must wins. Pitt is heading for a brutal second half — ‘Nova, @UConn, WVU, Providence, @Marquette, @ND, L-ville, Cinci, @Syr and @WVU. Even at full strength it wouldn’t have been outrageous for Pitt to lose 3 or 4 of those games.

I’ve had this in my bookmarks since back in late December and I’m finally getting around to it now. What is this map with seemingly random markers on it? It’s the locations of Pitt football’s away football games since 1998. MapGameDay.com posted maps for all of the FBS teams and made them sortable by teams and conferences. The Wizard of Odds then compiled all of the data and made fancy graphs from that.

According to this, the farthest we’ve traveled in each compass direction.

North: @ Syracuse (’98, ‘00, ‘02, ‘04, ‘06) in Syracuse, NY
South: @ Miami (’98, ‘00, ‘02) in Miami, FL
East: @ Boston College (’99, ‘01, ‘03) in Chestnut Hill, MA
West: @ Nebraska (’05) in Lincoln, NE

Our amount of travel compared to other Big East teams?

And as a whole, the Big East travels less than every other conference except the ACC and SEC. Of course, the fact we only have 8 teams in our conference might lead to that.

I have been trying to catch up with reality after a long break away over Thanksgiving. That has meant a bit of neglect here on one of the most important weeks for Pitt football. I’m feeling a bit of guilt, so it’s time to kick off a little hate.

The ‘Eers are in the hunt for going to the BCS game. They benefited from the Big East scheduling them to have 3 of their final 4 games at home. Something most teams in a national title hunt would happily welcome. What team wouldn’t want to come down the final stretch and be in front of a home crowd? Apparently the team with a buckskin-clad mascot and like to stress their hale and hearty constitutions are a wee bit put off by having to play so many games in the cold. Seriously?

WVU athletic officials have brought this matter to the conference’s attention, according to coach Rich Rodriguez. He believes the fans deserve a better shake. “I would have preferred to have more Big East home games during the season in the month of October,” he said a week ago. “I think it’s the second year in a row we’ve had more games in November and December.”

Would he? Really? He would rather have more road games at this point for the comfort of fans? Fans who would otherwise be pissed at not having their team at home very much as they approach heading to the BCS Championship? Personally, while I grudgingly admire the coaching of Rodriguez — developing players for his system, teaching them and becoming the Yoda of the spread option — I think Rodriguez is more than a little bit of a whiner who would be complaining if the team had only one home game in November.

My fellow Fanhouser and unfortunate WVU alum, John Radcliff (who wrote the post linked above) has seen Mountaineer Stadium lose its edge in the last couple years. So, he seems to believe that it is the moneyed alum are responsible for bitching to the WVU officials.

Perhaps. Like I said, Rodriguez is a whiner by nature it seems. Whine, whine, whine.

Coach Rich Rodriguez is not exactly giddy about playing a game amid hunting season.

Not so much deer-hunting season — and a host of West Virginians and Western Pennsylvanians partake in that — but rather the period for tracking down prospective Mountaineers still in high school or junior colleges.

“This is the third year in a row West Virginia has missed a week” of the recruiting period, Rodriguez said yesterday. “When we only have six weeks of a recruiting-contact period, losing a week hurts.”

…

“I see a lot of people doing it,” he added of a rivalry finale. “I just don’t like playing it in December. Playing it this late, I don’t know if it’s that fun for our fans out there.”

Pathetic. Mountaineer fans not liking the cold. WVU officials complaining about too many home games late in the season. And a coach always complains about something.

Ahhhh. I feel better.

The title suggests plenty to cover, so let’s go.

During the last year or two, Pitt fans have been a bit upset at the Big East for making our conference home schedules so uneven. One year we’ll have the loaded side with Louisville, WVU, and Rutgers. Before this season we thought that the opposite year’s BE home games would be bad — not anymore (or at least this year).

We knew South Florida was going to be good, but I don’t think anyone could have predicted them to be “Top 5 good”. Cincinnati has seemingly come out of nowhere to become a ranked team with a great coach who knows how to get his players to play well. With this rotation we also get to see UConn, who might not be amazing but a team we seem to make into a National Championship caliber squad. Add in Syracuse, a team that we should be happy to play just because it might allow us to actually see a win at home, and it’s not all that bad. Now we just need to get that non-con schedule improved just a bit (or a lot)…

Speaking of the Pitt-Cinci game on October 20, kickoff is set for noon. TV coverage will be on ESPN Regional (WTAE locally) as the Big East Game of the Week.

This week’s game against Navy allowed Chas to talk with Adam from Pitch Right. The questions deal with Pitt’s numerous injuries, Pat Bostick and the offense’s troubles, our inability to do much of anything on first down, and a prediction. Good stuff.

Some fun from hoops alum Aaron Gray: at Chicago Bulls fan night, the rookies sang to the fans. A clip of Aaron’s performance can be found on OnlyTheBulls.com. (Sorry, my computer won’t let me embed the vid in this post — blame my somewhat outdated Dell.)

While perusing the Pitt online store, I came across this.

The description:

New for this season, our alternate home Vegas Replica Football Jersey by adidas

Expect to see them on the field some time this year (hopefully not Wednesday on national TV).

Update: Left in the comments by Tony in Harrisburg…

Solid stuff right there.

Two basketball posts in one day right in the middle of a football week — get over it. The full 31 game schedule was released today, including that headliner against Duke at MSG.

Wednesday, Oct. 31 PITT-JOHNSTOWN (Exh.)
Sunday, Nov. 4 INDIANA (PA.) (Exh.)
Friday, Nov. 9 HOUSTON BAPTIST
Saturday, Nov. 10 NORTH CAROLINA A&T
Sunday, Nov. 11 SAINT LOUIS
Thursday, Nov. 15 MISSISSIPPI VALLEY STATE
Friday, Nov. 23, BUFFALO
Tuesday, Nov. 27, BOSTON U.
Saturday, Dec. 1 TOLEDO
Wednesday, Dec. 5 at Duquesne (ESPN-U)
Saturday, Dec. 8 at Washington (FSN)
Saturday, Dec. 15 OKLAHOMA STATE (ESPN)
Thursday, Dec. 20 vs. Duke (ESPN) Madison Square Garden
Saturday, Dec. 29: at Dayton (ESPN2)
Wednesday, Jan. 2: LAFAYETTE (ESPN-U)
Sunday, Jan. 6: at Villanova
Wednesday, Jan. 9: at South Florida (ESPN2)
Saturday, Jan. 12: SETON HALL
Monday, Jan. 14: GEORGETOWN (ESPN)
Saturday, Jan. 19: at Cincinnati
Wednesday, Jan. 23: at St. John’s
Saturday, Jan. 26: RUTGERS
Wednesday, Jan. 30: VILLANOVA (ESPN2)
Saturday, Feb. 2: at Connecticut (CBS)
Thursday, Feb. 7: WEST VIRGINIA (ESPN2)
Tuesday, Feb. 12: PROVIDENCE
Friday, Feb. 15: at Marquette (ESPN)
Thursday, Feb. 21: at Notre Dame
Sunday, Feb. 24: LOUISVILLE
Wednesday, Feb. 27: CINCINNATI
Saturday, March 1: at Syracuse (ESPN)
Monday, March 3: at West Virginia (ESPN)
Sunday, March 9: DePAUL (WTAE)