Panthers need to seize opportunity now
By Mike Boytim,mboytim@altoonamirror.com
POSTED: March 17, 2008
When Pittsburgh Panthers coach Jamie Dixon told a small gathering of media he felt his team was playing at its highest level of the year following Pitt’s regular season finale win over DePaul, the comment went, for the most part, unnoticed.
A week later, after Pittsburgh won four games in four days to capture the Big East Championship as the No. 7 seed, Dixon’s Panthers have the entire nation’s attention.
Now Pittsburgh has an opportunity to keep it.
After struggling through an up-and-down season during which Pitt won its first 11 games before losing starters Mike Cook and Levance Fields to injuries in consecutive games, the Panthers earned a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament, set to begin Tuesday.
Pittsburgh never proved it could win on the road, routinely losing to mediocre teams away from the Petersen Events Center throughout the season, but early on against Duke and once again in the Big East Tournament, the Panthers proved they could play just fine on a neutral court.
Granted, Pitt has a large following in New York and is a popular attraction during visits to Madison Square Garden, but if anything can prepare a team for the bright lights of the NCAA Tournament, it’s playing on a stage like the Garden.
Over the past seven years, the Panthers have proven the correlation. Pittsburgh is now 23-8 at MSG since 2000 and has reached the Sweet 16 four times in that span.
With Fields back to practicing fulltime, and engineering the Panthers’ two most important offensive cogs in junior forward Sam Young and freshman center DeJuan Blair, Pittsburgh has a chance to finally get past the Sweet 16 barrier this year.
Pitt doesn’t have the suffocating defense it had become known for, but the Panthers have been able to make important stops down the stretch, and demonstrated an excellent ability to attack the offensive boards in the Big East Tournament to outscore opponents.
Pittsburgh drew Summit League champion Oral Roberts, a 70-54 loser to Washington State in last year’s first round, and would likely play Michigan State for a trip to the Round of 16 if victorious.
The Spartans are the Big Ten version of the Panthers. Both teams have been wildly inconsistent and have their fair share of bad losses, but if both escape first-round upsets, one will have an opportunity to tangle with Memphis, perhaps the most unproven No. 1 seed in the field.
If it is Pittsburgh and Memphis, the Panthers may have the advantage in that they’ve played in the extremely tough Big East Conference, which got eight teams into the tournament. The Tigers have spent most of 2008 cruising through Conference USA after a win in December over Big East regular-season champion Georgetown.
However, all of that speculation could be null and void if Pitt slides back into the inconsistent mode it was playing in when it fell to the residents of the Big East cellar, Rutgers, at home by 13 points in January.
If Blair and Young return for another season, and Cook is successful in his plea to the NCAA for another year of eligibility, Pittsburgh may be just as good or better next year. But not seizing this year’s opportunity could come back to haunt the Panthers in today’s world of sports where teams often fall from champions to chumps in no time at all.
