The AP Writer’s pre-season poll is out. Pitt is ranked #17. Other ranked Big East Teams are Syracuse (#6), UConn (#8) and ND (#20). You can see just about all the polls and MSM rankings you out there here. At this point, I’m polled out.
This Andy Katz column to kick off the ESPN.com weeklong love fest for college basketball (and being able to show something other than World Series of Poker reruns). It slips in a key worry about next year’s Big East.
The Big East plays this season with 12 teams before bloating to 16 in 2005-06 with the loss of Boston College to the ACC and the addition of Conference USA teams Cincinnati, Louisville, Marquette, DePaul and South Florida. How the Big East will manage 16 teams is still to be determined, but it didn’t work for the WAC in the ’90s.
To be somewhat fair, it wasn’t the basketball side that did in the WAC so much as the football. Most of the members were also playing football. The Big East is only half of that. Not that that is really much of an improvement.
I’m a little slow in getting to this, but, then it is just an exhibition game. Pitt got off to a slow start against Carnegie Mellon Saturday night, actually being down at the half, before slowly pulling away 97-70. The important story was that Carl Krauser didn’t play because of a minor shoulder injury in practice. The team didn’t play good defense, that Coach Jamie Dixon (I keep waiting for a press release a la Mike Vick announcing that Coach Dixon will no longer be using “Jamie” but “James”) attributed to working in the new players into actual game situations.
Center, Chris Taft, thought part of the problem was that the players weren’t helping each other out on defense like they usually do. The energy with which the Tartans came out and played was also credited.
Ronald Ramon, one of the prized freshmen players, got a lot of positive reviews. He came off the bench first and played 32 minutes. Mostly at the point guard position. He scored 19 points and shot 5-7 from behind the 3-point line. If he can do that in the regular season, he will quickly be playing a lot of minutes at the 2-guard. This led to his own puff piece today.
[A bit of an aside. I don’t know if the Tribune-Review has hired a separate beat writer to now cover Pitt basketball, or if Joe Bendel will be back on the beat after the college football season ends. Just worth noting that most of the articles are being written by a Joe Rutter. No real problem with that or his reporting, except that his puff piece on Ramon is just too loaded with cliches tired comments about Ramon’s height in the beginning.]
Since it’s an exhibition game there isn’t much to really judge on the team. Looking at the box score (PDF) does yield some big potential positives. Chevon Troutman and Taft both shot very well from the free throw line, 9-10 and 6-7, respectively. Two of the big men from the bench Aaron Gray and Levon Kendal played a combined 18 minutes and 5-5 from the field. Indicating both were waiting to take high percentage shots. Gray, however, also had 3 turnovers.
Pitt has one more exhibition on Sunday against Div. III Gannon, before the real season begins against Howard on Nov. 20.
