In case you hadn’t heard — and lord knows you will Thursday night — this is only the second meeting between Pitt and DePaul. The first was a 41-37 Pitt loss in 1936. That suggests very little value to that past history.
Of a more recent vintage, DePaul’s head coach, Jerry Wainwright, was in charge of Richmond last year. A team Pitt beat. That game may be more remembered because it was the same day Coach Dave Wannstedt was introduced as the Pitt football coach, and made an appearance at the game.
Both Pitt and DePaul have their game notes (PDF).
According to the Pitt notes, there was media time after practice this afternoon, so expect quotes in tomorrow’s stories. This is Pitt’s highest poll rankings in a little over a year — before the loss to Bucknell. Of course the ESPN crew will have their storylines for players that we all know well by now. Krauser coming back to school, being a leader with all the kids, moving to shooting guard, his toughness. Kendall and his 40 for Canada against the US in the U-21 game. Gray taking over inside, averaging a double-double and the leading rebounder for the Big East. Young, Fields and Biggs — the talented freshmen. Especially Young after the recent games and getting his first double-double.
For DePaul it’s a young team with freshmen and sophomores doing most of the scoring. A new head coach, and they are almost at the end of a stretch where they will have had only 2 home games out of 8 in a 39-day period. Also, Coach Dixon’s sister Maggie was an assistant for the DePaul women’s team before taking over as Army’s head coach. Blue Demons’ Freshman Forward Wilson Chandler was this week’s BE Rookie of the week with 38 points and 19 rebounds over 2 games. Chandler is 10th in the BE in rebounds.
Another storyline you can expect, concurrently with the requisite/stock discussion of the supersized Big East will be the fact that the BE has 6 teams in the top 25 polls. Actually there are only 5 in each, but I am surprised the BE didn’t claim 7 since Syracuse is ranked #24 in the Coaches Poll and Cinci is ranked #25 in the AP Writers.
