Barring some miracles — like Georgetown somehow losing to USF and Marquette dropping one of its final two games — Pitt will not get a bye and will end up as the 6th seed in the Big East Tournament.

That means they will play the 9pm game next Wednesday versus the 11 seed. The 11 seed could be Rutgers, Louisville, Providence, St. John’s or even Notre Dame.

If Pitt wins that, it will be a 9pm game on Thursday against the 3 seed. The 3 seed is, of course, WVU.

Before, during and after — let it fly.

HALFTIME UPDATE: Pitt losing 30-37.

Very mixed feelings. Pitt could have been down so much more with 11 turnovers and WVU just hitting some really, really deep shots. At the same time, WVU should be shocked to be up this much considering the way Pitt came back on them.

Problem for Pitt was they cannot stop playing tight on the man. They came out hesitating on that, and then again late. Have to stay tight. Especially against Pittsnogle. He doesn’t have a first step to take the drive from outside the arc.

Kendall’s biggest defensive failing — and he did do a lot right — was that he kept playing off the Hoopies when they were outside. He stayed near the line, letting them take deep 3s, which they can make.

Less turnovers and tighter defense is the only way.

FINAL UPDATE: Pitt loses 62-67.

The moments when I felt the game just wasn’t going to go Pitt’s way were all — tips. When Frank Young got the tip in to go over Sam Young, and then Gansey got a seemingly random tip up and in it felt bad. Then, at the end when Krauser’s out-of-control drive missed but Kendall’s tip-in somehow didn’t.

I don’t like blaming one player. Especially one of my favorites, but Krauser cost the team. Not because he had a bad shooting night. Because he forgot to trust his teammates in the end. When he stood there dribbling the crap out of the ball when Pitt was down 61-58. He was going to take it himself, and everyone knew it. He wasn’t even looking to see if anyone would come open. It froze all the Pitt players in their tracks, because they knew the ball wasn’t coming to them under any circumstance. It sucked everything out for those key moments. All of the sudden, all they could do is try to create the space for him to drive, but it took too long, and WVU wasn’t biting.

It was selfish, egotistical and a critical mistake.

It was Krauser trying to atone for all of his misses, some ill-advised drives and bad decisions in the game all at once. He was going to drive get the hoop and the harm. Not going to happen. Not in this game, not against a team that just doesn’t foul, in a game where the refs let players bump.

Krauser forgot everything, to try and do everything.

Pitt moved up one spot in each poll. Pitt is #8 in the AP and #9 in the Coaches poll. After much trying to avoid it, the polls dropped all of the SEC teams out of the top-10 of the polls — the AP sent Florida all the way down to #17 — with Tennessee just outside at #11. The Coaches sprang Ohio State into the top-10, ahead of Pitt whiile the AP puts them just behind.

Marquette, which could finish the season 4th in the BE and will very likely be tied with Georgetown (still ranked) in the conference standings, still gets no love as they fall just outside of the top-25 in the AP and about #28 in the coaches.

Pitt showed the best way for their team to beat the Mountaineers in the first meeting. The team has to play strict man-to-man defense and resist the urge to double-team or help when there is a drive to the basket. WVU is such a sound and excellent passing team that they won’t hesitate to dish to the open player for the clean shot.

The other thing playing tight man does, is force the Mountaineers to continually move on offense. Their players move with out the ball better than any other team. It’s how they get open. If Pitt stays with them, at all costs, they keep running to try and shake loose. While West Virginia is a well-conditioned team, they are still not a deep team. The more Pitt’s defense forces them to move, the more it goes to Pitt’s strength in its depth — where fresh legs can be thrown at them in waves if need be.

I think this is extremely vital since I don’t see how this isn’t a very close game. The more they run, the less spring in the step near the end when they may need that jumper.

On offense, expect Pitt to move quickly in transition. Not to necessarily take quick shots, but, again to force WVU to get back on defense quickly. Not give them as much time to get set in the 1-3-1 zone. Getting the ball inside against that zone is very difficult, so it is important that Ramon, Krauser and other guards on the perimeter make the open jumpers.

If Pitt forces WVU to respect the perimeter game, this could be the kind of game where Keith Benjamin and Sam Young make things happen going to the net. Both are still raw, but have solid first steps that can get them to the basket. WVU doesn’t foul much, so that would only be a bonus. The flip side of their taking it to the basket is the fact that in the 1-3-1, there is plenty of clogging inside and WVU is adept at taking the charge.

A long, very interesting and of course troubling story about prep schools that are nothing more than roving basketball teams. The quickly becoming infamous, Lutheran Christian Academy in Philly, is mentioned.

Phil Jones attended Lutheran Christian Academy, an unaccredited private high school in Philadelphia where, he said, all of the students were basketball players. In his seven months there, he said, class consisted of the coach, Darryl Schofield, giving workbooks to the students to fill out. “I thought prep school was supposed to be hard,” Jones said.

In the past two years, these young men attended unusual institutions — some called prep schools, some called learning centers — where all or most of the students were highly regarded basketball players. These athletes were trying to raise their grades to compensate for poor College Board scores or trying to gain attention from major-college coaches.

An investigation by The New York Times found more than a dozen of these institutions, some of which closed soon after opening. The Times found that at least 200 players had enrolled at such places in the past 10 years and that dozens had gone on to play at N.C.A.A. Division I universities like Mississippi State, George Washington, Georgetown and Texas-El Paso.

“I would say that in my 21 years, the number of those schools has quadrupled, and I would put schools in quotation marks,” Phil Martelli, the men’s basketball coach at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, said. “They’re not all academic institutions.”

The NCAA takes hits since they set the minimum standards for schools to allow student-athlete eligibility.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association acknowledges that it has not acted as such places have proliferated. For years, its Clearinghouse has approved transcripts from these institutions without questioning them.

Until revelations last year about a diploma mill in Florida and concerns about other schools like it, the N.C.A.A. chose not to police high schools. Although the N.C.A.A. recently commissioned a task force charged with curbing academic abuse, it still faces the tricky task of separating the legitimate from the nonlegitimate schools.

The NCAA sets the standards, but doesn’t certify whether the prep schools themselves are legit. I don’t see how they can, they don’t oversee prep schools. They are, apparently, taking some steps.

Mr. Lennon, the head of the N.C.A.A task force, said it would focus first on schools like Redemption that are not under state regulation. “We’re committed to flushing out those high schools abusing the system and putting a stop to it,” he said.

One question the task force must answer: What is the maximum course load? For now, there is no rule against taking the required 14 core courses in a year. It is essentially impossible for a student at Winchendon or South Kent to take more than five core courses in a school year, the coaches there said. (Intense summer school could add one or two more.)

“If they set the limit at five, I’d be in favor of that,” Coach Chillious of South Kent said.

With the task force recommendations due June 1, Mr. Lennon issued a warning: “Any student contemplating leaving their high school right now to pick up additional courses needs to be aware the N.C.A.A. will be implementing policies. They need to make sure they are taking real courses, academic courses, and not simply trying to buy eligibility.”

But after years of not policing secondary schools, the biggest challenge for the N.C.A.A. will be determining which of the nation’s 5,000 private schools that do not fall under state regulation are exploiting the system.

Josh Centor seems to want to push the decisions, evaluations and responsibility onto the individual member organizations.

The NCAA, which is comprised of more than 1,200 member institutions, has minimum standards — set by those member institutions — that prospective student-athletes must achieve if they are going to be eligible for intercollegiate athletic competition. Just because there are minimum standards, however, doesn’t mean schools need to admit student-athletes who barely gain their eligibility. The onus falls on the member institutions to make sure they’re admitting qualified individuals each year.

That’s taking the easy way out for the NCAA on two fronts — hey, we’re just the governing body setting the standards, it’s up to the member schools to make sure the student-athletes are legit. If it is a monster task for the NCAA to look into the numerous private prep schools, how is it any easier to for individual schools to evaluate the legitimacy of each prep school?

Also, the argument that a school doesn’t have to take a barely eligible kid is naive to the competitive and financial pressures facing schools, teams and coaches. It also reduces the opportunities for the kids. Someone like Carl Krauser would have been hard pressed to get an opportunity to play, considering all he needed to do ultimately to become eligible to play at Pitt. He’s one of the success stories the NCAA and Pitt want to trumpet, but it doesn’t happen that way unless Pitt was willing to accept a student-athlete who had lower academic credentials then generally accepted.

The other risk, in trying to push it on the schools to make sure the kids can/will actually perform on the academic side by the NCAA is it generates greater pressure that a Minnesota/Clem Haskins situation arises. Where the academic support and tutoring programs get subverted into doing the academic work for the kids. If the academic issues are ignored at lower levels

I’m not saying the individual schools don’t bear a lot of responsibility as well. They do. They bear the ultimate and final responsibility — and are at the greater risk. Coaches put their jobs and careers on the line when they recruit kids from prep schools that lack anaccreditationon from state education boards, and turn a blind-eye to schools that are nothing more than storefronts. They get a rep for recruiting only for basketball and ignoring the school part. Not to mention their job dependency on the court. It’s hard to win when you lose too many recruits to academic issues.

Schools and athletic departments can see their reputation damaged for years by being represented in football and basketball by kids who are openly contemptuous of the academics.

I do have some sympathy for the spot the NCAA is in. They take some heat whenever there is any scandal for not being more proactive and not seeing the flags at a member institution sooner. They also get slammed for the micromanagement and thByzantinene rules system regulating seemingly little, minor matters.

What I suspect happens is that the NCAA ultimately goes with a rule requiring that all prep schools be state certified for a student-athletes coming from the prep school to be eligible. That pushes the onus onto the prep schools and makes it better insulates the member institutions against charges that it willfully recruited kids who were ineligible.

Sure, there will then be sad stories of kids who went to unaccredited prep schools and didn’t know it or were lied to, but at least the NCAA and member schools will look clean.

Just a ton in this game, that has WVU as a 3.5 point home favorite.

For Pitt, what rides on the game is this:

Third place or sixth place. That, in a nutshell, is what the game against West Virginia at 7 p.m. today means for Pitt.

(Hmmm. Someone’s been cribbing my posts or I simply preempted the storyline.)

“That bye is really huge,” senior guard Carl Krauser said. “No one wants to play four days in a row, playing against the top competition in the Big East. You want to have that chance to rest your legs and have your teammates watch a couple of games so they can get a feel for what the Big East tournament is like.”
…
Boiled down, Pitt has to beat West Virginia to give itself a realistic chance at winning the Big East tournament.

“It’s definitely important,” junior center Aaron Gray said of the bye. “That’s what the emphasis is now. We only want to have to play three games up there.”
…
If there is one thing missing from Pitt’s NCAA resume this season, it’s a signature road win. The Panthers are 3-4 away from home in Big East play. In years past, the Panthers have recorded some impressive road wins, including wins at Connecticut, Boston College and Syracuse last season and at Providence and Syracuse the year before that. All of those teams were ranked.

Pitt is winless against top echelon teams on the road this season. The Panthers’ most impressive road win? How about South Carolina?

And South Carolina has hit the skids. They lost to Vandy and their RPI is now much closer to 100 than 50.

Under normal circumstances, with both teams playing Saturday, Pitt’s depth would be expected to be a good advantage.

There hasn’t been much time for either team to prepare. The game comes two days after both teams posted victories and 18 days after Pitt handed West Virginia its first Big East loss, 57-53, on Feb. 9 at Petersen Events Center.

“We’ll be ready to go,” Dixon said. “Our guys will be anxious to go. We took care of business (Saturday). We played very well throughout.”

Pitt and West Virginia earned conference victories Saturday on their home courts to keep pace in the race for a tournament bye. The Panthers defeated Providence, 81-68, and the Mountaineers held off Louisville, 68-64, to end a three-game losing streak.

But this is not a normal game. It’s the Backyard Brawl in basketball. The sellout crowd in Morgantown will be in a hightened state of frenzy — and not just from the booze. It’s Senior Night, on a senior-laden team.

“I think that’s what is amazing about this group of seniors,” West Virginia athletic director Ed Pastilong said. “They came along at a time when there wasn’t a lot to feel good about our basketball program and they have established a credibility with our fans, with people all over the country, with our alumni — they’ve been role models for our other student-athletes as well as student-athletes of all ages.

“The class and effort with which they play with is something West Virginia will always appreciate and remember.”

That’s putting it mildly. The season before they arrived, WVU went 8-20 overall and 1-15 in the Big East.

Now…

And while illustrating just what those five have meant to West Virginia basketball is difficult to condense, perhaps just taking a look at the game that will mark their final appearance here is a good place to start.

West Virginia is 19-8 overall, 10-4 in the Big East and already has sewn up its second straight appearance in the NCAA tournament.

The game is a sellout, the fifth straight at the Coliseum. The total attendance and average attendance this season is the highest in more than 20 years.

Oh, and the Mountaineers go into the week ranked No. 14 in the country and are actually a 3 1/2-point favorite over No. 9 Pitt (21-4, 10-4).

The game will be carried nationally by ESPN.

That, in a nutshell, is how far West Virginia has come in the four years since John Beilein inherited a team — and even to some degree a program — in complete shambles. It is a team playing for a spot near the top of the Big East conference standings and near the Top 10 in the country; a team that a year ago was a basket away from the Final Four.

So, while WVU could lose this game and would still be in a position to get 4th place and the bye in the BE Tournament (they hold tie-breakers over Marquette and Georgetown), they would need a win on the road in Cinci. A team that really needs another quality win to ensure their own berth in the NCAA.

Even WVU Coach John Beilein isn’t trying to minimize this game and his players.

Five WVU seniors will be playing at home for the last time. Coach John Beilein is expecting a highly emotional occasion when they’re introduced.

“It’s hard for me to talk about seniors because you’re so close to them,” he said after Saturday’s 68-64 victory over Louisville. “Then one is your son, and that makes it even tougher to talk about it.

“Those five seniors on the court, they went to the foul line and executed the game plan at the end. So that’s going to be very difficult for everybody here.

“But you know what would be more difficult? If we can’t come up with a ‘W’ (vs. Pitt). That would make it even more difficult.”

It will be very interesting to see what kind of game Pittsnogle has. He was tearing up before and after playing Pitt. Was it an aberration or does Pitt have the goods to shut him and Gansey down once again?

Pittsnogle said he won’t force the issue.

“That’s something I’m not going to do this game,” he said. “I think I did that the last game against Pitt, and I’ve got to let the game come to me like I’ve done in our games lately.”
…
Mountaineers senior forward Mike Gansey called Pittsnogle’s performance against Pitt “a fluke.”

“He couldn’t make a basket against Pitt the last time, but I think he’s going to be ready for what they’re going to throw at him this time,” Gansey said. “He’s going to make shots. That was a fluke game for him.”

Pittsnogle, the Mountaineers’ leading scorer, has shot 49 percent from the floor, 40 percent from 3-point range and 86 percent from the foul line this season. He’s knocked down 71 3-point shots so far.

“For Kevin not to make shots in the first game against Pitt, that’s kind of hard to believe,” Gansey said. “He’ll be fine.”

Pittsnogle likely will face Pitt center Aaron Gray, who leads the Big East in double-doubles with 13. He also leads the league in roubounding with a 10.5 average.

“They’re going to be anxious to come and play us,” Gray said. “They didn’t do so well offensively against us in the last game that they played us. It’s going to be probably more motivation for them to come out and try to literally come at us.”

In the past couple weeks while the ‘Eers have been struggling, their 3s have been falling at a worse percentage. Hopefully, that continues.