I don’t think it fully dawned on me that it was actually hoops season until I wrote that last post about the 103-62 win over Houston Baptist.

The absolute best collaboration of bracket predictions is the Bracket Project. It’s amazing and amazingly pointless to predict the brackets at any point during the season, especially before the season even starts, but Pitt’s average projected seed is currently on the 7 line. The highest projection for Pitt is 3 and the lowest is 9.

BigEastHoops.com sees Pitt finishing 9th in the Big East since we have “nothing in the middle.” Presumably because they’re not familiar with Dejuan Blair.

9. Pitt – Their dynasty is over. With Gray and Kendall leaving, Pitt is left with nothing in the middle. In a league that has such great big men, the Panthers will struggle to beat the top teams. The backcourt of Cook, Ramon and Fields are very good. But with no inside game, Pitt will struggle to find points. They’ll still beat the weak teams of the league, but I can’t see them finishing much higher than 9th.

Blair won’t lead this team to a conference title, but I think he’ll keep Pitt from falling as far as 9th or worse.

Big East Basketball Report compiled a preseason power poll as well as conference awards.

2007-2008 Big East Pre-season Poll (first place votes in parenthesis):

1) Georgetown (13): 282 pts. Hi: 1st. Low: 3rd.
2) Louisville (5): 274 pts. Hi: 1st. Low: 3rd.
3) Marquette: 243 pts. Hi: 3rd. Low: 5th.
4) Syracuse: 206 pts. Hi: 3rd. Low: 8th.
5) Pittsburgh (tie): 200 pts. Hi: 3rd. Low: 10th.
5) Villanova (tie): 200 pts. Hi: 2nd. Low: 8th.
7) Connecticut: 195 pts. Hi: 3rd. Low: 10th.
8) Providence: 165 pts. Hi: 4th. Low: 10th.
9) Notre Dame: 154 pts. Hi: 5th. Low: 12th
10) West Virginia: 142 pts. Hi: 4th. Low: 11th.
11) Seton Hall: 98 pts. Hi: 9th. Low: 14th.
12) DePaul: 84 pts. Hi: 9th. Low: 16th.
13) Cincinnati: 82 pts. Hi: 10th. Low: 15th.
14) St. John’s: 57 pts. Hi: 10th. Low: 16th.
15) South Florida: 35 pts. Hi: 13th. Low: 16th.
16) Rutgers: 31 pts. Hi: 14th. Low: 16th.

Seems like Pitt is one of the toughest teams to gauge, with their high-low differential of 7 (10-3=7) is only tied by UConn and DePaul — DePaul doesn’t really count though, because they’re near the bottom and once you get closer to #11 or so, all of the teams are similarly bad.

The preseason awards portion has Levance Fields on the all-conference 3rd team, Dejuan Blair on the all-freshman 2nd team, and Bradley Wannamaker on the freshman honorable mention list.