Welcome to the meme. It’s about not doubting Coach Dixon and Pitt. It’s about proving the doubters wrong. No doubt.
Gary Parrish at CBS offered up his mea culpa.
Basically, it taught me to keep my big mouth shut, and that Jamie Dixon is now worthy of earning The Bo Ryan Treatment. What’s The Bo Ryan Treatment, you ask? It’s when you resist the urge to doubt a team with a questionable roster for no other reason than the man coaching the team has proved capable of winning with any kind of roster. Ryan is the first member I put in that club, and I wrote about it last month.
Over the past three days, it’s become obvious that Dixon should join him because the 44-year-old California native just backed Saturday’s win at Syracuse with a win at Cincinnati, otherwise known as a place Connecticut recently lost.
For those of you who don’t follow Parrish, he has an amusing weekly feature on his blog where he rips questionable poll voting. He spent several ripping an AP voter from Georgia who kept ranking Pitt — even after the Indiana loss. I think it is a worthy feature, since I hate bad voting. Of course, others take it personally when their team is singled out. He even conceded to wanting a do-over on his top-25 from Monday.
Moving on to more doubting themes, Adam Zagoria at SNY caught up with Ashton Gibbs after Pitt’s bus ride back from Cinci.
“We’ve been having a lot of doubters from the beginning since we lost a lost of big-time players,” Gibbs said. “But everyone in that locker room knows what they can do and we all have confidence in each other and it’s really starting to show.”
Pitt coach Jamie Dixon says he plans to use the 6-6, 210-pound Brown in ways he utilized Young, now with the Memphis Grizzlies.
“We ran some sets for [Brown], and we want to use him similar to Sam. He finished strong and made some plays,” Dixon said after the Cincinnati game.
Both Jermaine Dixon and Brown add experience to a young team that features six freshmen and two sophomores. With Dixon back, former St. Anthony star Travon Woodall, a redshirt freshman, now comes off the bench
“They can play multiple positions and they really work hard and they’re leaders on our team,” Gibbs said. “It starts from the defensive end with those guys and it’s really carrying over to the offensive end as well.”
The numbers back up the defensive emphasis.
Speaking of that 2009 team, I spent the balance of last year yelling and waving my arms in an effort to convince people that the old Pitt stereotypes (rugged D, points scored with more brute force than skill) no longer applied and that this was one incredible offense. Indeed it was, but this year it might be time to move one step back toward the good old Panther preconceptions of yore.
You could make a case that this 2010 team is comprised of a strong defense that for the past three games has been momentarily joined by an offense that is hitting shots like crazy (e.g., sinking 45 percent of their threes in conference play). Sophomore Ashton Gibbs has said thank you very much for the available minutes and rather quietly emerged as one of the more impressive pure shooters you’ll find anywhere. For the year Gibbs is hitting 94 percent of his free throws (against the Bearcats last night he went 10-of-11) and 41 percent of his threes while taking the bulk of the shots for this offense. Pitt’s not as good as they were last year, but right now they’re much better than expected.
Coach Dixon of course, is not buying into the surprise (publicly, anyways).
I’m shocked that Pittsburgh has put together consecutive road wins against previously unbeaten Syracuse and Cincinnati.
Panthers coach Jamie Dixon? Not surprised at all.
“It can’t happen if you don’t believe it can happen,” Dixon said on Tuesday morning, shortly after his team knocked off Cincinnati on the road the night before.
Pitt is part of the group of teams that have beaten expectations already.
