Yes, because my focus is right there for this matter. Guess what is getting started today? Spring practices kick off. Pitt is even letting us watch the post-practice presser with Coach Graham at 5pm.

Here’s the official place for Pitt’s spring practice stuff.

Not sure how much of a practice it will actually be. Today is also Pitt’s pro-day.

Dom DeCicco is hoping to make an impression.

DeCicco was not invited to last month’s Combine in Indianapolis, so today will be the first time he will be able to show his measurables to NFL scouts.

“It is definitely important,” DeCicco said. “Just to show teams that I can run and that I have good footwork and be able to flip my hips and all the other stuff.”

Pervert.

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My sister lives in Houston, so I have a place to stay. I’m still working on the wife accepting the idea of me running away for the first weekend in April — without returning to find the locks changed.

Here is the entire schedule for NCAA Tournament basketball games. Pitt is set for Thursday, 3:10 pm on truTV (Ch. 246 if you have DirecTV). Calling the game will be Tim Brando and Mike Giminski.

The log5 analysis puts Pitt’s chances of winning the whole thing at 7.5%. Lowest of all the #1 seeds.

Let’s look at the Southeast bracket snap judgments:

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Sorry, my host suffered a particularly ill-timed outage today. I haven’t been able to do anything. And I know the site has been down. Hopefully this has finally passed.

Media reaction to Pitt as a #1 seed coming…

It’s Selection Sunday so it’s time to really start thinking about filling out those brackets.

The group is on ESPN. You will need an ESPN account to register(which is free).

The group can be found here. The password is pittblather.

Limit of 1 entry per person. Chas will announce the prizes at a later time.

The brackets get announced tomorrow at 6pm. I’ll be tweeting and trying to digest all the information. You can treat this post as an open thread on the remaining conference championship games and for the bracket announcements.

At 7pm there will be a livechat on the brackets and seedings that I’ll be moderating. Scheduled to join the fun are bloggers from VUHoops.com (Villanova), Eers to You (WVU), Johnny Jungle (St. John’s), Cracked Sidewalks (Marquette) and FriarBlog (Providence). There might be a couple others as well.

It’s going to be a little different from game liveblogs. It’s going to start out as a panel discussion with other Big East bloggers. Getting other perspectives and thoughts. There will be some questions and comments, but it will be a bit tighter on controls over what gets through.

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Remember when Pitt won the Big East Tournament in 2008? Limping in and finishing 3-4 in the final seven games of the Big East regular season.

Four games in four days. Getting healthy. Getting confident. Consistent. Rising from middle of the pack in the Big East to winning the BET. Sam Young finally started playing consistently at a high level on both ends of the court. While it was something Pitt fans had been expecting for some time, it was a kind of coming out on the national stage for him. Other players found their place. It cemented that team as one that will always hold a special place in Pitt fans’ heart. Even if Pitt bowed out in the first weekend.

Or 2006 and Syracuse. Overshadowing Pitt’s almost as impressive run — only without one player dominating and pushing. Gerry McNamara carrying the Orange all the way to winning the BET. Something UConn’s latest victim, Syracuse could recognize — with requisite bitterness.

While it’s not quite the Gerry McNamara run of ’06, hats must go off to Kemba Walker (who passed Devo for the single-tourney scoring record). He’s got UConn in a position to set a new BET record for five-wins in one go. They certainly have the Team Destiny thing going for them, which is fine, since that makes it all the more likely they’ll run out of gas by next week (just like Gerry’s Orange did).

And almost as bad as losing — being merely a player in some other team’s or someone else’s story. That’s where things stand nationally. Pitt didn’t lose, so much as they were beat by a special player doing special things.

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Just giving a heads-up. The brackets get announced tomorrow at 6pm. I’ll be tweeting as it happens (along with nearly everyone else). But come back here around 7pm for a livechat on the brackets and seedings that I’ll be moderating.

It’s going to be a little different from game liveblogs. It’s going to be a panel discussion with other Big East bloggers, and then we well take questions and comments

Scheduled to participate are bloggers from VUHoops.com (Villanova), Eers to You (WVU), Johnny Jungle (St. John’s), Cracked Sidewalks (Marquette) and FriarBlog (Providence). There might be a couple others as well.

The other feature about this is that the liveblog will also be on these sites blogs as well, so there should be questions and comments from other fans and perspectives. Hope you stop by.

So that’s what it is like to be Kemba’d. Sucks.

UConn Blog has been saying it all season, “We have Kemba and you don’t.”

Yeah, I know. Giving up 20 points on 11 turnovers. McGhee having another horrid game at the Garden. Getting beaten on the boards. The switch-up at the end. Plenty of other things I’m sure have been pointed out.

Fact is, Pitt was beaten on a neutral court, against a top-20 team, on the final shot, by one of the best players in the country, making the tough shots he’s made all season. Statistically speaking, clutch has been disproved time and time again. Then you see something like that and stats go out the window compared to what just was.

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Sorry no liveblog for a weekday game. Not sure how many could participate.  Too many people would be popping on to ask the score, as they scramble to find info from work. And just too many little factors that make it better suited for an open thread. If Pitt advances, then there will be liveblogs for the evening games.

Some links to pass on before the game.

As usual the debate on how much a team should care about the conference tournament is a pointless one. I side with guys like Jim Calhoun and Coach Jamie Dixon in wanting to win it.

Damn right Pitt should go all out to win, starting at noon today against Connecticut. There’s no other way to play, really. Why worry about the NCAA tournament? That’s next week. “I don’t know how you’re supposed to pull back and then turn it on again,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. “I’ve never understood that thinking.”

The effort at the Garden is worth it. We’re talking about the best conference tournament in the country. I’ve never bought the argument that it’s a Big East money grab, a made-for-television event between the regular season and the NCAAs. I’ve been to too many not to realize how important it is to the players and the coaches. The competition is incredibly fierce. The banner is that valuable.

Now I don’t buy Bob Knight’s hyperbolic statement about winning the Big East Tournament being tougher than winning the NCAA Tournament. And I won’t be reading too much into things if Pitt doesn’t win the BET.

I also don’t think Pitt will be too tired or drained from the BET for NCAA Tourney games on either Thursday or Friday.  I just think it’s great to win it, and hate seeing Pitt do anything but win.

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I guess it’s okay that Pitt players are saying they want another shot at Notre Dame in the Big East Tournament — as long as they are focused on what they need to do to get to that point. It makes me a little nervous about looking past games. Especially when UConn should have a bit of a chip on their shoulder about playing Pitt. The Huskies haven’t beaten Pitt since 2008. Pitt is 4-0 the last three years against UConn. There’s some curiosity on the UConn side about how things will go this time.

“I really just want to see our reactions against Pittsburgh,” UConn coach Jim Calhoun said. “Because our reactions the first time were young. And we can’t have young reactions (today) because we can’t beat them if we have that type of game. We have to kind of man up a little bit.”

The Panthers (27-4), as has often been the case under coach Jamie Dixon, have a strong, physical team.

“We know we have the toughest opponent in the league coming up,” Calhoun said. “But that’s what you play for, to get there.”

Pitt is still talking about getting off to better starts.

March entering the one-and-done phase, Ashton Gibbs says the Panthers can’t afford any more slow starts. Pitt is averaging 22.7 points in the first half in its past three games and has trailed at halftime in six of its past 10. “We’ve got to start games better,” Gibbs said. “The last couple games, we haven’t been starting off as well as we should have. I think if we start off good, we will be fine.”

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As you know, I felt like a bit of a homer picking Coach Jamie Dixon as the Big East Coach of the Year. Yes it is a defensible choice, and plenty of good reason to make the call. Still when you are a Pitt partisan picking the Pitt coach in a wide open field there is a twinge.

That said, you have to love West Virginia partisans trying to explain both why Bob Huggins was deserving of consideration, and why he wasn’t.

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Working on this post was a stark reminder that timing is everything. I started gathering the data lask week and then on Friday night I decided I would wait till after the Villanova game to post this.

My original hypothesis was that opponents have been trying to slow Pitt down since the Notre Dame game as the burn offense had become the blueprint as to how to beat Pitt. Not exactly a given when you consider that Pitt’s schedule was back loaded with slower-tempo teams.

Of course, after I gathered most of my data, Jay Wright forced the Panthers into a 56 possession crapfest low-scoring game and then admitted that he was trying to force Pitt into a limited possession game.

So much for needing statistics to prove my theory. Let’s soldier on anyway.

For the purpose of this exercise I only used conference games. My reason for doing this was that as much as I would like a larger sample-size, teams experiment too much in non-conference play and are often more focused on trying to figure out a rotation than trying to implement a strategy to control tempo. This graph shows the number of possessions Pitt’s Big East opponents had versus Pitt as opposed to their other opponents.

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I’ve let the links pile. A lot of them are already dated. Time to clear them before the Big East Tournament gets real (any game involving DePaul doesn’t count).

Before I start, I’m just wondering: who in the Big East offices did Villanova tick off last year? Bad enough they got scheduled with two road games to end the year, but both were on Senior Days at two of the toughest home courts in the Big East.  I know they have been struggling for a couple weeks, but that was just overkill.

Ashton Gibbs was named a 1st Team All-Big East team player. Brad Wanamaker made 2nd team.

“First and foremost, it was because of my teammates and coaches,” he said. “Without them, I wouldn’t be in the mention of being on the team.”

Gibbs, a second-team pick last season, averaged a team-high 16.4 points while ranking in the top 10 in the nation in 3-pointers made and 3-point percentage.

“Great shooters work at it,” Dixon said. “And he’s paid the price.”

As soon as Gary McGhee was not included anywhere on the list — not even honorable mention — it was a lock that he wasn’t going to be named Big East Defensive Player of the Year. Idle question if someone wants to dig for the answer. Has there ever been a Big East Defensive POY not included somewhere on the All-Big East team?

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Big East Tournament starts in just a little while. Happy times.

Rumble in the Garden polled Big East bloggers last week for Big East honors, before the weekend games.

You can see the overall voting results for each category:

Big East Player of the Year and All-Big East Team

Newcomer and Rookie of the Year

Big East Coach of the Year

Most Surprising and Most Disappointing Teams

Most Surprising and Most Disappointing Player on Your Team

Team You Don’t Want to See in Big East Tournament and How Will Your Team Do in the BET?

How Will Big East Teams Do in the NCAA Tournament?

What’s next for the Big East Teams not in the NCAA Tournament?

As for my vote…

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You know, if Pitt had lost the game, I suspect they would have quietly raised this banner sometime around 11 pm with no one to see it. Pitt Script has video of it being raised.

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