Joining with other top-25 lists following the results of who returned to school. Jeff Goodman at FoxSports has Georgetown #6, Louisville #8, Marquette #10, Pitt #12, Villanova #21 and ND #24

Sure, the Panthers will lose 7-foot senior Aaron Gray. But Jamie Dixon still has a pair of experienced starting guards in Keith Benjamin and Ronald Ramon — as well as Mike Cook on the wing and Sam Young at power forward. The key will be whether Tyrell Biggs can step in and replace Gray in the middle. Big freshman DeJuan Blair will also help ease the loss of Gray.

He also adds Syracuse in the “10 on the verge.” I think the ‘Cuse are getting lowballed a bit after writers let Boeheim convince them that Paul Harris was going to blow up as a freshman. Syracuse has a lot of incoming talent, but still lost a lot of leadership and upperclass starters.

Andy Katz at ESPN.com also has his list. Georgetown #5, Louisville #6, Marquette #13 and Pitt #14:

The Panthers lose big men Aaron Gray and Levon Kendall but add Dejuan Blair, who might be another under-the-radar superstud coming to Pitt. The Panthers return the core of their perimeter as well as their wings and Jamie Dixon quite simply doesn’t lose too often. This team will move quicker, play defense perhaps a bit tighter and will not lose too many, if any, home games. Expect the Panthers to be in the thick of the Big East race.

It’s going to be hard to claim Pitt is being disrespected going into the 2007-08 season at this rate.

The impact for Panther Digest, remains to be seen.

I’m kind of surprised about this. When Fox Interactive Media (FIM) bought Scout.com nearly 2 years ago, I thought it meant Fox was gearing up for more competition with ESPN across platforms on college sports. With deep pockets behind them, they seemed more stable. Especially as Rivals.com seemed to be looking for a buyer or their own media support.

Instead, it seems that things have gotten very strained. Scout.com has suffered a series of embarrassing losses of affiliates in the last couple of weeks and months. Ohio State’s affiliate left, as did Florida, and then USC. Today, Oklahoma left. These are some of the biggest of the fanbases and subscriber groups. Gone.

You can likely add Texas to that list real soon. The Texas, OSU, Oklahoma and Stanford sites filed a suit against Scout.com and FIM (PDF) in May seeking class action status over the accounting and financial practices.

So the problems at Scout.com is not about a new corporate attitude that stifled the freedom and creativity of the publishers, editors and writers of the sites. It’s about the  money. It’s always about the money.

Looking over the suit, the team sites that will most likely be interested in joining and/or head for independent status will be the big sites. Sites that have their own magazine (ex, Michigan, Nebraska, Penn St. and Alabama), since there are some heavy allegations of big accounting irregularities with the allocation between magazine and site.

Scout.com has the financial support to fight and perhaps even successfully defend the lawsuit. The problem is that they will still lose some of their biggest network affiliates. Even as they build new affiliates in their place, they will face increased competition.

More changes a-coming.

I’ve always been mildly intrigued by fan-created websites that call for the firing of a coach. It started with sites like FireRonZook.com which gained all kinds of attention from media outlets including SportsCenter and Pardon the Interruption. Zook ended up getting fired from Florida and the idea was put into every fan’s mind that they could oust a coach by buying a domain name and putting up a website. There’s even a “company” out there that sells some of these domain names.
There is, in fact, a FireDaveWannstedt.com — in operation since his days as head coach of the Miami Dolphins.

OK Pitt’sters— ya gotta agree with me that this year is kind of a little tiny watershed year for your boy Dave. All I heard the year before is how Pitt had one of the greatest recruiting years in the history of the planet. oooooK. Well–as someone once said— “It’s the Coach Stupid!”

As always—I wish you guys the best of luck…I’m sincere in that because I feel that were kind of brothers—much the way Bears fans are Brothers with us Phin fans. Sitting with a Bear fan in a bar is a hoot because boy oh boy we have something in common. I suspect that someday I’ll be throwing back a few with some Pitt fans and I’m pretty sure we’ll be ranting in harmony. Wouldn’t be a riot if a Bears fan joined us?

If you think you’ve had enough of Wanny and want to turn in into a protest of his time here at Pitt, feel free to buy it. Only $1,000.

There is no “Fire Jamie Dixon” website out there except this petition (that looks like it’s from a few years ago) that was signed by all of 51 people. If someone were to make a Dixon-based site, they’d have to be pretty crazy. You don’t call for a coach’s head over the internet when he’s put up this kind of record. You can say he’s not coaching at the level we want him to but he’s definitely not reached his coaching potential yet. In 10 years if we still haven’t made it past the Sweet Sixteen then we can start talking about said website.

As far as I know, there’s somehow not a “Fire Paul Rhoads” page out there and yet more people seem to be against him than any other coach on either the football or basketball staffs. FirePaulRhoads.com is still availible — I know there’s someone out there who wants to buy it.

One thing that the Pitt Athletic Department has yet to do it take a page from Iowa and buy the domain name to fire one of their own coaches. Not a bad idea to help spare your coaches a little.

I had toyed with trying to go to the Blue-Gold game. Really. If for no other reason then a trip to the ‘Burgh and maybe a night out. The wife, however, has me on a variation of home detention this month. The good news, is I and others who can’t make it to Heinz Field can watch from the comfort of our own computer (hat tip to Pitt Panther Fans).

Pitt will be streaming the Blue-Gold game live via their All-Access/CSTV.com feature. This event, though, will be a freebie. They use the Windows Media Player stuff. The coverage starts at noon this Saturday.

The games have gotten underway. A couple hours or so until tip. I’m not ready to start the open thread, but here are just a few more stories — quick hitter — to read if you need to pass the time.

Seth Davis at SI.com went with UCLA. I’m not shocked. Look, Pitt hasn’t won in this round. It’s a generally safe bet to go with that trend. Add in that it’s against UCLA, and there is no reason for most pundits to pick Pitt.

The whole getting past the Sweet 16 issue.

UCLA will try to get Aaron Afflalo going early. He’s struggled lately, but isn’t concerned. Mike DeCourcy at the Sporting News, however, is.

Oh, you bet it’s missing. It’s missing almost three-fourths of the time lately. A 39.5 percent 3-point shooter heading into the final weekend of the regular season, he is at 27.6 percent over the past five games. He does not look as confident in his shot, and this has had a devastating effect on the Bruins’ offense. They had a 3-2 record in that stretch, and, perhaps even more foreboding, averaged 59.4 points.

The Bruins’ attack depends on Afflalo being a force. The Bruins are not making it out of California if he struggles in these next two games. Presuming there are two more games. It’ll be hard for UCLA to beat Pittsburgh without a significant Afflalo contribution.

It would be nice to keep him down and struggling.

Some are disappointed with the second year output of Luc Richard Mbah a Moute.
Washington Post story on Dixon-Howland.

Nebraska (and former Pitt) AD Steve Pederson will be pulling for Pitt and recalls the recruiting of Jamie Dixon to come on as an assistant.

Former Stanford and Golden State Warrior HC Mike Montgomery picks UCLA for the game (shocking, I know).

The question is, can you get it all worked out in four days of preparation? If people don’t have the skills to make those kinds of plays against a defense as intense as UCLA’s, you’re not going to learn it in a week.

Now, I would guess that same game plan is also what Pitt runs. I think the key for UCLA is Collison. He creates off the dribble. If Pitt controls Collison, and Afflalo and Shipp don’t have good games, then UCLA is in trouble. They’re not going to score enough points to win.

But I’m going to pick UCLA because, if nothing else, they might do what they do better. Also, the Bruins are at home, so to speak. Every UCLA alum I know is trying to get tickets.

No kidding. It’s in the state and under 350 miles from LA.

— Former Pitt hoops coach (1994-1999) Ralph Willard’s Holy Cross team wasn’t able to pull the 13 over 4 seed upset last night and lost to Southern Illinois 61-51. His Holy Cross team was also in the West Region to add to the Pitt connection. It’s down to Dixon and Howland as the best Pitt related guy in that part of the bracket.

— If there was any reason I wanted to play Duke before, after seeing this flop I’d want to play them and beat them so badly.

— Damn, those Dukies have broken an opponents nose in two of their last three games. First it was Tyler Hansbrough and now VCU’s Wil Fameni. He’ll be wearing a mask against Pitt which is an advantage for us. It seems to always take guys a few games to get used to wearing a big plastic guard over their face. If only it had happened to Eric Maynor…(Thanks to TMGPanther in the comments for the link.)

I looked around a Wright State message board that we got a few hits from (one of their fans found us and pointed it out) and here are some things being said.

My main concern is Gray — how do we stop somebody like that given our limited “big” men? get him into foul trouble? Deny him the ball? Control the tempo? Anyone with a better basketball sense than me can offer some insight here?

If the “What will Wright State do about Gray?” question isn’t the main storyline/focus for this game then I don’t know what is.

I personally like the match up with Pitt. Aaron Gray is prone to foul problems.

Gray in foul trouble aginst guards driving right at him will probably be their main plan. He sometimes fails to move his feet (and when he does it’s very slow) and instead he fouls to compensate.

Will Brad go small against Pitt? I think he should. Take the 7 footer out of the equation as much as possible. Let our shooters control the game and leave it in their hands. I think that is our best shot.

My response to this is, “Go ahead, let our seven-foot double-double machine have a 6′ 6” defender on him. Please, be my guest. No way Wright State shoots lights out enough to cancel out the 20+ points Gray would put up if WSU goes with a small lineup.

Man, I love ‘big’ schools. This is entertaining stuff. If you can’t go here and laugh, then life just isn’t fun.

I might as well be going to comedycentral.com. lol

If I were in this guy’s shoes I’d probably say the same thing. There’s always going to be some guy on a message board under some fake name like PittExpert12345 who says we’re tops in the nation when we play well and puts us out of the Top 25 after a loss.

There’s a thread that discusses the start time on Saturday, hoping that it’s not too early. Not one fan warning the others to not overlook us. Keep it up, Pitt.

Probably true enough.

With all of this NCAA tourney talk, let me take this time to remind you to sign up for the Pitt Blather Bracket Challenge.

(By the way, the title only took me about 2 hours to come up with.)

So it turns out the time I mentioned here was 8:30 central time, not eastern. Looks like another night staying up until midnight. It’s all in the name of the Panthers though — I’m sure we’ll all make it. Right? Right.

After poking around Yahoo Sports last night and this morning there were all kinds of stories about teams who will get upset or fall flat on their face.

Pitt was one of the teams that was mentioned as having the chance of disappointing an unknowing office poll selector.

Why they tank: Underneath their brute Big East exterior, these Panthers are all pink. As dominant as frontcourt Frankenstein Aaron Gray is, Pittsburgh is a team that is too much ying and yang. Guards Antonio Graves and Levance Fields are not much of a perimeter force, ranking 199th in the nation in three-pointers made per game with 6.2, but Graves can occasionally go off as his four bombs versus Louisville in the Big East semis proved. They are defensively sound in the half court, holding opponents to 40.7 percent shooting, but generate few turnovers (277th in TO%) and transition buckets. Finally, they are a strong paint team that draws a large number of hacks, but convert only 66.8 percent of their free throws. Considering the Panthers practically counteract their strengths and given their history of underperformance in the Big Dance – they failed to advance past the Round of 16 as a 2 or 3 seed in ’02-’04 – they will be caged by the Elite 8. Prediction: Sweet 16 loss to UCLA

The possibility of Pitt losing to UCLA is a surprise? Honestly, I think that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. I can see where he would form his opinion from; chances are he only happened to watch the Big East Final and forgot about us beating two very good teams in the night before.

And then this:

Wright State (vs. Pitt) – The Raiders finished the season 23-9, but they started 3-5 as they adjusted to new coach Brad Brownell. Since Christmas, this has been one of the hottest teams in the country. Wright State finished by winning 12 of its final 13 games, including two over Butler, and both the Horizon League regular season and tournament championships. This team is much better than a No. 14 seed.

It’s mainly saying Wright St. is possibly a better team than they were seeded. Still, when Dan Wetzel was writing this I’m sure he had visions in his head of Georgetown stomping Pitt on Saturday. Looks like Gray could put up 20+ points on them though.

By the way, a few people were wondering if they would get the Pitt game in their market. If you’re too lazy to go to a sports bar, there’s always this option.

Ugly game last night. Chalk it up to Georgetown simply being better than us or it “just wasn’t our night” or whatever you want. I’m not here to tell you what to believe in that respect and I don’t want this to turn into a game that makes us hang our heads and completely forget about beating Marquette and Louisville.

The offense wasn’t there on many different levels.

The 42 points were the fewest points scored in a Big East championship game and were the fewest for a Pitt team since the Panthers scored 30 against Temple on Jan. 15, 1969. The 23-point margin of defeat was the most since Pitt lost to St. John’s by 24 in 2000.

The most notable was Gray, however.

Here’s all you need to know about the Big East championship game Saturday night:

Roy Hibbert had more dunks than Aaron Gray had points.

Kind of hard to place the entirety of blame on him though. It’s also too bad this was one of the games where Roy Hibbert came to play. He’s been a nonfactor more times than Hoya fans would have liked this year but last night he came to play.

Life goes on though towards the NCAA Tournament. When it comes to seeding, to me it’s always been match ups and location over actual seed number. We obviously will want to play our first round games in either Buffalo or Columbus (I’ve heard the athletic department wants to go to Buffalo rather than Columbus). We also want to play against teams who our strengths match up well against — once again, if it means we drop a seed line to play teams we can beat easier in the first and second rounds then I’m all for it.

If you like to listen to Joe Lunardi, he has Pitt at a #3 seed (in Buffalo). There’s no way we’ll move any higher and I can’t see us moving lower unless the Committee takes the Pitt hate to an extreme level.

No doubt you’ve seen some sort of ad for this: March Madness On Demand from CBS where you can watch streaming video of games from outside of your viewing network online for free. I used it last year and enjoyed it since I don’t have any extra TV packages for the March Madness holiday. To sign up early for a “VIP pass” to avoid waiting time when the games actually roll around, go here. I don’t believe you’ll be able to watch Pitt games at work using this however due to certain restrictions. My solution: just stay home!

Also on that page is a countdown with days, hours, minutes, and seconds to Selection Sunday. Yes, I’m excited.

Pitt was somehow able to overcome this last week. The fat guy dancing during a timeout down in Morgantown as previously mentioned. If I may quote myself…

Thankfully there were no pictures to accompany this story.

Instead we get a full video. Just grand.

Click here to see a fat man do some dancin’.

And take notice how many people put up a backwards “C”.

As expected Pitt took a tumble in the power rankings that come along. Pitt fell to the 3 seed line on ESPN.com.

Sort of Kansas Lite in the sense that Pitt looks good for awhile and then does something inexplicable, like getting smoked at home by Louisville. I expected more consistent scoring punch from Mike Cook. They need someone to help Aaron Gray.

Range of the votes from 6 to 14.

Luke Winn at SI.com drops Pitt to #14 from 8. I wouldn’t mind so much if it weren’t for the fact that he still keeps Marquette ahead of Pitt — despite what would appear from his comments to be greater concern and questions about the Golden Eagles.

Mike DeCourcy at the Sporting News tries to make sense of a week of upsets and closer than expected calls for a slew of teams this week.

Is it possible it’s something like that for the guys who play the game? In the past week, we saw Pittsburgh, Texas A&M and North Carolina — three of this season’s elite teams — lose at home. And though they lost to capable opponents, they did not lose to elite opponents. Florida fell in a deep hole against an Alabama team that previously treated the road as if it were radioactive. Ohio State nearly blew a 21-point halftime lead at lowly Penn State.

It seems there is a tendency at this time of the year for the best teams to lose focus, because they know how long the year has been and because they know what’s up ahead. Texas Tech at home on a Tuesday night in February does not seem to be as big a deal as the Big 12 tournament and the NCAAs. But on that Tuesday in February, it’s bigger.

It’s comforting, but probably a little too easy.

We are less than 48 hours from Wednesday, National Letter of Intent Day. Chas averaged the class rankings from Scout.com, Rivals.com, and Scouts, Inc./ESPN.com and came up with this ranking of the Big East teams:

1. Pitt
2. West Virginia
3. Rutgers
4. Louisville
5. Syracuse
6. South Florida
7. UConn
8. Cinci

Along with that was this small breakdown of Pitt’s ranking.

Pitt: Ranked #10 by Scout.com, #23 by Rivals.com and #28 by ESPN.com/Scouts, Inc. They’ve had the best recruiting class in the conference last year as well. They’ve yet to do anything with it.

As we knew coming in and have seen from the verbal commitments over the past few months, Dave Wannstedt knows what he’s doing when he goes into the homes and school of these player’s. We can only hope he starts finding out the right way to make the players work on the field as well.

Maybe sometime soon we’ll be ahead of Georgia Tech, WVU, and Nebraska on the field instead of just in recruiting polls.

Let’s see, Pitt comes in at #8 on ESPN.com. In the voting this week for ESPN.com Pitt ranged from #3 (Fran Fraschilla) to #16 (Doug Gottlieb). Mostly Pitt was in the 6-9 range.
Luke Winn for SI.com moved Pitt to #9 and focused on the Gray puff piece from the Allentown paper. Seth Davis has Pitt as a #2 seed for the NCAA.

Jay Bilas writes about various teams that could get to the Final Four beyond Wisconsin, UCLA, UNC and Florida. He leads with Pitt (Insider subs.)

Why? You have heard the Panthers talked about in this rarefied air before, but Pitt has always seemed to sputter earlier in the NCAA Tournament than we expected. This Pitt team is different. No Pitt team in the past six years has scored with the ease of this team, and no Pitt team has had the quality depth on the perimeter. This Pitt team guards well like most Pitt teams have, but Pitt ’07 is one of the most efficient offensive teams in the nation — and a very good 3-point shooting team with multiple threats. The ball is not dominated by any one guard, and the Panthers are an outstanding passing team whose big men pass it almost as well as their guards. Most good shooting teams are good passing teams, and this team’s shooting opportunities are set up by very good passing and unselfishness.Why Not? Pitt does not shoot free throws well at all as a team, and down the stretch in tough games, the free-throw issues could make the difference.

Most Indispensable Player: Aaron Gray. The big man is a walking double-double who plays angles well and is an outstanding post passer who commands double-teams and opens things up on the perimeter.

Other teams he lists are Kansas, Ohio State, Oregon, Texas A&M and Marquette (“Why Not? The Golden Eagles are not consistent shooters, and in a tournament setting, the percentages suggest that will catch up with them. This is an outstanding offensive rebounding team, but in a one-game scenario, Marquette is held hostage by how it shoots the ball more than any other team on this list.”). Air Force and Notre Dame (???) are listed as “dark horses.”

Looks like this place wasn’t the only blog to discuss the game as it went. Cinci Post beat writer Josh Katzowitz has a Bearcats blog and had insights of his own. Media riot when the food ran out early. UC students getting on Kendall. Good stuff.