Pre-Seeding Thoughts
March 16th, 2008 | by The Prowler |I have said that I see Pitt as a 5-6 seed right now. Apparently I have no idea what I am talking about.
Joe Lunardi has Pitt at a 3 seed.
I think that is probably too high and not likely to happen. I still don’t think they will even get a 4 seed. But I assume Lunardi is giving credit to Pitt for being a better team with Fields than without, therefore giving them a pass on some of the conference losses.
On the other hand, as my brother pointed out, Syracuse wasn’t going to make the NCAA tourney two years ago without winning the BET. Yet they ended up with (I believe) a 5 seed. So there may well be an aspect that, despite all the talk that the Pac 10 and the ACC are the best conferences this year, there is a recognition that it takes a damn good team to come out of the BET with a championship. You just can’t waltz through the BET without beating some darn good teams.
It is all speculation, and I honestly don’t know what to think about seeding anymore. But it will be fun watching the brackets get revealed.
Post-Gazette columnist Ron Cook had the following to say:
You think this is the Golden Era of Pitt basketball?
“What we’ve done over the last seven years, national championship teams haven’t done in terms of consistency,” Dixon said.
It has been some run, especially at the world’s most famous arena. Let me put Pitt’s success under the Garden lights — the brightest in college basketball — in perspective:
In the Panthers’ first 18 years in the Big East, they went 6-18 in the tournament and didn’t win more than one game in any year. In the past eight years, they have gone 19-6 with those two championships and the seven Saturday night appearances.
Calling it the Golden Era of Pitt basketball just doesn’t seem to do it justice.
I do wonder how many of the naysayers of the past month or so still believe that Pitt should fire Jamie Dixon…