Pitt Panther Prowl

Picking Tourney Winners

I have never been particularly good at picking the NCAA tournament winners, primarily because I have strong feelings of like or dislike towards many teams. These feelings keep me from being as objective as I would like to be. It doesn’t stop me from making picks, but I know that they aren’t going to be the picks that Vegas uses to set their odds.

This year has been made especially hard by the fact that the #1 seeds, while in my mind are clearly the best four teams in the country, are also four of the teams which I despise most. It seems like the safe pick is to go with UNC. Pretty much every analyst who isn’t picking a “dark horse” to win it seems to have all four 1 seeds in the final four and then UNC winning it all.

To compound the issue is the fact that picking Pitt has become the latest trend for analysts. I want Pitt to win it all. Seeing Pitt win a national championship would be phenomenal. But I picked this team to only win one game in the BET and 1 game in the NCAA tourney. I know I wasn’t the only one back then, what seems like months ago, when Pitt wasn’t firing on all cylinders. It is hard for me, just a week and a half later, to say with any honesty that I think they are going to win the national championship. I hope they do. I would love for it to happen. It just seems unlikely. The problem is that so many different outlets and analysts have picked Pitt to at least make the final four that it makes me wonder if my attempts at being objective are actually causing me to short-change what this team is really capable of. Of course, it was clear during the BET that most of these analysts hadn’t seen a Pitt game all season so they are far from experts on the subject.

I guess the only thing for me to do is to analyze things game by game and see where I find Pitt losing, if at all.

In the first game I think Pitt will do pretty well against Oral Roberts. No disrespect to ORU, but Pitt has beat some of the top teams in the country and they seem to come prepared to big games. I just don’t see the same team that waltzed through the BET as though it were a minor conference tournament losing in the opening round to ORU. While ORU prides itself on defense and has a tall front line, if they had athletes as good as Sam Young, DeJuan Blair, or Gilbert Brown, they would be playing at bigger schools. I believe Pitt has to come in prepared and not look past ORU. But if they come prepared to play, they beat ORU 100 out of 100 games.

In the second round (I am assuming seedings play out) Pitt would face Michigan St. This team has been hard to figure out because they can beat anyone but they can lose to anyone. I think Pitt is the better team, but MSU can be very dangerous. Pitt’s vulnerability is to quick guards and three-point shooting. Drew Neitzel embodies both of those. This will be a tough match-up for Pitt. Ultimately I have them winning and advancing to play Memphis. In order to beat MSU, however, Pitt will have to play the solid defense they played in the BET and not allow Neitzel to get hot from outside.

On the surface, having to play a 1 seed to get out of the Sweet 16 seems pretty rough. Memphis is no pushover team, just because they come out of a pansy conference (though maybe they need to be forced into a real conference in order to get credit for all their conference wins). The tournament isn’t about the best teams, though. It is about how teams match up against each other. Memphis is the 1 seed that Pitt probably matches up with best. Pitt can be destroyed from 3 point land, and Memphis isn’t a big 3 point shooting team. Pitt plays a physical style that is likely to give Memphis free throws, which Memphis likes to miss. In fact, John Calipari doesn’t seem to even try to improve on it because he says that if they just make more regular shots then their free throws don’t matter. Memphis likes to run but Pitt is good at slowing the game down to a more intentional pace. If forced into a transition game, Pitt is good at creating turnovers and scoring in transition. While at first glance it seems like Pitt shouldn’t make it past the Sweet 16 again this year, in the first three games I think Michigan St. is their toughest team to match-up against. I see Pitt beating Memphis and moving on to face Texas.

Again, I am assuming seeding holds out and it is very possible that Texas doesn’t make it to the Elite 8, but for the sake of argument, I think the will. If Texas doesn’t make the elite 8, then I see Pitt in the final four no matter who they play in the fourth round. If they face Texas, however, this will likely be the end of the line. Texas has solid coaching, some great guard play, and the benefit of playing basically a home game at this point. Pitt has shown it can win on the road, even in tough places like Washington, but if there are 30,000 Texas fans at the elite 8 game, that is an atmosphere that is going to be almost impossible to overcome. Pitt will have to play in-spite of the crowd because there will be no chance of winning the crowd. The problem here is that Texas has two stellar guards, DJ Augustin and Damion James. If they only had one, I would think Pitt could win. Containing two of them in front of a home crowd might prove to be too much of a challenge. So I have Pitt going out to Texas in the elite 8.

As for who wins it all; who cares? If it isn’t Pitt, it doesn’t matter.