Herb Pope Has Another Setback

The excellent Big East basketball blog, Zagsblog.com, is reporting that former Pitt recruit Herb Pope has landed in the hospital:

Seton Hall forward Herb Pope was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital in New Jersey after collapsing on campus Wednesday afternoon.

A team source who was with Pope at the hospital said he was uncertain what triggered the collapse.

“A student-athlete has been taken to the hospital,” a university spokesman confirmed to ZAGSBLOG.com.

Complete cause is unknown, but Adam has some more information in the story. Just another setback for a tremendous local athlete. Here's hoping he's better soon and it's not serious. It's amazing what this guy's been through and even Pitt fans who weren't happy with his decision to back out of his commitment to the school have to be pulling for him to at least be healthy.

He was planning to test the NBA waters, but not sure if this will cause a setback in that plan.

Back To Business

Pitt got back to the business of taking Big East teams to the woodshed at home with a 25-point beatdown of Seton Hall on Saturday. The handy-dandy game flow chart shows a close game initially with Pitt pulling away for a big win. This was one that Pitt had to have and they responded as such.

Pretty much everything went the Panthers' way and they played about as well as possible. Shooting over 50% from the field, 45% from 3s, and 71% from the line. They outrebounded Seton Hall by nine, had 20 assists, and only turned the ball over nine times.

As I said - pretty perfect game.

Perhaps the biggest plus was the balance of scoring - 23 for Gilbert Brown, 15 for Jermaine Dixon, 13 for Brad Wanamaker, 12 for Gary McGhee, and 11 for Ashton Gibbs. Pitt will be at their best when they can get a bunch of guys into double figures and don't have to rely on 1-2 players. J.J. Richardson, who's been seeing increased minutes lately, had the same output as Dante Taylor (2 points/2 rebounds/1 block) in 2/3 less minutes.

Back to Gibbs - He took the second fewest shots of this season (7) and the 'share the load' mentality seemed to work. Pitt cannot rely on him to go out and score 20 points. He may do that once in a while, but as we've seen recently, Pitt needs other guys to step up if they're going to win games.

And going hand in hand with that is going to be Pitt's ability to get him a breather. Dixon followed the strategy that I laid out after the WVU game of playing Gibbs a bit less and Travon Woodall a bit more to allow Gibbs a breather from PG responsibilities. Gibbs played 31 minutes (his fewest of the Big East season) and Woodall played 19 minutes (his most of the Big East season). Woodall has been playing better of late and has been keeping the turnovers and wild play to a minimum. If Pitt can rely a bit more on Woodall, then Gibbs will be better for it. Woodall has not been getting a ton of assists or points, but in the past six games, has only six turnovers - not bad at all.

Former Pitt recruit Herb Pope had a mild 9/6, shooting 3-13 from the field and fouling out. Pitt also held scoring machine Jeremy Hazell to only two points, keeping him at 11 total in both meetings. Raise your hand if you thought THAT was possible. If your hand is up, please, just, go away. Anyway, Hazell was benched for the start of this game, picking up where he left off with head coach Bobby Gonzalez, who benched him at the end of their loss to Villanova for poor shot selection.

I expected Pitt to get tested a little more and really am surprised that nearly 7,000 people still made it out despite the snowstorm. Even if a lot of them were students, that's still pretty amazing. I was expecting a few thousand to get there and wondered what kind of home-court advantage that would really give Pitt. Not sure how much it helped that Pitt gave free tickets to students - I'm kind of under the mindset that whoever wanted to go already had tickets. But I'm sure it helped at least a little and was a good idea on the part of the university.

Pitt will certainly not play this well all the time, but it's nice to see them get back on track - hopefully this will instill some more confidence after the whooping they took from WVU.

And on a brief side note, I love Curtis Aiken but he was a train wreck tonight. Pitt went up by ten on an Ashton Gibbs 3-pointer with FIFTEEN minutes left in the 2nd half and he called it the final dagger or something, signifying the end of the game. He then followed that gem up by saying that Herb Pope at around the 11:00 mark had only 1 FG in the game (when he in fact had three). He was also completely in the dark on the technical foul rule, unsure of who had possession after the FT. Normally, this is stuff I can overlook. But it all literally happened within like five minutes. Come on, my man.

Next up is Robert Morris on Monday night.

So....Now What?

After a somewhat disappointing loss against Seton Hall, many Pitt fans (myself included) are asking a collective, 'Now what?' After a short fall in the rankings, Pitt also found itself sliding in Joe Lunardi's meaningless, but fun, Bracketology, to a four seed.

To start, many also are asking how Pitt could lose on Sunday. The answer is two-fold:

1. Seton Hall is not nearly as bad as some thought.

2. Turnovers:

"We had 20 turnovers, 14 in the first half," Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. "That usually will lead to a loss. Most amazingly, [the turnovers] all came in the half-court, which is hard to comprehend. We're making bad decisions and not executing well enough offensively and defensively."

The question on a lot of minds is likely if it's panic alert time since Pitt could have easily lost three in a row. Ray Fittipaldo doesn't think so and I agree with that. I think Pitt really needs to regroup and win both of these next two, though, or some serious questions will start being asked. Games at home against St. John's and on the road at South Florida are games you MUST win if you're expected to be a top contender in the best conference on the planet.

What's the cause for the recent lapses? Jermaine Dixon has some thoughts:

"We need to mentally get back to where we were," Dixon said. "I'm not going to say it's the rankings -- and I don't know how people are taking it -- but ever since our rankings got higher, I think our defense got worse."

Can't just be the rankings - it's GOT to be something else - oh yeah, there's that shooting problem:

Opposing teams are playing more attention to Pitt sophomore guard Ashton Gibbs, who is 11 for 43 from the field (6 for 19 from 3-point range) in the past three games.

Seton Hall's Keon Lawrence and Jordan Theodore were the latest guards to take turns chasing Pitt's leading scorer.

"It's definitely more difficult," Gibbs said. "Teams are definitely keying a lot more on me. I've got to keep working on it, and it will fall sooner or later."

Poor defense, turnovers, sloppy play, poor shooting - Pitt can handle one, even two of those. But when three or four happen, it's difficult for any team to win. And that's what we've seen in the past couple of games. I can't state how important these next two games are for Pitt. If they can't manage to win both, there should (and will) be serious questions about just how good they are. Personally, I think they'll be fine. I don't see any possible scenario that they don't get to 20+ regular season wins and I think once in the tournament, anything can happen.

Let's Hope It's Not Becoming A Trend

Let me start by saying I did not see Pitt's loss against Seton Hall - only a few plays and some highlights. So my analysis on this game is limited to strictly the box score and post-game interviews.

That said, I don't think this loss is that big of a deal. I don't know. Maybe it's the fact that I've seen good Pitt teams get bounced early from the NCAA Tournament and regular season games mean increasingly less to me. The hot start that Pitt has (or, had, depending on how you view it) gotten off to this year really got me excited because I wasn't really expecting that much out of this team. Yes, I predicted 20 wins for them going in, but after the Wofford and Indiana games, my expectations were lessened.

But back to the game.

This loss was to a rising team on the road after they had played an emotional one on Wednesday, so I'm not going to get too bent out of shape over it.

Looking over the box score, it looks like Ashton had another tough day (4-15 from the field), despite getting to the line quite a bit and ending up with 23 points. He also had the misses at the end to tie it. He's now had three off shooting nights in a row and is 11-43 from the field over that span (just over 25%). That's not going to cut it if Pitt is to be successful over the good teams. Yes, when others have shown their ability to step up, Pitt has shown they can still find ways to win. But Jermaine Dixon was the only other player in double figures (11) and the team shot an abysmal 35% from the field.

Other than Jeremy Hazell having a foul-plagued game, the other thing that stuck out to me was Dante Taylor only getting 7 minutes.

Pitt managed to outrebound Seton Hall by ten, but also reverted back to their old ways a bit with 20 turnovers - their most in eight games. Local kid and former Pitt recruit, Herb Pope, also appeared to have Gary McGhee and Dante Taylor for breakfast as he had 19/9 compared to McGhee/Taylor's combined 6/5. Ouch.

The Panthers' next two games are two that they should win - home against St. John's and on the road at South Florida. If Pitt loses either game, there should be cause for some concern - even with Pitt's history of playing down to its competition at times. Pitt really needs to come out strong and get two convincing wins this week.