Editorial: NCAA blues and blame

When high expectations are vanquished in a sudden cloud of shock and dismay, people respond by… When high expectations are vanquished in a sudden cloud of shock and dismay, people respond by grasping desperately for silver linings, doing their best to sustain any unextinguished morsels of self-esteem.

We at The Pitt News tried that for about an hour. But after the men’s basketball team’s loss to the Butler Bulldogs on Saturday, little solace can be found for our troubled hearts.

Oh sure, as the NCAA Tournament hums along Panther-less, people will try to comfort Pitt fans. They might applaud our regular-season record, using words like “remarkable” or the all-American “awesome-sauce.” They might point out how quickly we can replace graduating seniors with incoming talent. Or they might talk about the good looks of Pitt fans as a whole. Although all of that is true, we think Saturday’s defeat grants Pitt students a free pass to be utterly, immutably sad — for at least a few more days.

Along with a generalized sentiment of gloom, the blame game abounds on campus. Fingers are pointing every which way, from last-minute referee calls to Jamie Dixon’s decision not to call enough timeouts or pull the players from the line during Butler’s end-of-game free throws. Whereas some arguments might now seem to have merit, sifting through the complexity of the loss to find causality — especially when biased by an abnormal-to-the-point-of-unhealthy emotional state — is a practice ripe for error. So at least in this editorial, we’ll refrain.

But that doesn’t stop us from offering season-wide reflection. In one stroke of analytical genius, we’ve discovered that the two highest-profile men’s sports teams — basketball and football — might suffer from a kind of “big-game mentality.” Whereas it became clear last year that men’s football somehow fails to win big regular-season games — ahem, Backyard Brawl 2010 — the basketball team might often knock off socks during the regular season, but it just as consistently disappoints come the NCAA Tournament. A phenomenal characteristic of Jamie Dixon is that he gets the Panthers to the top of the Big East each year, but for some reason the performance stops there.

But why? Why must the curtains fall so prematurely? Why can’t Pitt translate national rankings into sizable, deserved postseason triumph?

Some say Pitt has choked each year because each victorious opponent has managed to put on the court an unstoppable player that Pitt cannot seem to neutralize. Think of Scottie Reynolds from Villanova, Jordan Crawford from Xavier or Shelvin Mack from this year’s Butler team. Somehow the Panthers let Mack score 30 points Saturday. Or perhaps the Panthers engage in yearly Tournament-choking because the Big East affords a uniform style of play that tends to differ from the playing styles of their NCAA Tournament opponents.

Or perhaps it’s just another fluke that shouldn’t change the way we live our lives, as any basketball game — no matter how many brackets you fill out or office pools you participate in — is in the end just a game. Nah, let’s go with the being-sad thing.