Tim Benz: If Pitt has 'joy with a mixture of hunger' conflict over being seeded in Dayton, there's a way to reconcile it

The NCAA Tournament bracket was released Sunday with Pitt playing against Mississippi State as a First Four team in Dayton on Tuesday. The winner will play Iowa State on Friday.

Many Pitt fans seemed to react with equal amounts of relief and outrage. Relief in the sense that Pitt managed to get into the field of 68 after a late slide. Outrage in the sense that the NCAA selection process had them in that tenuous situation for the last few weeks despite narrowly missing out on an ACC regular-season championship.

In my eyes, neither emotion is wrong.

“It was joy with a mixture of hunger,” Pitt’s Jamarius Burton said after the bracket was revealed.

I certainly understand that feeling from Burton. I also understand why Panthers fans feel as if a 14-4 start to conference play — before losing three of their last four outings — should have prevented their school from being that close to falling off the tournament bubble entirely. The belief being that any team who entered the last week of league play in position to win a “Power 6” conference shouldn’t feel as if its NCAA Tournament life was on the line entering conference tournament action.

Apparently for Pitt, though, that was the case, and their bubble almost popped.

Most bracketologists predicted that would be the predicament after the Panthers suffered an egregious loss to an 11-21 Notre Dame squad, a narrow defeat to eventual ACC regular-season champion Miami and a 27-point, second-round ACC tournament beatdown from Duke.

But here’s the thing with how the NCAA selection committee functions these days. It operates almost entirely in a gray area of taking objective numbers and applying them subjectively to guide who should be in the field of 68 and who shouldn’t. Good wins and bad losses have a non-specific sense of value and are applied as much as seen necessary and are ignored when other evidence seems more applicable.

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Some of the numbers suggested Pitt shouldn’t even be in the field. Then again, if Pitt wasn’t in, it’d be hard to justify the ACC getting four other schools (Duke, Virginia, Miami, NC State) into the tournament, seeing as Pitt was a bad week away from winning the conference.

“I don’t think our league gets the respect I think we should get,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said in advance of the team’s departure for Ohio. “But there is nothing I can do about that — except for us to play and (hope) for all of our teams to perform well.”

I’ve spent the past few weeks advocating for the Panthers to get an NCAA berth because I think a season’s worth of success in the ACC — down year for the conference though it may be — should’ve put them into “The Big Dance.”

I’ve seen Pitt on its best nights. Beating Miami, NC State and Virginia. Blowing out Northwestern. Handling North Carolina and Syracuse twice each. When that team is on its game, it’s impressive. They have multiple scoring options and always seem to be able to shoot themselves into a game even if they got off to a bad start.

I’ll pick them to beat Mississippi State. Iowa State is good, but certainly not in a different class than Pitt. I wouldn’t even be stunned if the Panthers win that game too.

Frankly, very few teams beyond the top two lines of this tournament have a dominant look about them. Now that Pitt is in, there is no reason that they should feel any less of a chance of making a run than Mississippi State, or Iowa State, or the other two at-large teams in Dayton (Arizona State and Nevada).

“We’ve done it in the past. We’re going to bring that swag to the court in March Madness. We are going to bring that energy,” forward Blake Hinson said Sunday.

However, while I’m talking up the Panthers, I’m not going to throw a pity party for them either. I’m not going to play the typical Pitt fan card of, “We get no respect. Pitt is always overlooked. The NCAA and the media have something against us.”

Wow such disrespect to Pitt..

— Pauly (@PParcell) March 12, 2023

The ACC disrespect is just pathetic. ACC should be sending 6 teams easily.

— Mike Ross (@IronCity_Mike) March 10, 2023

Committee hates the ACC this year, Pitt has been slammed all season long https://t.co/HjMsgOk3CQ

— Tom Crocco (@tmcrocco97) March 10, 2023

Lunardi is from Philly.... hates Pitt secretively

— Schroeder (@tstranko) March 12, 2023

Pitt gets no respect. Hopefully the team uses it and proves everyone wrong.

— sarcastic deer (@sarcastic_deer) March 13, 2023

Nah. I’m not going down that road. I’d have Pitt as a low-10 seed or at least one of the 11 seeds that didn’t have to play in Dayton. But save the usual Blue and Gold “woe is us” routine. Pitt had to know the situation on the heels of its 99-82 throttling of Syracuse on Feb. 25. Don’t lose to Notre Dame. Get at least one win in the conference tournament. Don’t look bad against Duke. Otherwise, it may be Dayton — at best.

Every bracket expert under the sun had that forecast for Pitt, and Capel’s Panthers still only accomplished one of those three tasks. So they have been reduced to play-in status.

Now it’s time for Pitt to play their way out of it and into the full bracket. Something I think they are more than capable of doing. I’m just not capable of giving anymore campaign speeches on their behalf.

At this point, Pitt needs to be in charge of its own validation. The hypothetical “what ifs” of Selection Sunday have come and gone. If they aren’t too pouty about being in Dayton and play their way into the field of 64, I give them a shot of making a little noise.

But that’s only if their energy is focused more on that task than it is about grousing over why they are playing on Tuesday in the first place.