Why is pitt basketball so bad

We got the dames in our backseat and we are headed to the malt shop. You gotta play the slow game, honeyknuckle! Three stars across the board on those recruiting sites, babycakes. Just you watch. My plan is to hope that they make one of those weird January bowl games and then by the time they finally play it I can sneak out of the back door until the spring game or so. Failing that, I will learn to love amateur wrestling. Try me. I did it for a week last year. Some of them, though, they have this story for an answer.

That was kind of like how I was. Except I never destroyed to understand. Pitt led a few times in the first half, but never by more than two scores and never after the 8-minute mark of the first half. Long Beach stretched the lead to nine at the half and never looked back.

Long Beach came in with a reputation for being a run-and-gun squad and they did just that, outscoring Pitt in fast-break points. Guard Casper Ware piled up 28 points on of shooting. The loss was the first non-conference loss at the Pete for Pitt in November or December and first at any point in six years. But Pitt went on to notch important non-conference wins at Tennessee and against Oklahoma State and seemed to find stable footing as the end of the year neared.

Hindsight: Long Beach was a good bit better than most of the teams listed here. Kevin Stallings said after this game that he was foolish to schedule a road season opener with such an inexperienced team. Pitt fans would later heartily agree with his self-assessment, in more ways than just who was scheduled on Nov. This one is pretty easy to sum up. After playing things pretty tight the first 20 minutes, Pitt scored one point in the first 10 minutes of the second half.

Navy jumped out to a point lead and the game was over. Pitt shot 8 of 28 from 3-point range, including an 0-for-5 debut from sharpshooter Parker Stewart. Hindsight: Navy lost to Miami two days later by It came at the very end of the non-conference slate, two days before Christmas, and also seven days before their Big East opener with Notre Dame scheduled for Dec. Pitt started sluggish and trailed at the half, but cut the lead to four points late in the game, only to turn the ball over on three straight possessions.

The Panthers turned the ball over 18 times in the game and shot a brutal 2 of 15 from 3-point range. The loss to Wagner came just a few weeks after the loss to Long Beach State and really solidified the changing tide for the Panthers. The loss was the start of an eight-game losing streak for Pitt. I had seen two of those dudes a few hours earlier at the Primanti Bros.

The next generation of bubbly Save time, money, and ultimately help save the planet by forgoing your La Croix. But in this century, the Panthers had established themselves as consistently top-tier: At one point, they appeared in the AP top 10 in 11 consecutive seasons. The Pete, which opened in on the former site of the on-campus football stadium, regularly sold out. Pitt won a lot of games. Pitt was fun. Pitt finished this season with 19 consecutive defeats, and it went in the ACC, including a season-ending loss to Notre Dame on Tuesday in the first round of the ACC tournament.

The Panthers are the only Division I program not to win a game in conference play this year. I want to show you a play. Just one. It happened 11 days ago, at the end of the first half of a home game against No. Pitt was down by 23, had scored just seven points, and was holding the ball for the last shot. How did this happen? And can Pitt ever recover? My father went there, and so did both of my brothers. I grew up a few miles away, and I attended grade school and high school just a few blocks down Fifth Avenue.

I came of age in the s, when Pitt and the Big East were the best show in sports: the brawls , the personalities, the conference tournament at Madison Square Garden where even the early round games packed the intensity of a prizefight.

My dad died four years ago. Yes, Enright attended every Pitt home game this season. And now it turns out, according to the NCAA — and the University of Pittsburgh, which agreed to the findings — Pitt cheated to be that bad.

It's not designing-an-elaborate-signal-stealing-mechanism-level cheating , but according to the NCAA and Pitt, then-head coach Kevin Stallings ordered three staff members who were not designated coaches to perform on-floor duties that are off-limits for their positions, by rule.

The findings also said Stallings "developed an alert system to ensure noncoaching staff would not be caught on the practice floor coaching student-athletes.

When I told you in March that hiring Stallings was a "comically poor decision," I never had any idea what a farce it would become. With six of the top seven players remaining from that team, Stallings went