Youth versus Experience at Pitt
People love to wax poetic about the value of experience in college basketball, especially in regards to the NCAA Tournament. Those veteran teams with an experienced point guard and senior scorer always win. They have been through the battles before, know what it takes to win and know how to avoid distractions. This is all fine and good but, at some point, doesn’t talent just win out?
This seems to be the epitome of Pittsburgh basketball under this regime. Jamie Dixon is a fine coach. He is very successful, routinely leading teams to top rankings and high Big East finishes. However, he does more with less, coaches up and any other coaching clichés that can be thrown around. The fact remains that Dixon coached Pitt teams always seem to underachieve in the Big Dance for the simple fact that they are never as talented as their foes. Leadership and experience can only take a team so far.
The numbers go a long way to backing up this claim. In the regular season, Pitt, under Dixon, is a remarkable 216-60. The Panthers win over 78 percent of all their regular season games, even playing in the death trap that is the Big East Conference. They are 98-38 in-conference through Dixon’s reign, another unfathomable figure. In eight seasons, Pittsburgh has won the Big East regular season title twice and finished second three more times. Jamie Dixon is just a tremendous regular season coach, working his talent the best he can to bring about the highest value possible. This is evident from his multiple coaching awards. He has been awarded conference coach of the year twice and has won a coach of the year award by different publications in three separate seasons.
Then the playoffs start.
Maybe it is due to small sample sizes or coincidences or outliers but Pitt does not fair well in one and done tournaments and it seems to be because coaching up cannot beat playing up. Where Dixon can outcoach others in the long haul of the regular season, he doesn’t seem to out-recruit anyone and in one game matches, more talented teams always end up taking down Pittsburgh.
Even with all the success, all the top seeds, Pitt has only won one Big East Tournament title under Dixon. They have made the NCAA Tournament every season, oftentimes with a very high seed yet have made it to the Elite Eight only once and have yet to make a Final Four. In fact, five of the eight years, they won one or fewer games in the tournament, failing to live up to expectations season after season.
The proof can also be seen in Pittsburgh’s NBA draft picks in recent years. Even the very best players Jamie Dixon has coached have been nothing better than second round draft picks. A few of the more notable Pitt Panthers, such as Sam Young, DeJuan Blair and even Ashton Gibbs on this year’s squad, were nothing better than late round picks (as Gibbs is expected to be in the 2012 NBA Draft). Even though they were tremendously successful in college, they simply did not have the basketball upside, the talent that makes for an NBA lottery pick and, as seems to be the case, makes for a successful NCAA Tournament team as well.
We’ll see if Jamie Dixon and Pitt can buck the trend this season with what should be another team vying for a Big East title and a high seed in the tournament.
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