College Basketball Notes : Pitt Has Edge in Scramble

Sitting precariously atop the NCAA Tournament bubble, the Pitt Panthers know they easily can fall into the abyss of near misses or slip into the select field of 64 this season.

The determining factor could be their four victories over top-10 teams. Or it could be their unimpressive collection of 10-and-counting defeats.

After Tuesday night’s 87-77 victory over St. John’s, the Panthers still are facing an uphill battle. At 13-10, they have four regular-season games remaining plus the Big East Conference tournament. Coach Paul Evans thinks 16 wins should be worthy of an NCAA bid.

Evans can take solace in his team’s giant-killer reputation. So far the Panthers have knocked off Syracuse and Georgetown, both ranked second in the nation at the time, Oklahoma when it was No. 3 and Seton Hall when it was No. 9. The prime-time Panthers are 6-2 on national television.

Their problems stem from a very short bench. Evans uses only six players, and those six have accounted for 779 of the team’s 792 points in 10 games before Tuesday night.

Saturday’s 79-74 upset of Georgetown was typical of Pitt’s season in that it followed a 10-point loss to Providence. The loss to Providence was their third in their last four games, and Evans’ antidote was to make practice life miserable for the Panthers going into the Georgetown game.

“We’ve been down there with whale dung,” the former Navy coach said of his practices leading into the Georgetown game. “I killed them in practice. I don’t think they want any more practices like we had. I want them to get (mad) at somebody, not just lay around and think they’re going to lay down and die and nobody’s going to care.

“I still think we have some games to be won and an outside shot at the NCAA.”

The encouraging news for Evans is that in the last two NCAA Tournament fields, there have been 29 teams with 10 or more losses. One of those teams, Kansas, won the whole thing last year with a 27-11 record.

Duke lost two national defensive players of the year from its last two teams when Tommy Amaker and Billy King graduated. For a while this season, it looked as though the Blue Devils might even have lost their defensive identity.

Not so, as Maryland found out last weekend. Duke restored its defensive reputation by overwhelming the Terps, 86-60. Afterward, Quin Snyder, the Blue Devils’ senior point guard, said Duke had lost sight of its defensive priority during a less than flattering stay at No. 1.

These 11th-ranked Devils are playing much better than the first-ranked Devils, who wound up losing three in a row.

“We’re two different teams,” Snyder said. “The old team tried to outscore people. It was a country-club team. We were No. 1 and listening to all that stuff. We didn’t understand what it takes. We didn’t understand what our identity was. We can’t be like that.”

Never one to pull punches, Oklahoma Coach Billy Tubbs has drawn an official reprimand from the Big Eight Conference for publicly ridiculing game officials.

In last week’s 112-107 victory over Missouri, Tubbs went on the public address microphone to ask Sooner fans to stop throwing objects onto the court “regardless of how terrible the officiating is.”

UNLV Coach Jerry Tarkanian commends Jim Valvano for inviting the NCAA to investigate allegations about his North Carolina State program: “I thought it was a good move on his part. He’s got nothing to hide. There’s not a phony bone in his body. He’s not a hypocrite in any way. With Jimmy, what you see is what you get.”

Valvano recently received support from the university’s academic deans, who found no evidence for the allegation that one of Chris Washburn’s grades had been changed. Then the university’s Board of Trustees unanimously passed a resolution expressing confidence in the school’s academic integrity as well as the men’s basketball team.

Still, it did not help Valvano’s cause last week when a faculty senate report stated that 10 of 12 players on the team were in academic trouble, and that seven of them were one warning away from suspension. The report said that 13 of the 43 players recruited by Valvano since 1980 were on suspension at the time they left the school.