A winning recipe for Jamie Dixon’s basketball team this season has been scoring 70 points. When Pitt scores 70 points they were 20-0 coming into today’s game.
The Panthers put up 71 points against No. 7 North Carolina but had no answers defensively in an 88-71 loss to the Tar Heels.
“I certainly thought we would have finished off better than we did,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said after the loss. “The defense struggled the entire game. Eventually it caught up to us as they pulled away in the second half.”
Pitt played with North Carolina in the first half in trading chances but the Tar Heels would pull away in the second half. With the game tied at 45 with 15:52 left the Tar Heels got rolling fueled by an 11-0 run. Where this game really started to get away from Pitt was late in the first half when the Tar Heels put together a 10-0 run.
What a superior team often does, North Carolina dictated the style and pace of play, outscoring Pitt 59-36 over the final 23:30 of the game.
North Carolina shot 58.9 percent from the field, the fourth-best shooting performance in ACC Tournament history.
Eliminated from the ACC Tournament, Pitt now waits to learn their fate on Sunday for the NCAA Tournament. Pitt often gets criticized for their weak non-conference schedule as they should, but the poor non-conference schedule has actually helped them look like an NCAA tournament team on paper(21 wins) when in reality this isn’t a team that deserves to go. With a 53 RPI before yesterday’s win vs Syracuse, the experts say Pitt is going to be in.
“Everybody seems to be telling us we are,” Dixon Said. “I haven’t looked at everything going on. Just from what everybody says.”
