Low Preseason Ranking Fueled Pitt's Run at Regular Season Title
PITTSBURGH -- When Pitt Panthers head coach Jeff Capel was a player, it was easier to ignore the noise. As a star of the 1990's, it was rare that Capel would ever have to interact with the negative opinions of outsiders in newspapers and on talk radio, but as a member of two unusually poor Duke teams, he wasn't immune to it.
"My senior year, I got booed at Cameron [Indoor Stadium]," The Blue Devil player turned Panther head coach said. "That was really difficult for me. I remember being at a home game the next game after that and I remember being out shooting before a game and I looked up and my family was passing around a newspaper. There was an article in the State and Observer and there was a big picture of me and the headline was something like ‘A Fallen Star’."
For most of his time in Pittsburgh, Capel advised his players to avoid social media and stay away from the internet because his teams didn't win much and the criticism could become overwhelming and deflating. This year, he wants them away from their phones because he's afraid the praise will cause his first-place squad could lose their focus.
"But that probably falls on deaf ears because these young people are addicted to it,” Capel said.
The players themselves say they've heeded the advice of their coach and stayed locked in on the task at hand, but there is one thing they've carried from October into the home stretch of the regular season - their 14th place ranking in the ACC preseason media poll. Much of the fanbase is clamoring for the Panthers to crack the AP top 25 but starting guard Greg Elliot said Pitt is more focused on the conference standings.
"The number 14 was crazy when you really sit and think about it," Elliot said. "That’s how we think about it. We don’t really think about being ranked but when we were picked 14th, we had to go get it.”
To call it "bulletin board material" is inaccurate - Pitt doesn't have a bulletin board in their locker room. But they remember seeing that ranking and bottled up the disappointment of low external expectations. That feeling hasn't dissipated.
“That didn’t go nowhere," Elliot said. "It may have been months ago, but if I grab my phone right now, I can pull that up. That’s not far-fetched - it’s right there."
Instead of letting the frustration fester, Pitt channeled it into wins. A rough 1-3 start subsided and even though this team has passed program milestones and put themselves in a position to win ACC regular season title and earn the top seed in the conference tournament, Elliot and his teammates walk into every game remembering that before the season began, everyone expected almost every opponent to bury them.
"The way we think about it is we go into every game and there was only one team they had under us and that was Georgia Tech. Everybody else is ahead of us and we got to get ahead of them.”
The Panthers sit at 19-7, 12-3 in conference entering a weekend visit to Virginia Tech. It doesn't surprise Elliot or any of his teammates. This was their plan all along.
"We all was told we’re trying to turn this around," he said. "No one said we was rebuilding and we knew we were trying to make noise this year. We came in with the mindset of having that chip on our shoulder and then us getting picked 14th, that only helped with that.”
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