Pitarresi: Big East a dogfight all the way

If you’re trying to figure out which is the best basketball team in the Big East, good luck.

Syracuse’s 78-60 loss at Pittsburgh Monday was indicative of what the league is like. SU, coming off a big victory over Notre Dame, was playing a Pitt team that had been knocked out of the No. 1 stop by Louisville Saturday. So, what happens? The Panthers play hungry, the Orange play flat, and Pitt wins going away.

It looks like the top six or eight or even 10 teams in the league all can beat each other. It helps to be at home – the home team won all but one of the league games Saturday through Monday – and you have to play your best. SU did not do that at Pitt. The Orange shot poorly (41 percent), made poor decisions (14 turnovers), rebounded poorly (40 to 28) and generally didn’t look totally prepared.

I also thought the normally very tough Eric Devendorf had a very strange game. He took just four shots in 24 minutes, scored just five points and had four turnovers. And Jonny Flynn, despite 12 points and seven assists, had a very strange game, too. The numbers say otherwise, but he was not efficient.

Still, as Jim Boeheim said, SU is 17-3 overall and 5-2 in the league, which is better than most people expected,. However, the Orange, monumentally talented physically, have to be smarter on the court and mentally tougher. The Big East is going to be a dog fight all the way, through the league tourney at Madison Square Garden.

In other news, Michigan just announced that it has hired former Syracuse football coach Greg Robinson as defensive coordinator. Robinson will work under Rich Rodriguez, who he faced several times when Rodriguez was the head coach at West Virginia. Good luck to Greg, always a good guy in his four years at SU, no matter what you might have thought of him as a coach.