FanHouse Pitt Panthers

Pitt sophomore forward, DeJuan Blair was at the very least going to test the NBA draft waters. Most mock drafts have Blair being drafted mid-way in the first round despite being a 6-7 power forward.

Blair has decided that he will not even pretend that there is a chance that he will come back to Pitt. He has retained an attorney to help him, though he has not hired an NBA-certified agent as of yet. The hiring of an attorney, though, means that Blair has surrendered his remaining eligibility. He has a press conference scheduled for later this afternoon to make an official statement.

INDIANAPOLIS -- On his tippy toes, he might be 5-10, very easy to lose in the enormity of a football stadium where faces look like matrix dots and crowd noise drifts to the ozone. But no one strikes a larger pose in the Midwest today than Tom Izzo, public defender of the Big Ten's battered self-esteem. If trends and hipness start on both coasts in America, college basketball in the heartland also has been taking on an irrelevant, plodding look, to the point I stopped watching.

And I live in Chicago.

Scottie Reynolds has hit a lot of shots for Villanova, but never, ever, ever one quite like this.

Ladies and gentlemen, we may have just witnessed the last Big East game of the 2008-09 season. If Louisville wins Sunday and Villanova wins again next Saturday, we get two more, but there's no guarantee. It's possible that this down-to-the-last-half-second classic, in which Villanova beat top-seeded Pitt to reach the Final Four, was the last game of the year between Big East teams.

And if it was ... dear god, what a finale.

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Update: Blair is wearing the bands during the Panthers' Elite Eight game against Villanova. The earlier report from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review said the bands would be banned if there wasn't a medical reason for their use. So we can only assume Blair has some ailment solved by the medical treatment of looking like a bad ass.

In the first half of Pitt's win over Xavier, DeJuan Blair had been held to only two points and four rebounds in the first half. When Pitt came out for the second half against Xavier, Blair was lacking the bands that he has had around each bicep all year long. Blair subsequently had a big second half, grabbing 13 more rebounds and adding eight more points, meaning yet another double-double.

He did not shed the arm bands to change his luck, though. The NCAA made him shed them.

Well, you don't have to look too hard to get the point of this night in NCAA Tournament history. The Big East won three of the four Sweet 16 games played tonight -- two of them easily. At this very moment, it's pretty hard to like Oklahoma's or Arizona's chances on Friday night, or Missouri's on Saturday. The Big East is flexing muscles, baring fangs, dropping its collective shoulder and knocking down all of college basketball on its way to history's hoop. The conference is guaranteed one Final Four entrant (either Villanova or Pitt will make it) and still has a chance to grab all four spots. Only one conference has ever had as many as three in the Final Four and that was...yeah. The Big East. In 1985.

This is a little bit of history, with even more possibly on the way.

For the first time since the NCAA tournament expanded to allow multiple bids from one conference in 1975, Pitt has a chance to play itself into the Final Four. And for the first time ever, the Panthers have won more than two games in the NCAA tournament. But Pitt, which last appeared in the Elite Eight with two wins in 1974, didn't make it easy.

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DeJuan Blair made this possible, of course. After a quiet, four-rebound first half, Pitt's monster in the middle went off and hauled in 13 boards in the second half as the Panthers stormed back from an eight-point deficit to advance to the Elite Eight.

But while it wouldn't and couldn't have happened without Blair, Levance Fields won this game in the final minute. There was the Bill Raftery "ONIONS!!" 3-pointer with a hand in his face that broke the tie with 50 seconds left. And then there was the steal-and-layup on the next possession that sealed it. That's a big-time player making big-time plays in a big-time game.

DAYTON, Ohio -- DeJuan Blair's arms are so humongous, he wears bicep bands, tiny strips of cloth stretched to the brink of snapping. At 6-foot-7 and 265 pounds, he could play tight end in the NFL or enter the Octagon, proving it Sunday when he shook off a furious collision that left Oklahoma State's Byron Eaton literally crying in pain on the bench. Levance Fields, too, could put on the big pads as a safety, absorbing a blindside pop in the chops and bouncing right back up. Sam Young? A 6-6, 220-pound wideout, no doubt, when he isn't listening to Go-Go music.

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DAYTON, Ohio -- DeJuan Blair's arms are so humongous, he wears bicep bands, tiny strips of cloth stretched to the brink of snapping. At 6-foot-7 and 265 pounds, he could play tight end in the NFL or enter the Octagon, proving it Sunday when he shook off a furious collision that left Oklahoma State's Byron Eaton literally crying in pain on the bench. Levance Fields, too, could put on the big pads as a safety, absorbing a blindside pop in the chops and bouncing right back up. Sam Young? A 6-6, 220-pound wideout, no doubt, when he isn't listening to Go-Go music.

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