PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) – Unranked when you are leading the ACC. The same conference that is home half of the Final Four teams from last year. It’s home to the 2019 National Champion and yet Pitt can’t crack the AP or Coaches Top 25.
You think that might be that is a motivator for this 19-win Pitt team. That’s not what has the Panthers talking, it’s the number 14.
“We wanted to make noise in the ACC,” said Pitt graduate transfer Greg Elliott. “When it came out that we were 14th, that’s why when you talk about the Top 25, we don’t think about being ranked, honestly. The only thing we think about are the people that ranked us 14th in this league.”
It was a group of media members at the 2022 ACC Tipoff on October 18 that set the motivation for a team now 12-3 in the ACC and 19-7 overall. The panel of 101 reporters selected Pitt to finish 14th in the 15-team league.
“Every day, that’s the only thing on our brain,” Elliott said. “We use that as a chip. The number 14 is crazy when you sit and think about it.”
That vote was taken five months ago.
Yet even after all they’ve accomplished that motivation is still real. Elliott mentioned he could grab his phone right now and pull it up. It’s a reminder they carry with them deep into conference play.
“We felt disrespected when it first came out,” Elliott said. “I feel like our whole team, when it was put together, felt disrespected. Everyone felt like they had a chip on their shoulder and something to prove. If we go out with that mindset on a daily basis, I feel like there is nobody that can break that.”
There is no physical copy of that poll in the Panthers locker room. But they remember those 101 people thought every team in the ACC, except Georgia Tech, was better than Pitt.
“We don’t have no bulletin board about it, we just talk about it,” Elliott said. “The way we think about it, there was only one team they had that was under us. Everybody else is ahead of us and we have to get ahead of them. That’s how we think about it.”
Those reminders are not driven by the coaches. Head Coach Jeff Capel said they never talk to the team about the rankings. The message is to get better every day, but Capel is attuned enough with his players, he knows they talk about it. He also said as much as he talked to them about not looking at social media, they probably do anyway.
“I’m pretty sure they probably feel a certain way about it because as a player you always want to feel like you are respected,” Capel said. “That’s not a conversation I’ve had with them. ‘What do you think about what other people think?’”
Elliott probably understands the low expectations outside of the locker room from the standpoint of there being so many new players. He knows, if not directly, this program has struggled over the better part of the last decade. What people outside of the group of roughly 25 players and staff didn’t know was this team believed they would do great things this year.
“That’s what we were brought here for as transfers,” Elliott said. “We all were told we are trying to turn this around, we weren’t rebuilding nothing. We knew we were coming in and trying to make noise this year. We came in with that mindset of having that chip on our shoulder. Then us being picked 14th only helped us with that.”
“We go into every game the same way we go into all of them, even at the start of the season, with a chip on our shoulder. We are not getting the respect we feel we deserve, but it is what it is at the end of the day. It’s something we can’t control. Every day we have to go in and control what we can control and that’s how hard we play on the court.
That’s all we can focus on.”
Their next opportunity is Saturday at Virginia Tech at 5p, pregame with Bill Hillgrove, Curtis Aiken and Cale Berger is 4:30 on 93.7 The Fan.