PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan) – It was something Pitt associate head coach Tim O’Toole watched Tuesday night before the Panthers played Georgia Tech on Wednesday in the ACC Tournament. It was a show about Navy SEALs. He equates their biggest value as to why the Panthers have turned it around.
“What they look for in their SEALs, are not only performance, but trust,” O’Toole explained on the Pitt Panthers Radio Network post-game show. “They would rather have a low-performance, high-trust guy than a high-performance low-trust guy at any point in time. What we have throughout our ranks, we trust each other.”
A veteran of 35 years of coaching, he believes you see that up-and-down the Panthers lineup. When adversity hits, they rally back together, reassemble and then start swinging and fighting back.
Before their ACC Tournament opener against the Yellow Jackets, which they would rally to win by eight, O’Toole pointed to two words. Humble and hungry.
“The reality is as March started we’ve been humbled,” O’Toole told Bill Hillgrove and Curtis Aiken. “We went to Notre Dame and got beat up and went to Miami and lost. You got to say, ‘screw that, that’s behind us’. What we’ve been able to do all year is we’ve been able to focus and be disciplined.”
Starting the second half with three consecutive turnovers and not making a field goal until over three minutes into the half, they dealt with it. Pitt didn’t let the mistakes discourage them, panic them or even start pointing fingers at each other. He believes this team is too together, been through too much to have that happen. Instead they rallied to a nine-point lead and then made big plays down the stretch.
You can hear that type of metaphor in senior leader Jamarius Burton’s post-game comments.
“We understand it's 10 rounds, we understand the game is not over,” Burton said Wednesday. “We started off the half not playing up to our standard, and we wanted to continue to make corrections, continue to take care of the basketball, and just continue to fight. We understand it's survive and advance.”
In those three sentences, the word ‘we’ is used five times. Never an ‘I’ or ‘they’, it’s about all of them together. Now after winning a 22nd game this season, 15th in the ACC. The group that no one outside of the locker room expected anything from, marches on.
“They have this chemistry, when you are trying to be elite, trust is everything on offense and defense,” O’Toole said. “They have that for each other and it’s a beautiful thing.”
Panthers play Duke Thursday at 2:30p in Greensboro, hear it on 93.7 The Fan.