At the start of the 2022-23 college basketball season, not many people would’ve been forecasting scenarios such as Pitt being in the Field of 68 and teams such as Kentucky and West Virginia on the outside looking in.
However, with 54 days until Selection Sunday, that’s how certain bracketologists are seeing things as of today. One of those guys is ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, who released his latest NCAA men’s basketball bracket this morning.
On the heels of Saturday’s 71-60 win over Georgia Tech, Jeff Capel’s team currently has a spot in Lunardi’s tournament field. Here are the highlights from Lunardi’s post from Tuesday morning.
—Pitt is a No. 9 seed and would play No. 8 Creighton in Columbus, Ohio. Winner of that game would play No. 1 Purdue.
—First Four Teams Out: Kentucky, West Virginia, Northwestern and Texas A&M.
—Next Four Teams Out: USC, Utah State, Florida and Virginia Tech.
—Last Four Teams In: Boise State, Oklahoma, Penn State and New Mexico.
—Four No. 1 Seeds: Kansas, Purdue, Alabama and Houston.
—Four No. 2 Seeds: Gonzaga, Tennessee, UCLA and Texas.
—ACC Teams (7): Pitt, North Carolina (No. 8 seed), Miami (No. 5 seed), Duke (No. 6 seed), Virginia (No. 4 seed), NC State (No. 7 seed) and Clemson (No. 8 seed).
Pitt (12-5) has a good chance to solidify their case to be tournament worthy as their next two games are against two struggling teams: Louisville (2-16) and Florida State (5-13).
I like it but .. it is way too early to be projecting this. H2P!
Hopefully the leadership on this team can make sure there are no let downs moving forward. I believe Pitt has 11 more conference games and should be favored in 8 of those games, so as long as Pitt can win the games they should, then the tournament is looking more and more realistic. Most of capels teams have gotten worse as the year went on, but those teams were also very young and inexperienced so it will be interesting to see how this pitt team performs in the 2nd half of the schedule.
The one things that’s going to hurt them is the lack of depth at the 4 and 5 spots