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Pitt Rozelle Nix comforts senior Sheldon Jeter after Jeter fouled out against North Carolina with more than six minutes left Saturday at Petersen Events Center.
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The Morning After: North Carolina 85, Pitt 67

Lake Fong/Post-Gazette

The Morning After: North Carolina 85, Pitt 67

Well, there’s not really a whole lot more to say about that one. I don’t think I’m the only person who left Petersen Events Center thinking that Saturday afternoon. Heck, Kevin Stallings pretty much thought that, as did his players, if the postgame press conference was any indication.

Yes, Pitt thought they could beat No. 8 North Carolina at home on senior day, and perhaps the Panthers have shown at times this season they could have (a two-point loss at UNC less than a month ago, included). Yes, they desperately wanted to add a monumental upset to all the rest of the pomp and circumstance that surrounds any senior day, but especially so for one that honored four of the five regular starters.

But it was a game that ended up being pretty simple, one of those somewhat forgettable ones that played out sort of exactly as it should have: The Tar Heels were just much better, and played like it en route to an 85-67 win. All the statistics that often portray a team’s superiority - rebounding, points in the paint, second-chance points, etc. - did exactly that.

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Turning point: Stallings specifically said he’s not sure if you can call this play a turning point, but because he even invoked the go-to phrase of this very blog, I’m going to do it anyway: Chris Jones’ offensive foul with 1:20 left in the first half. As Stallings himself noted, Pitt was already down 35-28 at this point, so its early lead was no longer a factor, but the charge call took a made bucket and possibly a three-point play off the board. UNC got a layup (a second-chance one, no less) on the other end, Pitt didn’t score the rest of the half and five straight unanswered Tar Heels points before the Jones charge ballooned to a 10-0 run and a 12-point halftime lead after it instead of Pitt cutting its deficit to four with a big play.

Game balls: No one played particularly well, so let’s just give it to the seniors here for senior day. There’s only four on the team, and they all start. They’ve all been major contributors for years. They all arrived at Pitt in their own way. Artis after a year in prep school; Young as a hometown kid who left the area after his freshman year of high school; Jones came in a year before those two and redshirted (remarkable side note, Jones was in the same recruiting class as Steven Adams) so he’s been here forever; and Jeter, well, all he did after transferring from Vanderbilt was take a year off at a Florida junior college so that he could come back home, and it doesn’t get much more “Pitt man” than that. They’re far from one of the most successful classes in Pitt history, but they all wanted to be here, and that’s seemingly a rarity in today’s transfer-heavy college basketball climate.

Notable stat: 55.8, North Carolina’s offensive rebounding percentage and the highest one against Pitt in a game this season, per KenPom.com. The highest against Pitt entering Saturday was North Carolina’s 46.9 last time the two teams met, but this time, Pitt let a taller, more athletic team do even more bludgeoning on the glass than the first meeting. The 55.8 was actually the highest OR% vs. Pitt in a game since 2010, when West Virginia put up a 57.8 in a 70-51 rout of the Panthers in Morgantown.

What it means: Not a whole lot, really. A win would’ve meant a lot; a loss was expected. Basically, Pitt now has to win one of its final two, at Georgia Tech and Virginia, to avoid finishing the regular season with a losing record. The Panthers haven’t done that since the first year under Ben Howland (no, not even in the CBI year). Not sure how this year could be considered anything but a massive failure if, in the first post-Jamie Dixon season, Pitt loses more regular-season games than it has since 1999-2000.

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What’s next: Tuesday night at Georgia Tech, which, coupled with Pitt, makes for an interesting case study in first-year coaches at reeling programs. After parachuting out of a rocky situation at Memphis, Josh Pastner has done a tremendous job in the A, getting the Yellow Jackets - a team some thought wouldn’t win a single ACC game - to 6-9 in the league so far. KenPom gives Georgia Tech a 59 percent chance of winning, with a projected final score of 67-64.

Notable quotables: “I’m disappointed for our seniors. Certainly didn’t want them to go out in this fashion. They’ve meant a lot to this program and accomplished a lot both individually and as a group. I feel badly for them that we couldn’t put together a better effort today to make this thing a little bit more competitive.” - Kevin Stallings

“Probably in order to have a chance to win, we needed somebody to have a performance like Sheldon Jeter had last Saturday against Florida State, maybe even him, and obviously he was saddled with fouls all day and that really hurt us.” - Stallings

“You can’t say, in an 18-point defeat, that was a turning point in the game because it’s not like we were on top of the game at that point, but that was a big swing. It certainly looked like a block to me, and Chris made the basket, so it could be a five-point swing. You get three taken away and whatever they went down and did. But the officials have a tough job. They’re not out there trying to miss calls. The view I had on the replay, it certainly looked like a block to me.” - Stallings on Chris Jones’ offensive foul late in the first half

“Generally speaking, the NCAA tournament is officiated more loosely than the regular season. It’s more physical. And I think their physicality will play real well when the NCAA tournament gets here.” - Stallings on UNC

“I thought our energy was plenty good to start the game. I think the seniors wanted to do well, being senior day, and we just were beaten by a better basketball team. They’re just better than we are. They’re deeper than we are. They did what they do very very well today.” - Stallings

“If you have a game left, it’s worthwhile to have a goal to win. You know, different people have different attitudes toward different things. I’ll be watching Georgia Tech tape tonight. I don’t know how they’ll feel come Tuesday night, but I know how I’ll feel. Hopefully they’ll want to keep competing and keep trying to win, and we’ll keep trying to do the best we can to help them.” - Stallings

“We can’t give up right now. We still have a lot of confidence in ourselves. We’re gonna keep practicing hard, watching film, getting extra hours in the gym. We’re not gonna stop working, so we’ve got to, in these next few games, keep playing our heart out.” - Jamel Artis

“It meant a lot seeing Brandin Knight here tonight. One of the many guys I looked up to here at Pitt. He’s got a banner on the wall, so you gotta respect the man. Him coming here, it means a lot, like I said. I wish I could’ve got a win for him, but things don’t go the way you want sometimes.” - Artis

“This game was key, very key. The next two are more key. If we can win those two, then make a run in the NCAA tournament, we’ll give ourselves a shot.” - Artis

First Published: February 26, 2017, 1:00 p.m.

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Pitt Rozelle Nix comforts senior Sheldon Jeter after Jeter fouled out against North Carolina with more than six minutes left Saturday at Petersen Events Center.  (Lake Fong/Post-Gazette)
Lake Fong/Post-Gazette
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