NCAA Tournament A 10

A day ago, folks in Tucson thought yet another coach had turned down the offer to be the next head coach of the Arizona Wildcats.

A day changes a lot of minds. Xavier coach Sean Miller originally declined the offer from Arizona athletic director Jim Livengood, but asked for a day to sleep on the decision. After waking up, Yahoo! Sports is reporting that Miller took the job, letting Xavier officials know on Monday he would not be returning.

Now, this is just getting silly. Both Jeff Goodman at FOX Sports and Gary Parrish at CBS Sports are reporting that Xavier head coach Sean Miller has turned down an offer to be the Arizona head coach.

Miller, apparently took a charter flight to New Mexico on Sunday morning to meet with Arizona athletic director Jim Livengood along with the Arizona president and a booster about the job. The offer was rumored to be as much as $15 million over seven years. He then flew back to Cincinnati that same day.

Everyone keeps tuned to sports sites and ESPNews for the latest plumes of smoke from Memphis and/or Lexington regarding John Calipari and whether he stays at Memphis or goes to Kentucky. The flip side is that the move has paralyzed nearly every other coaching search as programs and coaches in-demand wait to see what happens.

Oh, sure some little things have happened. Viginia Commonwealth has apparently hired Shaka Smart to be their next head coach. As with the last hire of VCU's former coach, Shaka Smart is a Florida assistant.

Everything else, though, appears to be on hold, if only for a moment.

BOSTON -- He looks like a chew toy, or something out of a puppet show. His dreads flop over a headband that would stand out more prominently if not for a midsection best described as doughy. His name is Levance Fields, and sometimes, he'll drive you to exasperation with reckless dribbling into traffic and corkscrew jumpshots heaved for no apparent purpose or reason.

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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BOSTON --Throughout his team's Sweet 16 game with Xavier, Pittsburgh guard Levance Fields kept trying to take over. Luckily for the Panthers, he finally did just that in the last minute -- and thanks to his heroics, Pittsburgh advanced to its first Elite Eight in 35 years.

Senior guard Levance Fields hit a deep, contested 3-pointer with just less than a minute left, then converted a layup off a Xavier turnover 29 seconds later, turning a one-point Pitt deficit into a three-point lead. The momentum swing was enough to propel the top-seeded Panthers to a 60-55 win over fourth-seeded Xavier on Thursday night.

So you were not quite good enough to make the NIT. No extra exposure on ESPN. Instead you are given the chance to be in the College Basketball Invitational. Maybe you get to appear on HDNet. Maybe not. The important thing, is you get to keep playing, and hopefully the Gazelle Group will put you in one of their better exposed non-conference tournaments in any upcoming year.

Oh, and if you want to be the host team for the game, you have to toss in another $60,000. What a bargain.

Among the big story lines from Sunday's filling out of the NCAA basketball tournament field, discussions of conferences who are "overrated" and "underrated" dominated the discussion. Specifically, fans of so-called mid-major teams cried foul, and the masses proclaimed the selection committee was biased in favor of the Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences.

The Louisville Cardinals weren't thought to be in line for a No. 1 seed a week ago, but the ball bounced their way -- so much so that they ended up as the top seed in the entire tournament. Their reward is what appears to be a relatively weak bracket. Michigan State is arguably the worst two-seed in the eyes of the public, for example. The bracket definitely has an up-tempo feel to it, so expect to see the points pile up, especially in the early rounds.

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