EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. -- A piece of scotch tape was doing a bad job of stopping the blood, which dripped over his left eye and down his face, but the stitches would come later. Oklahoma State forward Jason Miller had a game to play.
The Cowboys' Sweet 16 meeting with Pittsburgh on Thursday night wasn't going to come down to anything beautiful like speed or athletic ability, because if this were a beauty contest the Panthers wouldn't have been invited in the first place. Oklahoma State plays prettily. Pittsburgh just plays.
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| Coach Eddie Sutton gets his Cowboys to pick up the defense in the second half.(AP) |
Pittsburgh wasn't going to back down. That was a given. But would Oklahoma State? That was a question.
"In the first half they beat us to death on the glass," said OSU coach Eddie Sutton.
"We had to match their toughness," Miller said. "In the first half, we did a poor job of that."
Pittsburgh freshman center Chris Taft brought the blood from above Miller's eye with an inadvertent backhand late in the first half. To that point the Panthers had dictated the game's pace, putting the Cowboys, the Big 12's top-scoring team, on a point-a-minute pace. A point a minute? Shoot, Cowboys forward Joey Graham had almost done that by himself last month against Nebraska.
After Miller hit two free throws he was pulled from the game for medical attention, but as he left he screamed something primeval that triggered something ugly in his teammates. On this night, against this team, ugly was beautiful.
It's why the Cowboys won 63-51 and will play Saturday for a chance to get to the Final Four, and a chance to model the prettiness that allowed them to sweep the Big 12 regular-season and conference championships for the first time.
Over the final 22 minutes, when Oklahoma State scored 45 points, the Cowboys out-Pittsburghed Pittsburgh. They outrebounded the Panthers 15-13. They clamped down on Taft, allowing the precocious center just two points and one rebound in the second half.
Tony Allen handled the sweet stuff, floating in and around the Pittsburgh post defense for 23 points, while the rest of the Cowboys were as primitive as the blood on Miller's face. They had to be. Sutton said so.
"Coach had told us that if we didn't respond," Allen said, "we were going home."
For Pittsburgh point guard Carl Krauser, the strain was too much, the load too heavy. Krauser had spent 35 games poking and prodding Pittsburgh to this point, the fourth Sweet 16 appearance in program history, but eventually he was going to need some help. That eventuality came Thursday night, only there was no help to be found.
Now, there's no Pittsburgh to be found. Not in the 2004 NCAA Tournament, which will continue without the team that leads the country (for now) in victories at 31.
For much of the game Krauser was the best player on the floor, as he has been so many times this season. But if you were choosing sides for a pick-up game, the next three players taken from Thursday's game would have been Cowboys: Allen, Graham and John Lucas III.
The roster says Krauser wasn't going to have to go it alone, certainly not from the perimeter. The only two seniors in Pittsburgh's starting lineup are wings Julius Page and Jaron Brown, but their brutal offensive seasons continued -- rather, ended -- at Continental Airlines Arena.
Brown came into the game averaging 11.7 points per game, but he hadn't reached double figures in seven of the Panthers' previous 10 games. He finished with 11 points but got into early foul trouble, backed off, and finished with no rebounds or assists. None.
Page's offensive struggle has been mystifying all season. After shooting 48.8 percent from the floor as a junior, he shot 37.7 percent this season. He averaged 11.2 points, but didn't reach double figures in six of the team's last nine games. Make it 7 of 10. Page had five points Thursday, none in the second half, and was 2-for-11 from the floor.
"The game came down to me making shots behind the arc," Krauser said. "I was missing shots, giving (his defender) the opportunity to go under the screen and letting the big man hedge. That cut down my penetration."
Krauser averaged 36 minutes per game this season, and he wasn't going to get those four minutes off in this game. Not with Brown and Page basically leaving Pittsburgh to play three-on-five on the offensive end.
Midway through the second half Krauser had played 30 of 31 minutes when Pittsburgh coach Jamie Dixon pulled him, hoping to keep him out until the media timeout at the eight-minute mark. With 8½ minutes left Dixon looked down the end of the bench and saw Krauser, standing up, cheering on his teammates.
Since you're up ...
Dixon put Krauser back into the game, and seconds later Krauser was tossing up an old-school runner that tied the score at 42. Instead of charging, though, the Panthers crumpled.
They had run into something bigger and badder than themselves.
