Good news, bad news

I spent last night at the Wachovia Center, taking in No. 9 Pitt's 65-59 win over Villanova, and found the result to be part good news and part bad news for Penn fans.

Which do you want first?

Ok, fine, here's the bad news, but it's pretty obvious. Penn's RPI, took a hit after Villanova's loss, and the Quakers are now 99th of 336 teams.

Now the good news. Penn fans should NOT want the Panthers to fall to a spot in the tournament where there's any chance of the teams meeting in the first round.

It's a sexy matchup, with the teams close geographically, and the game would most likely be played in Pittsburgh's backyard up in Buffalo. In fact, it's one I've seen many times in various bracket projections already.

And with every win Pitt gets, the more likely the Panthers are to get a No. 1 or 2 seed and not get placed with the likely 13th or 14th-seeded Quakers.

To put it frankly, the Panthers played a below-average-to-bad game Monday night and still emerged with a road win over the Wildcats. They shot just 21-of-49 and committed 15 turnovers, looking sloppy all the while.

But 7-footer Aaron Gray would be too much for Penn to handle on the inside. Making it even worse, if the Quakers concentrated on the wide load underneath, there are plenty of other weapons. Pitt came in shooting 50 percent, and Jamie Dixon's defense holds opponents to just 39.8 percent from the floor.

It's a nightmare matchup that the Quakers would love to avoid.

I've heard it said many times, mostly by Quakers fans, that college basketball has no business being played in an arena like the Wachovia Center.

After attending my first Villanova game at that facility last night, I must say that I disagree. I realize that the student sections can't get their chants in sync. That the band needs its microphone to be on in order to be audible. That most of us needed oxygen masks to deal with the elevation of our seats.

But 18,017 people got a chance to watch a college basketball game in person last night. There's not I can think of to argue against that.

In the category of things I've never seen before, I witnessed my first ever delay in a basketball game on account of lettuce.

During a media timeout in the second half, the FreshGrocer sponsored a contest in which a Villanova student had to toss five heads of lettuce into a shopping cart to win a 60-second shopping spree. Good idea, but the execution could have been better.

See, the contest was held on the court, and some of the lettuce escaped, and a crew was working well over a minute after the horn to get the salad off the hardwood.

I'm curious what Bill Raftery had to say about this on ESPN. If any of you watched, could you please post and let me know if the Big Monday crew took note of this strange delay?