Pitt's impressive Big East Conference tournament championship run vaulted the Panthers up the pecking order of the NCAA tournament teams last night when the selection committee unveiled the 65-team field.

The unranked Panthers (26-9), who won four games in four days to claim the Big East's automatic bid, are the No. 4 seed in the South Region and will play No. 13 seed Oral Roberts (24-8), the champion of the Summit League, Thursday in a first-round game at the Pepsi Center in Denver. Game time will be 30 minutes after the end of Michigan State-Temple, which starts at 12:30 p.m.

---

• PDF: 2008 NCAA Men's Division I Bracket

---

If Pitt gets past Oral Roberts, the road to San Antonio gets much tougher. The Panthers will play the winner of the Michigan State-Temple game in the second round. The No. 1 seed in the South Region is Memphis, which has lost just once. The No. 2 seed is Texas.

"It's what we expected," senior guard Keith Benjamin said. "We didn't expect to jump too far even though we knew what we accomplished. We realize we're in a pretty good situation. I like our chances. Oral Roberts is a good opponent that's very well-coached. We're looking forward to it."

The South Region might be the toughest in the tournament, but the Panthers' impressive run through the Big East has made believers out of some national college basketball analysts. Former Indiana and Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight picked Pitt to win the national championship last night on ESPN. CBS' Clark Kellogg said the Panthers were "playing as well as any team in the country."

The selection committee was impressed, too. Pitt had been pegged as a No. 8 or 9 seed before the Big East tournament. Now the Panthers are favored to reach the Sweet 16 for the fifth time in the past seven years.

In addition to Pitt's Big East run, the selection committee took into account the injury situation with junior point guard Levance Fields, who returned to the starting lineup late last month. The Panthers are 18-3 with Fields in the starting lineup.

"Obviously with our situation and our injuries, there was probably a lot of back and forth about where we could be," Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. "We probably weren't locked into a certain number."

Oral Roberts is coached by Scott Sutton of the Sutton coaching family. His father, Eddie, coached at Creighton, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oklahoma State and is currently the coach at San Francisco after coming out of retirement in February. His brother Sean is the coach at Oklahoma State.

Pitt has played Oklahoma State the past two seasons, so the Golden Eagles will have a nice scouting report on the Panthers.

"I like our seeding, I like the location, I'm not particularly fired up about the matchup just because of the run they're on, but you never know," Scott Sutton told reporters in Tulsa, Okla., last night. "They're as physical a team as there is in college basketball. This will be a great opportunity, a very difficult task, but we're looking forward to it."

Oral Roberts was 16-2 in the Summit League. The Golden Eagles played some major-conference teams tough in their non-conference schedule. They lost to Arkansas, Texas and Texas A&M. They were tied with the Longhorns at halftime before losing, 66-56. And they led the Razorbacks with eight minutes remaining before losing, 62-51.

Oral Roberts also lost to mid-majors Texas A&M Corpus Christi, Creighton and Utah State.

Pitt and Oral Roberts have a few things in common.

Both teams are defensive-minded. Oral Roberts set a school-record by giving up just 61.4 points per game. And both have trouble shooting free throws. The Golden Eagles were the worst free-throw shooting team in the Summit League at 67 percent.

Pitt is playing in its seventh consecutive NCAA tournament and is one of nine programs nationally to advance to the tournament in each of the past five seasons. The others are: Arizona, Duke, Gonzaga, Kansas, Michigan State, Texas, Kentucky and Wisconsin.