eschewed name, image and likeness offers from bigger schools <\/a>to run it back one more season in Hamden.<\/p>\nAnd while Pitt (4-3) is hardly the Pitt of Charles Smith, DeJuan Blair and Brandin Knight, the Petersen Events Center has always been a tough place to play. Heck, Jim Calhoun went 1-6 in the building while at UConn.<\/p>\n
The victory continues an impressive early-season performance by Connecticut-based programs. Central Connecticut State owns road wins over the ACC’s Boston College and Rutgers of the Big Ten. And Quinnipiac crushed the Blue Devils 71-49 on Nov. 6 in Hamden.<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
Conversely, the Bobcats got blitzed by Yale at home 97-60 a few nights later. Yale is 5-1 overall, its lone loss coming at home to Rhode Island of the Atlantic 10.<\/p>\n
Oh, and the UConn men’s basketball team is doing pretty well, too.<\/p>\n
All this success makes Pecora pine for the return of the Connecticut Six Classic, an early-season tournament that involved Quinnipiac, Yale, Hartford, CCSU, Sacred Heart and Fairfield each year.<\/p>\n
“I was a big fan of the tournament when everyone was playing each other,” Pecora said. “It\u2019s great for the state, for basketball. It\u2019s great for the little guys and girls to fall in love with basketball in the state. In all my stops, playing games down the road is much better than jumping on a plane and playing Cleveland State.”<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n
And yet there were the Bobcats on Monday morning, flying down to Orlando to face UCF Tuesday (7 p.m.) in their second Legends Classic game. It’ll be a second straight chance to knock off a power conference team on the road.\u00a0UCF (5-1) plays in the Big 12.<\/p>\n
The Knights beat Pitt at home by 10 last Thursday.<\/p>\n
“We now have a point of reference,” Pecora said. “We didn’t come on the road for a split.”<\/p>\n
Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quinnipiac’s Tai Turnage (4) celebrates with teammate Amarri Monroe while coach Tom Pecora heads back to the bench…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43311,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[25804,25805,73,75,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-43310","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh","8":"tag-ct-insider","9":"tag-new-haven-register","10":"tag-pittsburgh","11":"tag-pittsburgh-headlines","12":"tag-pittsburgh-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43310\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}