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Pittsburgh and Louisville were very confident at various times in the last couple of weeks. Even after the Panthers lost Mike Cook in the win over Duke, Pittsburgh surely felt good about its chances in the Big East entering Saturday's matchup at Dayton. The 25-point loss to the Flyers was stunning in and of itself, but the loss of junior point guard and floor leader Levance Fields to a broken foot is the lasting implication of a miserable night. He's expected to miss eight to 12 weeks, putting his return somewhere between Feb. 23 and March 22 (the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament).

Louisville has battled through its share of injuries this season, with senior Juan Palacios missing the season's first nine games and without senior David Padgett since the season's second weekend with a broken kneecap. Despite Rick Pitino's claims of doom for his fifth-year center, Padgett was back in red and white on New Year's Day for Louisville's Big East opener against Cincinnati. Padgett is clearly still not 100 percent, but his return looked like a bonus for a team that appeared to have finally begun to put things together. Cincinnati's 58-57 win on New Year's Day proved that wasn't the case.

Cincinnati had perhaps the worst start of any Big East team, losing five games in a row, and that stretch didn't include the earlier losses to Belmont and Bowling Green. A heralded recruiting class wasn't making much of an impact for Mick Cronin, and fans had started to lose interest. But folks who followed the Bearcats closely saw significant improvement over the last four games, despite three of them being losses. UC was in the game at Xavier until the final minute and outrebounded Memphis in a closer-than-expected loss. Cincy then had N.C. State on the run on the road but couldn't hit enough shots or stop fouling. Then Cronin finally tasted victory again with an impressive win over Miami (Ohio), but even with the obvious improvement, it didn't seem like a opening Big East game at Louisville would end positively. But the one-point win over a man Cronin once assisted proved that this Bearcats program has quite a bit of life left.

Following Big East basketball continues to be a logic-defying endeavor. At least this season, it also has been very painful for the empathic among us. Fields injury is just the latest to players who have made or were expected to make a big impact this season. Consider:

Andy Rautins, G, Syracuse: done for the season with a knee injury suffered over the summer.
Mike Williams, F, Cincinnati: Texas transfer figured to see major minutes for Mick Cronin until he ruptured his Achilles' in practice.
Juan Palacios, F, Louisville: at one time considered a likely lottery pick, Palacios' career has been tormented by injuries, including a bum knee suffered in October.
Sharaud Curry, G, Providence: a stress fracture became a full fracture in October practice, and -- with the exception of a nine-minute appearance in a mid-December game -- Curry has been out ever since. Growing whispers indicate that he may not come back this season.
David Padgett, C, Louisville: described above.
Eric Devendorf, G, Syracuse: the Orange see its second best shooter go down after its best -- Rautins -- was already out for the year. Devendorf tore up his knee in December.
Mike Cook, G, Pittsburgh: tore up his knee in overtime of the Panthers win over Duke. The scene on the Madison Square Garden court was a painful one to watch.
Levance Fields, G, Pittsburgh: described above.

Injuries are a part of the game, of course, but the Big East has experienced more than its fair share this season. Perhaps it's a bit of selective amnesia on my part, but it's hard to even remember any serious injuries in the Big East last season. There was Providence's Randall Hanke, who ended up getting redshirted after injuring his head and dealing with personal issues. There were Mike Nardi and Jerel McNeal who were banged up toward the end of last season, and Palacios, who is always banged up. St. John's Daryll Hill was in and out of the lineup for most of last season. I can't remember any others -- please email me if I've forgotten someone -- and none of those injuries were of the destructive and season-killing variety that many of these aches seem to be. I guess it's just part of the breaks of being an athlete.

One of the other breaks of being an athlete is running into a team off of its game, and on Tuesday, Louisville just couldn't get a shot to fall. We didn't know when it was going to happen, but we knew that the Cardinals' proclivity for wayward outside shooting was going to bite them at some point this season. Who could have guessed it would come in a game that seemed like such a sure W beforehand? Louisville's 33 percent 3-point rate is 11th in the Big East, and yet the Cardinals take the fourth most 3-pointers in the conference. Teams like Connecticut (32.1 percent) mitigate their poor shooting by taking very few outside attempts -- the Huskies take only a quarter of their shots from outside the arc, the lowest percentage in the conference.

But Louisville shoots 38.7 percent of all field goals from deep, which was almost precisely the percentage of deep looks from the Cards on Tuesday (39.0). Of course, if Louisville had made just four of those 23 3-point attempts, than UofL would have won. On the other hand, if the Cardinals took a few more 2-pointers -- where they hit at 50 percent -- then the win would have been almost a certainty. It's a hard lesson to learn for a coach in Rick Pitino who built his reputation on exploiting the 3-point shot for all it was worth, which wasn't much on Tuesday.

One reason why Louisville didn't take many shots inside is that Derrick Caracter only played 14 minutes. He started the game, left to Padgett's standing ovation and rarely saw the floor thereafter. Caracter had three turnovers in his limited time, which is perhaps why that time was so limited. But with Terrence Williams (2-for-13) and Earl Clark (1-for-7) struggling, the Cardinals could have used another answer inside.

For Cincinnati, it was the rock solid play of three players in their second seasons in the Queen City who led the way in the shocker. ESPN analyst Doug Gottlieb was, at one point, someone I ignored entirely because I didn't think he was very good, but he has clearly improved over the last year or two and now provides a good dose of good sense in his coverage. But Gottlieb was way off on his analysis of Cincy's decline. He cited the lack of a recruiting class before Cronin's first year as the reason the program had fallen on hard times.

But I looked at the floor and saw four players who were part of the "nonexistent" recruiting class. Junior college transfers Jamual Warren, John Williamson and Adam Hrycaniuk and sophomore Deonta Vaughn all start at Cincinnati and all entered the program in Cronin's first season. Warren and Vaughn were steady in the backcourt. Warren had seven assists and eight rebounds, while Vaughn had three big 3-pointers in a 13-point effort. Williamson was the man in the middle of the zone who knocked down mid-range jumpers and even set up Vaughn's crucial 3-pointer that gave Cincy a late lead. Hrycaniuk was mainly absent thanks to foul trouble, but freshman Anthony McClain filled in admirably with nine rebounds in 25 minutes. Even with the contributions of McClain and starting wing Rashad Bishop (eight points in 27 minutes), the freshmen aren't making the impact that most expected, but the veterans carried the load in 40 minutes of play that had to be stunning to folks on both side of the result.

Over in Pittsburgh, meanwhile, it's back to square one. The Panthers will need to figure out whether they can depend on Ronald Ramon (who has a partially torn labrum, by the way) to handle the ball and whether they have any other options. Brad Wanamaker looked quick but played too fast early on as a freshman. He'll need to grow up quickly. Keith Benjamin has to go from a burst of energy off the bench to a dependable contributor every night -- I'm not sure he has that in him. A lot of teams would like a second chance to start their seasons, but the last Big East team to lose isn't one of them. Still, Pittsburgh starts its season anew on Wednesday night against Lafayette.

Day by day, sports remind me that I don't know half the things I know. That's why it's so fun, except when you are on the wrong end of a surprise. Pittsburgh knows that feeling and so does Louisville. We still have two more months to determine whether nights like Cincinnati's are aberrations or the beginnings of trends, and I'm looking forward to the process of discovery.

Conference predictions: Below are my predicted final standings for the Big East. I made these on Sunday, but I'll still stick with Louisville where I put it, though less confidently so. This is for all games up to but not including the Big East Tournament. What lies below may not line up directly with how I would rank the teams, as I've considered the varying difficulty of schedules and other factors (I know the folks at Villanova won't be impressed).