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Babcock's 27 Kills Sink No. 3 Kentucky
Pitt won 25-14, 21-25, 25-13, 25-21 at Fiserv Forum and out-blocked Kentucky 14 to 6. Two days earlier the Wildcats had swept No. 6 Wisconsin hitting .380.
Olivia Babcock has won the AVCA national player of the year award twice, which is the sort of line that stops meaning anything until somebody asks what it looks like on a Sunday afternoon. It looked like 27 kills.
No. 4 Pitt beat No. 3 Kentucky 3-1 at Fiserv Forum, 25-14, 21-25, 25-13, 25-21, and the two lopsided sets were the ones that settled it.
Pitt Won the Net by Eight Blocks
Pitt hit .297 with 49 kills, 14 blocks and three aces, and Izzy Starck ran the offense with 41 assists, 13 digs and five blocks of her own. Blaire Bayless added 10 kills. Maaike Heilig had eight blocks by herself.
Kentucky finished with 45 kills, six blocks and five aces, and hit .086 by Pitt's own box score. Brooklyn DeLeye served three straight aces to take the second set. Morgan Gaerte's swings got the Wildcats to 23-20 in the fourth.
Four kills separate those two attacks. The gap sits everywhere else. Pitt turned 48 assists into 49 kills and got to the net for 14 blocks, where Kentucky turned 43 assists into 45 kills and got there six times all afternoon.
Ayanna Watson is the third name worth writing down. Six kills, two aces and two blocks off the bench end of the rotation, on an afternoon when Pitt needed nobody to be a hero except the person already being one.
Kentucky swept Wisconsin on Friday hitting .380 and out-blocking the Badgers 10 to 5. Same building, largely the same rotation, and the hitting line moved nearly 300 points in 48 hours.
Babcock Answered the Only Question Anyone Had
She had five kills inside an early 6-0 Pitt run and 19 through three sets, according to LEX18's Noah Cierzan, who watched DeLeye and Gaerte put seven attacking errors between them into the opening 25 minutes.
The second set was the one Kentucky earned. Cierzan has it level at 16-16 before DeLeye served three consecutive aces, which is the only stretch all afternoon where the Wildcats looked like the team that had swept a Final Four side two days earlier.
Craig Skinner called timeout with Pitt ahead 21-17 in the fourth. Kentucky got to 23-20 on back-to-back kills and then Pitt closed it on the second match point.
Babcock finished with 27 kills, nine digs and four blocks, and Cierzan's line is that Pitt took Kentucky down once again, which is a reminder that these two have met before and that the revenge on offer Sunday was Kentucky's to take.
The Panthers look like the team the poll should have spent the weekend arguing about.
Pitt is 1-0 and Kentucky is 1-1, and of everything that happened in Milwaukee this weekend the Wildcats' hitting line is the number that follows them into September.
