SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Text messages began ricocheting toward the South Bay almost from the moment Jamie Dixon finally lowered himself onto Pitt's bench and pressed his face into his hands, that being with 3.3 seconds left in Pitt's exit loss to UCLA the other night.

Or was 3.3 Pitt's shooting percentage?

No matter. By the time most of the live audience at the NCAA West regional had retired to the loud bars and bistros of San Pedro Square, incoming texts had distilled to pure vitriol:

Gray = Fraud.

It was after 3 a.m. in the East, perhaps not the hour when texters are hyper-lucid, so, yeah, there's that, but the Gray = Fraud wing of the Pitt-afflicted populace surely was going to have an extended say on the destiny of these Panthers for upholding an unhappy school tradition: evacuating the Sweet 16 at the first hint of turbulence.

There will be plenty of time to calcify to most everyone's satisfaction what it is Pitt needs to get better penetration in the NCAA tournament field, but, for the moment, the Aaron Gray critics have the floor, even if at 12:07 a.m. EDT yesterday, the senior center got canceled from the relevant Pitt equation along with classmates Levon Kendall and Antonio Graves.

The people who like to pin every Pitt failure to the massive chest of 7-foot Aaron Gray are largely the same people who forget to credit him for any part of the productive and positive things that have come to the program since Dixon and Ben Howland recruited him out of Emmaus (Pa.) High School four years ago. There's little nobility in that position, but the uncomfortable part is, it might just happen they're right. Or at least half right.

There's no physical law that dictates Aaron Gray be Aaron Great, no matter how often the lords of college basketball tell you otherwise.

"He's an outstanding, great player," Howland said in the minutes after his UCLA defense limited Gray to 10 points and not a single foul shot. "We knew we couldn't handle him one-on-one. He's just too big, and too good."

And ...

"I thought Lorenzo [Mata] was fantastic in standing up to Gray, who is a great player. He'd kill most teams."

And ...

"Lorenzo is just a great person and battles so much; he really showed a lot of toughness to be able to take on Aaron Gray, who is a great player, a very physical player."

But there's a cavernous disconnect between what many coaches say about Gray, the supportive testimony of his public image, and what he looks like to the unindoctrinated, the people from whom he is largely insulated.

You'll hear he has a nice shooting touch, but you can't help but notice that it often doesn't include the part where the ball goes into the basket.

You'll hear he's a superior passer, but you watched him throw a two-handed missile across the lane to the far corner at Levance Fields, which would have been a low percentage pass even if the receiver had been as tall as the sender. Fields is 5-10, maybe. A critical turnover.

You'll hear that opponents fear letting him catch the ball near the basket, but you can't help but notice that few coaches, including Howland and Georgetown's John Thompson III, ever bother to front him. That's because if you can push him even 5 or 6 feet from the rim, his shot flies with no confidence.

You'll hear that he's the Big East scholar athlete of the year as a Communications and Rhetoric major, but you'll also hear him say "ya know" 12 times in a compound sentence. Maybe they should change the name of that major to communications and, ya know, rhetoric.

You'll hear of his exemplary leadership skills and of his willingness to take responsibility within the system and the program, but you'll also find that when his own performance veers into the substandard, he won't hesitate to make himself unavailable to questions.

Very little of all that is to suggest that Pitt short-circuited in this postseason strictly because of Gray's enigma (Fields ended this campaign having made 17 of his last 58 shots, for example) but only that it's possible Dixon's offensive systems were too dependent on Gray's anatomy.

The loss Thursday night, only the eighth in Pitt's 37 games this season, was the first occasion on which the Panthers lost despite shooting better than 40 percent from 3-point range. In other words, they couldn't overcome how badly they shot closer to the basket, a horrid 13 for 39. Gray missed six of those, three early in the first half, three more early in the second, all of them bunnies, one closer to the rim than the next. Thus, in Pitt's two postseason losses, the other being the Big East championship affair with Georgetown, Gray shot 6 for 24 from the field.

In the end, that probably wasn't the way to run an offense, channeling the ball away from more confident shooters. Gray shouldn't be blamed for that, but shouldn't be credited for being anything beyond what he was in his college career -- a good player, just not as good as a lot of people wanted him to be.