A logical starting point to any game plan is to draw similarities between your pending opponent and teams you've seen.

So when Pitt basketball coach Jamie Dixon was asked yesterday whom Xavier reminds him of, his answer was succinct: "Us," he said.

Yes, there will be that mirror-image effect for Dixon in the frontcourt when his top-seeded Panthers (30-4) from the Big East play the fourth-seeded Musketeers (27-7) from the Atlantic 10 in an East Region semifinal tomorrow night in Boston with advancement to the Elite Eight on the line.

Pitt's 6-foot-7, 265-pound DeJuan Blair will encounter 6-9, 255 Jason Love in the middle; the Panthers' Tyrell Biggs (6-8, 250) and Xavier's Derrick Brown (6-8, 227) possess similar outside shooting skills; and Pitt's wing scorer, Sam Young, who goes 6-6, 220, will face C.J. Anderson, who measures precisely the same.

But in the backcourt, it's a much different story: Xavier possesses B.J. Raymond and Dante Jackson, who stand 6-6 and 6-5, while Pitt's Levance Fields is only 5-10 and Jermaine Dixon is 6-3. But, Jackson is not the ballhander that Fields is, and Raymond isn't the threat from long range that Dixon is.

And while there is no question the Atlantic 10 did not wield the same national acclaim the Big East did this season, Xavier raised its stock outside its conference, having beaten Memphis, Missouri, Auburn, Cincinnati, Virginia and Louisiana State in the regular season and Wisconsin in its most recent NCAA tournament game -- all teams from conferences that carry more clout than the Atlantic 10.

"Our goal this year was much like last year ... to play the toughest schedule to put us in the best position to get a good seed in the tournament," said Love, who is averaging 6.9 points and 5.9 rebounds per game. "We feel as though we got really good players and we were confident going into each game this year and we weren't intimidated at all by anybody we played. I think that it definitely put us in a great position as far as seeding and just being ready to compete against teams -- upper-echelon teams of the NCAA."

Kansas coach Bill Self knows about being lightly regarded. Before coaching at heavy-hitters Illinois of the Big Ten and Kansas of the Big 12, he took Tulsa -- then a member of the Western Athletic Conference -- to the Elite Eight in 2000. He understands the attitude of players at schools in leagues such as the Atlantic 10.

"When I was at Tulsa, we went to the Elite Eight and had a pretty good team, and I felt like I had four guys who could play at Oklahoma or Oklahoma State," Self said. "For whatever reasons, they weren't recruited at that particular level, and we were able to sneak in there and get them. And they did play with a chip on their shoulders."

Dayton's Brian Gregory, an Atlantic 10 coach, knows all about that chip on the shoulder. Gregory, whose team was knocked out by Kansas in the second round of this tournament, concurs that, perhaps, the conference affiliation is noticed too much instead of the name on the front of a uniform.

"You look at the success that Xavier has had. I think you go down over the last 10 years, we've had four, five teams make the Elite Eight from our conference," he said "Rhode Island did, obviously Massachusetts did, Temple has, St. Joe's has. You just go down the list.

"Ours is a basketball league. Every school in our league has kind of built their athletic national reputation based on their men's basketball program. It is a great basketball league. And so sometimes it's under the radar unfortunately."