Correspondent photo / Robert Hayes. YSU forward Cris Carroll drives to the basket against Pitt's Cameron Corhen on Monday night at the Petersen Events Center in Pittsburgh.

PITTSBURGH — For almost 16 minutes, Youngstown State looked like the better team on the Petersen Events Center floor against an ACC foe.

But fouls began to tally up for the Penguins and Pitt started to settle in with its size and ball pressure. YSU fought till the final whistle, but fell to the Panthers 74-59 in the 2025-2026 season opener on Monday night in Pittsburgh.

“They’ve got legitimate high-major size and length,” YSU head coach Ethan Faulkner said. “The pressure disrupted us. We knew coming into the game it was going to be about keeping them off the offensive glass and handling the pressure they were going to apply to us. I thought for the most part, they won those battles and that was kind of the game within the game.

“I like our team. I think we’ve got a chance to be a pretty good team, but we’ve got things we gotta get cleaned up and get better at, and we’ll do that as we progress throughout the year.”

YSU scored the first points of the night — a 3-pointer by senior forward Cris Carroll — and led for most of the first half, even taking an eight-point lead about five minutes into the game.

After a sluggish performance in the exhibition game against Akron last week, Carroll led the Penguins offensively. He finished with 18 points, including scoring eight points in the first half.

“Offensively, we did some really good stuff in that stretch,” Faulkner said. “Cris had it going early, and we were trying to get him some screening action to get him shots to keep his momentum going.”

But a scoring drought by the Penguins allowed the Panthers to creep back into the game. Pitt went on a 9-0 run over the final four minutes of the first half to regain a lead they would not relinquish.

“It was really a travesty to be down six points at half, to be honest,” Faulkner said. “They had 34 points, 26 of those points were off offensive rebounds and our turnovers.”

With its size advantage, Pitt dominated on the glass, outrebounding the Penguins 46-24. The Panthers’ edge on the glass also showed with its second-chance points, which it held an 18-4 advantage, with a 17-8 edge on the offensive boards.

“That was two of the biggest keys of the game — keep them off the glass and handle their pressure,” Faulkner said. “Just didn’t do that well enough to win the game.”

Midway through the second half, a couple 3-pointers allowed YSU to cut the deficit to four. But a quick 6-0 scoring burst by Pitt pushed its lead back to double figures, where it would remain the rest of the game.

Cameron Corhen led the Panthers with 23 points, while Brandin Cummings had 18 points.

Fouls continued to pile up throughout the night for YSU and that affected the rotations they wanted to play, especially when it came to countering Pitt’s size with its own.

The Penguins finished with 21 fouls compared to 14 for the Panthers, as three different players totaled four fouls, including Carroll, Jason Nelson and Tae Blackshear.

“They’re strong. They’ll get into you and bump you, but you gotta bump them back,” sixth-year guard Cam Polak said. “But there’s a point in time where the ref gotta step in. I think we’re a physical team as well, but they kind of got us a little bit.”

Nelson joined Carroll as the only Penguins in double figures, finishing with 15 points. The duo knocked down six of YSU’s 10 made 3-pointers.

YSU’s two top scorers from the Akron exhibition, Blackshear and Bryson Dawkins, combined for just eight points on 3-for-16 shooting.

“With Bryson, they’re just so hard to score on around the rim because they’ve got so much size and length,” Faulkner said. “We knew coming into the game we were going to have to make some shots from the perimeter and loosen that up. … Then Tae, I thought he pressed a little bit late in the game trying to get us back into it. But he’s going to be a guy. He’s going to make a lot of shots for us as we move forward, just didn’t have that tonight.”

HOMECOMING

A native of West Homestead, Pa., Polak played high school basketball at Steel Valley High School, just six miles across the river from Pitt’s Oakland campus.

He had no shortage of friends and family in attendance to see him on Monday night, and he finished with nine points on 4-of-11 shooting.

Polak also used to work out in the offseason with former Panthers star Ashton Gibbs, so he has some familiarity with the Pitt program.

“It was really cool,” Polak said. “There’s a lot of people here waiting for me. But it was a good experience, especially coming from Division II up to this.”