PITTSBURGH — Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl is about to learn whether it was wise to allow his Volunteers to become, well, volunteers.

No. 11 Tennessee (6-0) meets No. 3 Pittsburgh (10-0) Saturday afternoon in an SEC-Big East Invitational matchup of early season unbeatens. The game will be at the Consol Energy Center, not Pitt’s Petersen Events Center, but it will be anything but a neutral site game — not with 16,000 Pitt partisans attending.

“We’re going to get a great barometer of where we are at,” Pearl said.

For Pitt, it’s been 15 years, or since a December 1995 game against then-No. 11 North Carolina, that the Panthers played a nonconference game in Pittsburgh against such a highly ranked opponent.

For Tennessee, it’s a challenging trip to play a physical team most ranked schools would prefer not to meet until the NCAA tournament. One that Pearl gave up a game in Tennessee to play.

“We had the opportunity to play Marquette in Nashville. And there weren’t a lot of volunteers to go up there to Pittsburgh and play Pittsburgh without a return game,” Pearl said. “So as to put myself in good stead with our commissioner (Mike Slive), I volunteered the game. So we’ll see how it works out.”

No nonconference opponent has beaten Pitt in Pittsburgh since Bucknell on Jan. 2, 2005, although the Panthers have played few schools from the power conferences there during that time. This will be the highest-ranked nonconference team Pitt has met anywhere since losing to then-No. 3 Texas 78-62 in the CBE Classic in Kansas City last season.

“I don’t compare teams, but they’re a very good team,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. “They run a lot of plays similar to what we run. There are a lot of similarities between the two programs. They’re good, and our guys know that.”

Pearl’s concerns about the Panthers are the same as every team that’s played them to date: They’re the nation’s best rebounding team. Ashton Gibbs and Brad Wanamaker can hit 3-pointers. And this might be the deepest of Dixon’s nine teams at Pitt, all but one of which has won at least 25 games.

Rutgers (5-2), coached by former Pitt assistant Mike Rice, plays Auburn (3-4) in the other SEC-Big East game in Pittsburgh. Rice previously coached at Robert Morris, which nearly upset Villanova in the NCAA tourney in March.