Did we witness the figurative end of West Virginia’s men’s basketball season this past weekend?
There are at least 13 games remaining for the Mountaineers – 12 regular season contests, plus at least one in the Big 12 Championship in Kansas City – but given the demeanor and comments of WVU head coach Bob Huggins following the game, plus the feelings engendered and conclusions drawn as West Virginia wasted yet another second-half lead and imploded down the stretch against Texas, it’s hard not to feel that there’s anything other than more of the same in store.
Sports, of course, includes a lot of emotional investment, and when things go wrong for your team, the reactions can be mercurial. That’s part of fandom, understandably. But when the weight of the same mistakes and errors of both commission and omission continue to pile up, there’s a point that gets passed, where hope of improvement and thoughts of “they’re close to turning it around†become more wishful thinking than objective analysis.
Hollowing Saturday’s loss, Huggins offered some comments in a different vein than those of his normal postgame analysis, noting that there are “issues that I am not at liberty to talk about,†observing that there are players who are getting minutes that don’t deserve them, and that problems that he thought had been corrected are cropping up again before admitting, not for the first time this season, that he did not know what to do in order to correct some of them.
None of that offers much hope for any different outcome to this season than to that of 2021-22, in which the Mountaineers finished 4-14 in the league and missed the postseason again.
During Texas’ postgame interview with Longhorn coach Rodney Terry, a parade of UT fans and boosters filed into the small area in one of the WVU Coliseum Club sections that is set aside for media interviews with coaches and players.
This was apparently done at the behest of Terry and UT – perhaps viewing it as a perk of accompanying the team on a road trip. It was also incredibly unprofessional, as postgame interviews are supposed to be a working environment for those covering the game in a working capacity, not a sightseeing opportunity for fans.
Big 12 rules require that the visiting coach be made available to media at the same location as the home coach – typically, the visiting coach and players go first so they can get their travels underway a bit more quickly – but bringing along a fan group, which numbered some 20 members, shouldn’t be a part of the deal.
Was Terry, who is serving in an interim capacity, trying to curry a bit of favor with a group that figured to included at least some significant donors?
Apparently this isn’t the first time the Longhorns have done this – reports indicate that their women’s team did the same thing on their recent visit to the Coliseum.
While UT’s anticipated exit from the league can’t come soon enough, perhaps the Big 12 should issue some working rules to address this issue. It so happened that league commissioner Brett Yormark was in attendance at Saturday’s game.
Need some better outcomes to boost your mood?
West Virginia’s women’s hoop team put together the antithesis of the men’s showing just a few hours prior to the men’s loss on Saturday, making some critical plays in the fourth quarter of a back-and-forth contest to get a 67-57 win over Texas Tech. That moved the women to 13-5 overall and 4-3 in the Big 12, where they stand fifth overall.
WVU head coach Dawn Plitzuweit’s squad is showing some of the growth and progress the men’s team has lacked, as they have not only fit themselves into her preferred up-tempo pace and 3-point shooting reliance, but also shown the ability to make adjustments when some of those tactics aren’t working.
The Red Raiders clogged the lane and contested WVU’s shooters on the perimeter to forge a 9-0 run in the third quarter to take the lead, and the visitors also took advantage of some Mountaineer miscues to cut a 12-point lead to four in the final period. WVU steadied its ship on both occasions, though, In the last quarter, West Virginia made five of its seven 3-point attempts and drained 12 of 13 from the free throw line to get the victory.
If, as Huggins noted, his team put on a clinic of everything a team can do to lose a game down the stretch, then Plitzuweit’s squad did just the opposite in grabbing a satisfying home win.
Any observer of those two games would quickly come to the conclusion that the women would have a much better chance of making the NCAA Tournament, but NET rankings and bracket predictions are still showing a rosier view for the men than the women.
The Mountaineer men have been dropping quickly in the NET rankings, down to 30th at the latest viewing, but they were still holding on to one of the final NCAA Tourney selection spots in 52 of the 76 predictions tracked by Bracket Matrix.
The WVU women, despite a much better record, aren’t on any of the bracket predictions (those are admittedly fewer in number).
Despite a strength of schedule that isn’t awesome but is still better than a number of Power 5 schools (West Virginia is 108th and 116th in two major SOS metrics out of 361 D1 teams), the women’s team is just 67th in the NET and 73rd in the RPI after the Texas Tech win on Saturday.
Understandably, comparing the two rankings isn’t a mathematically defensible process, as each uses a different algorithm to come up with its ratings, and obviously strength of schedule is a huge factor in each.
On a higher level, though, the Big 12 women’s conference is similar to the men’s, albeit a bit less strong at the top. Three teams are in the top 24 of the women’s NET, and nine of the 10 teams have a NET ranking of 70 or higher. Perhaps, if the Mountaineer women continue to do well in the league, they can climb those ratings a forge a spot in the Tournament.
