In case you’re wondering, today’s 72-70 win over Louisville was drawn up precisely the way both Scott and I expected it: crushing the offensive boards, barely being able to score, getting a last second shot from Cam Thoroughman, fouling out two of the four seniors playing their last game (Joe Mazzulla and Thoroughman), counting on Casey Mitchell to make two late 3s, scheming a Louisville missed 3 that ends up in the hands of Truck Bryant who is immediately fouled by Louisville with .6 left on the clock, Bryant making both foul shots despite trying to miss the second shot and then seeing Louisville’s courtlong heave fall just short. JUST LIKE WE PREDICTED!

Notes
-John Flowers, I’m going to miss you, your 12 points, your 12 rebounds, and your 6 blocks. I had a realization today: blocks are my thing to measure in basketball. I’m more impressed by blocks than I am by anything else. Which means that I loved Flowers entire career. He went out on the highest of high notes. The only bummer? Every other player’s hug with Huggins made it onto the ESPN broadcast, including Johnnyie West’s; Flowers’s didn’t. Nor did we see his appearance with his mom, Pam Kelly-Flowers. I was ready to sub her in during the second half when our offense predictably ground to a halt. She couldn’t have played any worse than Kilicli.

-Joe Mazzulla put up the very odd 5-5-5-5-5 (points, assists, rebounds, turnovers, fouls). Weird. He didn’t have his best day. He saves those games for the ones that really matter, and frankly, an end-of-the-season game against Louisville, no matter how awful Rick Pitino is, doesn’t really matter much.

-Cam Thoroughman went out in the way that you’d imagine: 8 points, 6 rebounds, 5 fouls. The man is who is he. He also broke down sobbing when he hugged Huggins. That was unexpected. It is easy to forget that these guys are…well, guys. You spend four or five years giving your everything and suddenly, it’s over. That’s a big moment.

-Johnnyie West got some playing time there at the beginning of the game, made some foul shots, and went back to the bench. Jerry West was in the building. These things are connected.

-Casey Mitchell played like garbage for the entire game, then decided in the last two minutes that we needed some magic, so he made two three pointers and was awesome. Dude is an enigma, wrapped in a riddle, ensconced in confusion…and high.

-It was ironic that Truck made his final free throw when he was trying to miss it, right? Especially after missing so many I assume he was trying to make.

-More stat sheet fun for you!

-Oh, right, Kevin Jones: 25 points and 16 boards, a first-half double-double, a huge performance. What are the odds that it clicks in his head that he’s capable of that on a more regular basis? He took shots he could make…and made them! He grabbed rebounds…and put them back! He tried three pointers…and missed them? Think he watches the tape and puts all of that together? His game is short jumpers, rebounds, and put backs. If he’d focus on that, I feel like 25-16s could very easily become a baseline. (How about 18-12s? Does that sound more reasonable? If he’d abandon that goddamned three pointer, he’d play so much better.)

-And in the end, one of the most memorable wins for Mountaineer fans, owing to the oddity (ALTHOUGH ENTIRELY EXPECTED BY US!) of the ending.

-God dammit.

-Was there a single point during that game that you felt confident? Yeah, me neither.

-Cam Throughman’s attempt at a drive and then a runner was…uhh…underwhelming shall we say.

-Speaking of which, remember that time that Dalton Pepper faked a three, drove the baseline, and laid it in easily? Yeah, I do to. What I don’t remember is him having ever done that before. While I appreciate him adding a move to his arsenal of corner threes that occasionally go in, why did he wait all season to do so?

-Deniz Kilicli shoving Dalton Pepper toward the place on the floor where the shooting guard was supposed to be was very cool. The rest of Kilicli’s game wasn’t.

-It was odd to see Joe Mazzulla to revert to his pre-shoulder injury form, in which he has no problem getting to the rim and then no clue what to do when he gets there. He looked gassed yesterday.

-And maybe therein lies the hope - that the early exit from the tournament gives the team time to rest and focus their attention on the NCAA tournament. That’s what I’m telling my stuff. Why?

-Because this team is hinting strongly at the team’s 2009 tournament performance, something better left forgotten.

It is almost impossible to keep up with the shifting standards that Mountaineer fans have for themselves. I know that we’re supposed to be loyal (“Support your team!”). We’re also supposed to not be loyal (“Bill Stewart is a douchebag that has to be fired!”). We’re supposed to have standards (“Bill Stewart’s nine wins per year aren’t enough!”) We’re supposed to not have standards (“How dare anybody insist that Dana Holgorsen has to win ten games a year!”). We’re supposed to be paying customers (“Fans that don’t buy tickets don’t matter!”). We’re supposed to not buy tickets (“Fans staying home are evidence of programmatic collapse!”)

It is very tough to keep track of. Tiptoeing through this minefields is intensely difficult.

Then Kevin Jones decided to explore the NBA Draft. Then, after getting what can only be considered negative feedback about his draft position - meaning he wasn’t promised an selection in the First Round - he decided to return to WVU. But what were the rules for fans on this.

The Problem
The problem was this: fans wanted to be supportive of Jones, a player who has already given WVU fans a great career. He has been one of only two Bob Huggins recruits that has lived up to the hype (the other being Devin Ebanks). He is obviously beloved. So fans felt the need to encourage Jones to pursue his professional dreams.

“It’s okay if he leaves. He deserves a shot at the payday. He deserves his success. He’s earned it,” was the collective response.

Wishing a beloved player luck is great. It speaks well of our fans that we didn’t have anybody pulling of the rampant douchebaggery on display here. But is supporting what would have been a bad decision really a good thing? Because that’s what Kevin Jones decision to stay in the draft would have been: a bad decision.

A Bad Decision
Almost all of Jones’s numbers were down this year. Some people attribute this to the fact that Da’Sean Butler and Devin Ebanks weren’t playing in front of him anymore, forcing him into a leading man position that he was unaccustomed to after playing third fiddle for two successive seasons. That explanation is right, but the conclusion is wrong. Let’s start with the numbers themselves:

-Made fewer field goals, took more shots.
-Made fewer three pointers.
-Scored less points.
-Assist to turnover ratio worsened.
-Field goal percentage worsened.
-Three point percentage worsened.
-Foul shooting worsened.

Those are the not the numbers of a player destined to make a significant contribution at the NBA level. Those, frankly, aren’t the numbers of a player that’s likely to get drafted.

The biggest problem that Kevin Jones had last season is that he couldn’t hide. He’d spent his first two years at WVU feasting on third defenders, grabbing rebounds, scoring on put backs, occasionally sneaking out for a three, and wrecking opponents with his baseline jumper. That’s his game. That’s Jones in his best possible environment because it lets him play to his strengths. He wasn’t able to do that this season because he was forced to be the team’s statistical leader. It was assumed by everybody that the bulk of the production was going to have to come from Jones. That was probably true. But that doesn’t mean that providing the bulk of the production is what Kevin Jones excels at. His numbers worsened last season because he was effectively playing out of position, being asked to do what he does in a way very different than he’d done during his first two seasons at WVU.

Supportive Fans
I understand the desire to be supportive. I understand the desire to see the young man make it. But is supporting a plainly bad decision really support at all? It isn’t like any of us were going to have an impact on Jones decision making of course. It isn’t like our support really mattered in any substantive way. All that did were what the NBA professionals told him, and they plainly told him to go back to school. So why did many of us bother telling him something else? What’s to be gained from encouraging a young man to make a transparently bad decision?

We can be fans of the players, of the team, of the institution, and yet not sacrifice our ability to think critically about them.

Here are a few good reasons why Dana Holgorsen’s rant against Mountaineer fans today was ridiculous:

Math Matters
Holgorsen complained that WVU only got 40,000 people out for Saturday’s non-conference showdown with the Fighting Falcons of Bowling Green State University while Louisiana State University got 92,000 for its showdown with the Fighting Wildcats of the University of Kentucky. A couple of important facts:

-WVU plays in Morgantown, WV, a metropolitan area with roughly 120,000 people.
-LSU plays in Baton Rouge, LA, a metropolitan area with roughly 802,000 people.

Yes, there are fans who travel to the games from beyond both metropolitan areas, but it seems worthwhile to remember that we’re talking about very different places in terms of population. If you DO take into account those numbers, for example, you arrive at this: WVU turned out 33 percent of its metropolitan area to attend its game against Bowling Green whereas LSU turned out 11 percent of its metropolitan are to attend its game against Kentucky. Now who has the more loyal fanbase?

So Does Weather
In Baton Rouge last Saturday, the weather was nice and warm. In Morgantown? It was both cold and raining, long before people had properly adjusted to the possibility of either. After a long hot summer, autumn arrived with a snarl; 40 degree days and pouring rain. Not surprising, fans stayed home when seeing that our the window, while fans in Baton Rouge didn’t, mostly because the temperature wasn’t 40 and it wasn’t pissing down the rain.

I know coaches from the “The weather doesn’t MATTER!” school believe otherwise, but they’re wrong. It’s the same reason I’m much more likely to play golf on a day when it’s 70 than on a day when it’s 40. (Holgorsen said, stupidly, that the coaches and players and trainers were going to be there, regardless of the weather, and that’s true, because that’s what they’re paid to do. How many of those same people would paid out of pocket to be at Saturday’s game if they weren’t getting anything fiscal in return?)

Oh, And The Opponent?
We were playing the not-too-shabby Fighting Falcons of BGSU, a non-conference game against a small school from Ohio with a funny name and flashy uniforms. LSU was playing Kentucky, a conference game against a team with whom the Tigers have history. Simply put, these aren’t comparable games.

The Magic of Technology
Here’s the thing: if you wanted to enjoy seeing the Mountaineers play 20 years ago, you had two options: go to the game or get down on your knees to pray for the game to be televised. That though simply isn’t the case anymore. Everybody has 1000 channels, big screen televisions, and (very) comfortable couches. The act of attending a game is no longer as vital as it once once, and on a day when the opponent is unappealing and the weather is very unappealing, it isn’t realistic to expect 60,000 fans to fill up Mountaineer Field.

Something To Consider
Holgorsen now (and Bob Huggins, regularly) slams the fanbase for not being loyal enough, loyalty being defined as attendance at games. I won’t get too far into weather that’s a good definition (it isn’t) but instead want to point their attention toward who might be more accurate to blame: the idiots who designed Mountaineer Field and the Coliseum. Both are way too big for Morgantown. Yes, we’ve filled both before (basketball more than football) but on an average night, both the football and basketball venues have empty swathes of seats. Why? Because of the weather. Because of technology. Because going to games is an expensive pain in the ass. Does it really matter why?

What if we had a football stadium that sat 50,000 fans? What if we had a basketball stadium that sat 10,000 fans? How much closer would we be to averaging sellouts for everything if those were the numbers we were trying to hit? Answer: a lot. Why? Because we know that numbers like that are achievable on a (semi-)regular basis.

If our coaches are so desperately concerned about the lack of attendees to their events, they need to be realistic about their expectations. As it currently stands, our coaches aren’t being that. They’re being pie-in-the-sky dreamers who are either willingly denying or willfully ignorant of the current realities of enjoying sports.

Since I haven’t been writing (for which I apologize - I have a project I’m involved in) I thought I’d quickly recap where we are at with WVU sports.

Football
-WVU beat Cincinnati Saturday, barely. It was yet another game in which all our assumptions about the Mountaineers have to be questioned. The offense piled up yards by the bushel and looked easily like the most talented team on the field, but the yards and the talent didn’t equal the points that we expected from this team. The special teams was again shaky, at best, including the fact that the squad had another field goal blocked (before, ironically, winning on a blocked field goal). The defense meanwhile, the group that has been roundly criticized this season, won the game for the Mountaineers, harassing Cincinnati’s quarterbacks all day and even scoring a touchdown.

I’ve seen lots of defensive posts written about how good Holgorsen and this season has been. This is revisionist history. We all expected more and as a result, this season has thus far been an incredible disappointment. We haven’t scored the points we expected which means that our defense, which we all expected to be bad, has for some reason been unreasonably expected to be much, much better. The point isn’t that Holgorsen is problematic, but that clothing him in Jesus’s robes may have been a bit much. He’s a football coach, and one who hasn’t been particularly successful this season. We’re now at the point where we are relying on the defense to win games for us. It says a lot about where we are as a program.

Basketball
Speaking of where we are as a program, the men’s basketball team is up the creek without a paddle, and in this case, paddle can be translated to mean any sort of offensive semblance. Simply put, this is going to be a baaaaaad season. The team is exceptionally young. The team is exceptionally inexperienced. There is no relief anywhere on the horizon. After barely beating Oral Roberts last Friday night, the team lost a weird 10:00am game to Kent State this morning.

Here again, we’re going to run into problems of interpretation, because although he was never as canonized as he should have been here, John Beilein’s players underpinned much of Bob Huggins’s successes. Joe Alexander. Da’Sean Butler. Joe Mazzulla. All of them were the type of player that Beilein was good at finding (smart, capable, multi-faceted) and that Huggins was good at molding (by adding muscle, toughness, and discipline). This team tough? These are Huggins’s guys entirely. And because they’re young, they just aren’t very good. They didn’t look good winning last Friday and they looked bad (save for some incredible rebounding by Kevin Jones and Deniz Kilicli) today.

Wrap-Up
The future isn’t so bright that we’re all going to be wearing shades anytime soon. Next seasons ought to be interesting, but unless our football team starts realizing that it can eviscerate any team in the nation, and unless our basketball team suddenly figures out a technology to give green rookies experience, the rest of this athletic year is going to be a bummer.

Of course, there’s always hope, which is what I always maintain, even into my 30s.

I’ll be honest - I figured that WVU’s game against Kansas State last night would break down the way our losses this season have: competitive gameplay for 25-30 minutes before running out of the steam and experience necessary to hang around. It’s what happens with young teams. It’s what is reasonable to expect with this team.

Which made last night’s 85-80 double-overtime victory against Kansas State all the sweeter. I don’t think many fans, if they’re being honest, expected to win last night’s game. But the team hung around and hung around and hung around and geez Kansas State doesn’t seem to have many scorers and hung around and on my god Kevin Jones for a three and oh my god Aaron Miles for a three and the 1-3-1 and then Kevin Martin’s eyes were bugging out of his head and the Mountaineers had won. I can’t sum the game up any better than that.

So instead, let’s briefly discuss the fact that our two seniors delivered hugely. Kevin Jones’s numbers were ridiculous: 30pts and 12rbs and no turnovers. It genuinely seemed as though every time the Mountaineers missed a shot, Jones was there to grab the rebound and put it back. He also stopped chucking from the three-point line. He took his usual baseline jumpers and repeatedly got the ball on the low block where he’d execute a lethal little jump hook. I loved it. I loved it so much that I hope it never again dawns on him that he should take eight jumpers from near the three-point line. He looked absolutely unstoppable and not like the player who has occasionally frustrated us with his attempt to add a long-distance jumpshot.

Speaking of frustrating players, Truck Bryant scored 24 and only turned the ball over once. He shot 9 for 12 from the line, which made him better than the rest of the team by an incredible degree. This is literally Bryant’s ceiling in terms of simultaneously helping the team without hurting it in some other way. We’ve all become accustomed to Bryant shooting the ball too much, turning the ball over too much, or doing both at once. The only thing he’s consistently delivered to the team is his free throw shooting. Last night, we got all three and at least a brief hint of the player he could potentially be.

All of that said I continue to believe that this isn’t a team that will amaze us for the rest of the season. The grim reality is that it is a team with a lot of really young players, guys that need time to develop and better understand the college game. We might have watched the team’s game of the season last night. But if it in fact was as good as the team is going to be this year, then so be it. It was a fantastic victory.

News and Notes
-Kevin “Hot Dish” Noreen was playing with what appeared to be a chip on his shoulder. He is noticeably bigger than he was last year and last night seemed very Thoroughman-y, which isn’t actually a word, but which is high praise indeed.

-Oh Aaron Brown, your silky shooting stroke excited and entices me, especially your sudden willingness to shoot a jumper off the bounce.

-Deniz Kilicli deserves credit for his 12 and 6 but…6 rebounds in 29 minutes when you seem to be as tall as everybody else out on the floor and seem to be physically bigger than everybody? Come on!

-Finally, three cheers for the successful implementation of John Beilein’s 1-3-1 defense at the end of the game. Kansas State figured out its weakness (the baseline) relatively quickly, but seemed to struggle to get good shots against it despite knowing where to go.

(If you’re wondering, the fact that Bob Huggins got a technical called against him for screaming, “Truck!” is evidence enough of the rank bias.) One of my favorite jokes: “What can be said about X that hasn’t already been said about Baghdad?” It is overwrought, ridiculous, and properly frames our immediate although not entirely important concerns as Americans with a place that has real troubles and real challenges. Let’s take that joke for a spin though:

What can be said about Saturday’s game against Syracuse that hasn’t already been said about Baghdad?

I am as depressed as anybody by the Mountaineers sudden descent in basketball no-man’s-land. The numbers speak for themselves but perhaps nothing makes it more clear: the team was once 15-5 and 5-2 in the Big East and now they’re 17-12 and 7-9. Where once there was a young team who didn’t realize that basketball was supposed to be hard, there is now a collection of players who do not look like they’re on the same page, who cannot consistently defend, and whose performances are emotional roller-coaster rides.

Fans have theories for what has happened, and while I want to address all of them, I do not believe that any of them are as much to blame as the one that I will conclude with.

These Players Are Terrible
This drumbeat starts with Truck Bryant, who had an awful few weeks after a sizzling start to his senior year. But the critics are there for other guys too: all of the rookies, a few of the returning guys, and basically anybody who isn’t named Kevin Jones. These criticisms aren’t entirely unfounded. Guys have played badly. Shots haven’t fallen. The offense has often stalled. The team’s best player (Jones, by far) can’t get his hands on the ball.

Huggins Recruited These Players
The rejoinder to the These Players Are Terrible complaint is observing that these are all Huggins’s guys. Whereas in previous years he was coaching a combination of his own recruits and the remained of John Beilein’s players, he’s now relying entirely upon the guys that he managed to get here. So implicitly, if the players are bad, then the guy who brought them here must be at fault too. This is fair.

Think Of The Experienced Guys We Lost
It isn’t just the Beilein players who finally graduated out of the program though. At least two players - Dalton Pepper and Dan Jennings (both Huggins’s recruits) - abandoned the program. Pepper voluntarily left, either because his father was sick or because he was sick of Huggins’s rebukes. Jennings spazzed out and was refused re-admission to the program. (And other recruits who would have brought needed experience to this year’s team haven’t worked out either. Kevin Noreen was playing but injured himself again, sadly. Noah Cottrill is high somewhere. Darrious Curry can’t ever play again, except when he does, owing to an undiscovered heart condition. David Nyarsuk never made it to campus.)

The Emotional Abuse Isn’t Getting It Done
Huggins has been as red-faced as ever on the sideline this season, and more than blunt after press conferences, going so far as to describe one player as a “coward” for refusing to take a charge at a critical point in Friday’s night’s crushing loss to Marquette. He has employed the patented Huggins Hook for most of the season, yanking young guys out of the lineup at a moment’s notice for mistakes real or imagined. Fans are rightly starting to wonder whether this sort of coaching isn’t crushing the confidence of players we need to contribute: Aaron Brown is the most obvious example. We’ve seen him shoot the ball earlier in the season but now he looks terrified to do so. (This same melodrama played itself out last season with Pepper, who missed shots before trudging over to the bench in anticipating of getting removed from games for not shooting 100 percent from the field.)

But The Real Reason…
All of these explanations are perfectly reasonable on their own, but they’re missing the bigger issue: we’ve got a young team. At some point, players have to learn the game of basketball and how it is played at a particular level. They’re going to struggle along the way. Unlike other teams that Huggins has had, this is a team not populated overwhelmingly with upper-classmen.

This is a team who desperately require quality minutes from young men who do not have the experience it takes to necessarily deliver them on a consistent basis. Our upper-classmen, incidentally, are this: Kevin Jones, Truck Bryant, Deniz Kilicli, and, barely, Kevin Noreen. Jones and Bryant have been great players for the Mountaineers, Jones more than Bryant. Kilicli is essentially coming into the end of his sophomore season, given his ludicrous suspension for his first year on campus. Noreen has spent the majority of his career injured, and is only an upper-classmen in the sense that he’s spent two years living in Morgantown.

The rest of the team though? They’re just not experienced enough. And while it is fair to observe that a majority of players just aren’t particularly good right now, and while it is fair to say that these are the players that Huggins wanted, and while it is fair to observe that Huggins might have chased away players capable of contributing, and while it is fair to say that Huggins tirades aren’t getting the job done right now, the real issue is that these players just aren’t ready.

The unfortunate side-effect of that is that Kevin Jones (and, to a lesser extent, Truck Bryant) are being wasted in their senior seasons. I think we can collectively wish that this hadn’t happened, but it is has. Perhaps a more reasonable response would be a rejiggering of our own expectations for the team and a recognition that, in the future, things will improve, as they inevitably do, when players gain the experience necessary to be successful.