MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A steel barricade outside of the West Virginia men’s basketball locker room Saturday provided just enough support for Jermaine Haley to take a moment’s rest.
He glanced over at the Covelli Centre floor that was now nearly in pieces and ready to be picked up by a forklift to be replaced by an ice surface.
“That was the last of them today,” Haley said, after chipping in 11 points in the No. 25 Mountaineers’ 75-64 victory against Youngstown State. “That was our last ‘gimmie game.’”
Following a three-day break for Christmas — players are due back in Morgantown by Christmas Day night — WVU (10-1) will begin preparations for a run of 20 games all against teams from a Power 5 conference.
It begins with Sunday’s showdown in Cleveland against No. 5 Ohio State (11-1), which will be coming off an impressive 71-65 victory against No. 6 Kentucky on Saturday.
It will continue the following week, as the Mountaineers begin Big 12 play on the road against top-ranked Kansas, although the Jayhawks will drop from No. 1 after losing against Villanova on Saturday.
WVU’s final non-conference game — on Jan. 25 — comes against Missouri in the annual SEC-Big 12 Challenge.
“The games that are coming up, that’s why you sign up to play at a school like this,” WVU guard Taz Sherman said. “Not to downplay the teams we’ve already faced, but the bigger challenges are ahead of us. These are the kinds of games that get me excited.”
WVU hasn’t beaten a school ranked in the top five of the AP poll since January of 2017, when the Mountaineers beat No. 1 Baylor and No. 2 Kansas in a two-week span.
It’s likely the Buckeyes and the Jayhawks will be ranked in the top five when the Mountaineers come calling.
“We’ve got big games coming up,” WVU forward Derek Culver said. “You can’t drop your guard now and get lackadaisical.
“We’ll find out a lot about ourselves over our next few games. We’ll find out just how hard we’re going to compete against the top teams out there.”
WVU trailed by as many as seven points early in the second half against Youngstown State, before pulling away in the game’s final minutes.
Culver said the team would learn from its sometimes uninspired play and use it moving forward.
“We get better and better every game,” Culver said. “I’ll say that even today, even though we were down to a team we shouldn’t have been down to. We always learn from each individual matchup. We’ll learn today from what we did to get in the position we were in and what we did to get out of it. As long as we continue to learn, we’ll be ready to face those challenges as a team.”
