Instant impact: Truck Bryant sees similarities with McBride, Tshiebwe and his freshman year

MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — It hasn’t exactly been from afar, that being Truck Bryant’s experience with WVU freshmen Oscar Tshiebwe and Miles McBride.

“I see them all the time in the gym,” said Bryant, the former WVU standout point guard from 2008-12. “Oscar is hilarious. He tells me all the time, ‘Truck, when I get the ball in the paint, no one can stop me.’ The thing about it, he just may be right.”

It has been nearly 12 years since Bryant, Kevin Jones and Devin Ebanks first enrolled at WVU as freshmen.

They came in instantly marked as an impact recruiting class by Bob Huggins, the kind he was known for during his 16 seasons at Cincinnati.

Ebanks was the five-star, can’t-miss prospect. Jones was a four-star recruit. Bryant came in as a highly-respected three-star prospect. All of them from New York.

Twelve years later, Tshiebwe came in as just the second McDonald’s All-American to enroll at WVU as a freshman.

McBride, though, has been a steal in the recruiting ranks. A three-star rating coming out of Archbishop Moeller in Cincinnati may have been more about him missing most of his junior season with a broken ankle than about McBride’s ability as a player.

“He was a three-star just like me,” Bryant said. “Which means you play with a little chip on your shoulder. You have something to prove.”

As the 12th-ranked Mountaineers (16-3, 4-2 Big 12) travel to Texas Tech (12-7, 3-3) at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Huggins believes his team still has a lot to prove.

“We’re in the same situation we were basically in at Kansas State,” Huggins said. “We’re playing a desperate team, a desperate team with a sold-out crowd. We’re a young group and they haven’t been through that a lot and that’s the hardest part.

“We’ve got to keep getting better. We can’t think that we’ve arrived. When we can start going to Lubbock (Texas) and win and start going to Kansas and win, despite all the odds, then all of a sudden we’ve arrived. Until then, we’re walking uphill.”

There may be no way to gauge and compare the impacts made by both freshmen classes, at least until both Tshiebwe and McBride have completed their college careers.

With that said, Tshiebwe is the Mountaineers’ leading scorer and rebounder, while McBride has scored in double figures in nine of his last 10 games to become the team’s third-leading scorer.

“Looking back on it, I will say Miles and Oscar are both super-talented kids,” Bryant said. “I like the way they’ve learned the defense so fast, but there are so many different things that go into the success a team has.”

The trio of Bryant, Ebanks and Jones first had to learn to deal with failure before success came.

As freshmen, WVU just barely hit the top 25 rankings and were knocked out after one week.

They fell to Dayton in the first round of the NCAA tournament.

“That was the motivation,” Bryant said. “It was like, ‘OK, we’ve been through it and now we know what it’s about.’ ”

The Mountaineers were in the Final Four a year later.

This season, WVU has already spent seven weeks in the AP Top 25 poll and are currently projected as a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament by ESPN.

The major difference between the two classes, as Huggins noted, was who else was around the freshmen on the roster.

“We’re resume builders for other teams right now. Obviously, the last time we were presented as that, we didn’t handle it,” in a road loss at Kansas State, Huggins said. “I think the first three had other guys with them. They had Da’Sean Butler. They had Alex Ruoff. They had guys who had been through the grind.

“These guys don’t have anybody. Put Da’Sean Butler on this team, how much better are we? We’re probably undefeated and maybe first in the country. He was a great player, but guys also looked up to him. We don’t have that right now. We have a bunch of young guys.”

Young guys who have are coming off two wins against Texas and Missouri by a combined 61 points, but young guys nonetheless.

“I think they can get there, but it’s hard to win with a young team,” Bryant said. “Eventually, you go up against someone who is older and more experienced.

“With Oscar and Miles, they’re making an impact, but I would say they have a lot more in store. If they get everyone to come back, I really think they can go win a national championship.”

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