10 FOR 10: Upset or not, West Virginia made historic run by beating Kentucky to advance to the 2010 Final Four

*** THIS IS THE SEVENTH in a series of 10 local sports stories The Dominion Post believes would make a good sports documentary. They will be posted online every Saturday and Wednesday through July 1.

MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — In college basketball, what ingredients are needed for a win to qualify as an upset?

Is it the point spread, the national rankings, the recruiting rankings, the setting, the talent of the other team or maybe some combination of it all?

Members of the 2009-10 West Virginia men’s basketball team gathered for a 10-year Zoom reunion Saturday night, celebrating a moment that still feels as much alive today as it did that night in the Syracuse Carrier Dome a decade ago.

None of them referred to their 73-66 victory against No. 2-ranked Kentucky — a win that put the Mountaineers into the Final Four for the first time in 51 years — as an upset.

Even as confetti fell around him and his players were celebrating with championship hats and were getting set to cut down the East Regional net, WVU coach Bob Huggins was not sounding like a man who had just pulled off an upset.

“I said before this season started that this team had a chance to be special,” Huggins told the crowd that night. “Two more wins and they’ll really be special.”

The numbers back that up. West Virginia, led by senior leader Da’Sean Butler, who three weeks earlier became a national name after hitting the game-winning shot against Georgetown to win the Big East tournament, entered the game as the sixth-ranked team in the country.

Kentucky, owners of seven national championships at that time (now eight), was a mere 4-point favorite.

Yet, it is through the lens of history and some hindsight, that maybe we can call that game the perfect upset for the Mountaineers.

“That Kentucky team was very talented,” WVU associate head coach Larry Harrison said during the reunion. “Overall, I would say that Kentucky team was probably the most talented team we’ve faced.”

The good, the bad, the memorable

It would be doing that team an injustice by not including an expanded view of the weeks leading up to the moment.

In truth, there are many starting points to begin the story of those players from that season.

You could even go back as far as the previous season, in which a dejected bunch of young men sat in a locker room inside the Metrodome in Minneapolis after being on the wrong end of an upset.

Dayton, an 11th-seed, pulled off a 68-60 first-round win against the Mountaineers in the NCAA tournament.

In the locker room that day, almost in unison from the likes of Butler, as well as teammates Devin Ebanks and Truck Bryant came a promise.

“This won’t happen again,” Ebanks said that day. “It’s going to be a different story next year.”

And it was. With the bulk of that team returning, WVU began the 2009-10 season ranked in the top 10, and never dipped below No. 11 in the Associated Press rankings that season.

The Mountaineers were No. 8 when they traveled to Connecticut in late February, and from the ashes of that 73-62 loss to the Huskies came greatness.

Huggins set the tone for the rest of the way with these words on his postgame radio show:

“I don’t know if they know what they mean to this state,” he said. “I told them in there, ‘You have a chance to be special.’ Very few people have a chance to be special, particularly in West Virginia.

”Pittsburgh had great basketball, but it was not the Steelers. Cincinnati had great basketball when I was there, but it was not the Reds. We have a chance to represent this state and bring so much pride and joy.”

In the years that followed, Huggins joked that it was, “like the Gettysburg Address in West Virginia now.”

What immediately followed was a magical 10-game winning streak that covered two game-winning shots by Butler in the Big East tournament and a regular-season finale victory against Villanova that Huggins often references for the fact that WVU had only 16 points at halftime, but was able to pull out a win, because the team continued to play solid defense.

Out of disappointment came opportunity

From the moment Truck Bryant first walked on to the WVU campus, he was talking about playing in a Final Four one day.

That’s the kind of confidence he had in himself and in the team Huggins had constructed.

That confidence also went hand-in-hand with his fun-loving personality.

He had a smile that lit up the darkest rooms. He had a laugh that could break up the most tense moments.

Former WVU forward Kevin Jones once told this story about a team film session inside the WVU Coliseum before a practice:

“We’re watching film and Cam (Thoroughman) was supposed to throw a pass, but didn’t do it,” Jones said. “I can’t remember who he was supposed to throw it, too, but he was wide open. Huggs was fuming and he yells out, ‘I’ll kiss your butt on High Street if he’s not open.’ ”

Jones immediately looked at Bryant, who is doing his best to hold in laughter, but eventually lets it out.

“When Truck started laughing, then of course everyone else does, too,” Jones said.

Bryant’s part in this story is overshadowed some, because of the heroics from teammate Joe Mazzulla.

Bryant did make it to that 2010 Final Four, except that he did so with a walking cast on his right foot after having fractured a bone in practice before the team’s second-round game against Missouri and then had it snap on him again against the Tigers.

It is here we try to put the story in proper context.

Not many teams could lose their starting point guard in the second round of the NCAA tournament and go on to the Final Four.

Not with Kentucky still alive in the same bracket.

And this is where Mazzulla steps in and maybe shows the true character of that team.

To be sure, Mazzulla was no stranger to pressure-packed moments or to winning.

He was a freshman when the Mountaineers won the NIT.

A year later, Mazzulla nearly pulled off a triple-double when WVU beat Duke in the second round of the NCAA tournament.

But a shoulder injury cost Mazzulla most of his junior season and forced him to take a medical redshirt. By the 2009-10 season, he was mostly in a back-up role behind Bryant.

That was how the national media saw Mazzulla, simply as the kid getting thrust into a new role.

Mazzulla played it up with one reporter before the Kentucky game, saying he had never really been in that situation before.

“I thought he was going to ask a follow-up and I was going to let the cat out of the bag,” he said later. “But he never asked anything else.”

The moment was far from too big for Mazzulla, who like Bryant, stood on his own foundation of leadership and confidence.

He gave all he had to give in 30 minutes. Mazzulla scored 17 points, he hit his only 3-pointer of that season and consistently found driving lanes through Kentucky’s defense to create offense before finally fouling out.

“I have no idea how it happened,” Mazzulla said. “We just executed well. I hit my first three and that just gave me a lot of confidence throughout the rest of the game. We were able to get in a good defensive rhythm.”

So, what makes it an upset?

To be honest, the 2010 NCAA tournament was filled with upsets, beginning with top-ranked Kansas losing in the second round to Northern Iowa. Remember Ali Farokhmanesh and his 3-pointer that put the nail in the Jayhawks’ coffin?

Old Dominion beat Notre Dame in the first round. Ohio University did the same to Georgetown and Cornell beat both Temple and Wisconsin to become the pride of the Ivy League.

Brackets were busted all over the place well before little-known Butler became a national darling by working its way into the NCAA championship game against Duke.

But, this was a Kentucky team with No. 1 recruit John Wall at point guard and 6-foot-10, 270-pound DeMarcus Cousins in the middle and sweet-shooting Eric Bledsoe on the wing.

Patrick Patterson — a native of Huntington — was 6-8 and was a nightmare match-up in that he was shooting 3-pointers on the outside and then crashing the boards on the inside.

Off the bench came Daniel Orton, himself another 6-10, 255-pound monster to deal with down low.

In 2010, it seemed like a tough match-up for WVU. Looking back on it 10 years later — knowing that seven players from that Kentucky team went on to play at least three seasons in the NBA — it seems like even more of an accomplishment.

“You see they had so many top picks in that class that we beat, so yeah, it makes it feel like we really accomplished something,” Jones said. “Not a lot of people had us winning that game at all outside of the state of West Virginia. In that moment is felt great. Looking back, it feels even better seeing what we accomplished that day.”

But an upset? Not to that bunch of WVU players.

The reason? We give the final words of this story to back-up guard Cam Payne:

“To me, I felt like going into the tournament that we should have been a No. 1 seed that year, but we ended up as a No. 2 seed,” Payne said. “All the players and coaches, from Huggs all the way down, we knew we were going to win that game. Huggs kind of had (Kentucky coach John) Calipari’s number. It didn’t feel like an upset to me and I’m pretty sure it didn’t feel like an upset to anyone else.

“Looking back on it 10 years later, obviously a lot of their guys have had success in the NBA, but I had a lot of confidence that my teammates were going to do what was necessary.”
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