MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — Hours after Kansas had already left Morgantown and the WVU Coliseum now looking like a sort of ghost town, Deuce McBride was still scoring on the Jayhawks.
A review of the film showed WVU forward Jalen Bridges had been credited with a first-half basket that McBride had scored.
So, McBride’s new career-high is 31 points and he became just the second WVU player to score at least 30 on Kansas. Devin Williams also had 31 on the Jayhawks in the 2016 Big 12 tournament.
In the grand scheme of it all, just add it to the list of things that will be remembered after the No. 17 Mountaineers (13-5, 6-3 Big 12) knocked off the No. 23 Jayhawks, 91-79, on Saturday.
“I beat Kansas as a freshman,” said WVU forward Derek Culver, who had 19 points and nine rebounds in the victory. “There haven’t been too many of them. I’ve been on both ends.”
Culver’s freshman season saw the Mountaineers upset Kansas at the Coliseum, on Jermaine Haley’s drive to the basket with seven seconds remaining for a 65-64 win. Culver had 11 points and seven rebounds in that game coming off the bench.
A five-game losing streak to Kansas followed, which set up the joy of Saturday’s win.
Maybe most pleasing was a story Culver shared on a conversation he had during the game with Kansas guard Ochai Agbaji.
The Jayhawks (12-7, 6-5) are now expected to drop out of the top 25 for the first time since 2009 and find themselves in a tie for fifth place in the Big 12 standings.
“Agbaji said this was the game of the year for them, or something like that,” Culver said. “For us to go out there and win and win like we did, it speaks a lot for us.”
It seems like every one of West Virginia’s six wins against Kansas is accompanied by some kind of story.
A win on Jan.12, 2016 came after a major snow storm had hit Morgantown.
Kansas’ team bus needed a police escort just to get through the gridlock in town, while Jaysean Paige told a story of how he, Tarik Phillip and Jonathan Holton had left their rides and began running up Monongahela Blvd. just to make it to the game on time.
In 2015, after Juwan Staten had won the game on a coast-to-coast drive and then ran back to the other end of the floor to make a defensive play in the final seconds, he had to lean against ESPN reporter Holly Rowe just to conduct a postgame interview while exhausted.
As for the latest win, it was the first time Taz Sherman experienced a victory against Kansas.
The Texas native grew up in Big 12 country, so his career-high 25 points in Saturday’s win won’t soon be forgotten.
“It means we’re one step closer to our goal,” Sherman said. “We just wanted to close out the game as best we could, because everybody knows that’s been a problem we’ve had against other teams. That was the best feeling about this. I was 0-3 at first, so it feels good to finally get a win.”
And for WVU head coach Bob Huggins, who improved to 6-3 against the Jayhawks in games played at the Coliseum, his latest victory meant another $25,000 would be donated to his mother’s cancer endowment.
When did it sink in for him?
“When (Kansas head coach) Bill (Self) told them to stop fouling,” Huggins said. “That was about when I started relaxing. We were still putting ourselves in tough positions with their pressure. It got to a point where there was no way they could come back, and he just said stop fouling, so I was happy about that.”
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