MORGANTOWN — West Virginia played three games against Kansas this season that spanned a total of 120 minutes.
The Mountaineers held a lead for all of 11 minutes and 55 seconds in those games, not even long enough to account for one half of a game.
No. 6-ranked Kansas went wire-to-wire Thursday in knocking off WVU 87-63 inside the T-Mobile Center in Kansas City, Mo., to advance to the Big 12 tournament semifinals.
It was as bad as it sounds for the Mountaineers.
WVU went nearly six minutes before scoring its first basket, needed nearly 14 to reach double figures and head coach Bob Huggins was ejected from the game halfway through the first half when he could no longer stand how the refs were seemingly looking the other way when WVU players drove to the basket.
All of these facts and figures are measured by time, which is an important subject for WVU (16-17) today.
As in how much time will it take Huggins and his coaching staff to turn this around?
The clock officially began ticking on the rebuilding job somewhere in the first half, as the Jayhawks (26-6) ran out to a 19-4 lead, which is when Taz Sherman was whistled for a technical foul for complaining about a no-call, which was followed up moments later with Huggins getting ejected.
“I’m going to stand up for my guys,” Huggins said after the game. “I’ve never not stood up for them. It is what it is.”
There is likely to be another game this season.
In his postgame radio show, WVU associate head coach Larry Harrison made a mention of the NIT, which can technically take teams that are below .500, but haven’t done so for a long time.
The CBI could be in play, too, if Huggins and the athletic program decide to pull the trigger there.
Huggins said in his postgame press conference that WVU expects to play in one of those tournaments.
In either case, that’s a continuation of the current situation, giving the older guys on the team one last hurrah before moving on to the real world.
It’s time to begin a real discussion about the future of this program.
Where it stands currently is it’s not good enough to legitimately compete against the best team in the Big 12.
Going by Thursday’s results — and, yes, the Jayhawks did get some help from a bad officiating crew — the Mountaineers are in the same league as Kansas by default membership only.
The Jayhawks dominated all three games in rebounds, points in the paint and generally made it tough for WVU shooters to get any open looks.
“They were obviously dialed in,” WVU guard Sean McNeil said of Kansas’ defense. “The looks I got were contested, I thought.”
No team in the Big 12 can compete with Kansas in the recruiting game. That will be true in another five years and long after Huggins has decided to retire from West Virginia.
So, if Huggins can’t out-recruit K.U. head coach Bill Self, it’s simply a matter of continuing to get creative.
He’s got to hit on guys who were overlooked by other schools. He’s got to really find some guys in the transfer portal who can make a difference and he’s got a group of freshmen to develop.
That’s the first step.
Then it’s a matter of getting this program hungry again.
It’s a matter of getting guys who have the mentality of being physical athletes and not ones who put up lazy shots around the rim that get blocked by Kansas’ back-up center.
It’s a matter of getting guys who know how to win ugly, how to play defense, how to scrap for loose balls and battle like crazy for a rebound and quit crying to the refs every time they don’t get a call.
This program hasn’t been consistently like that since about 2018, when Jevon Carter was a senior.
That’s been a complete four years now, too much time since we’ve thought of WVU as a traditional Huggins-like team.
In the end, it’s all about putting a group of guys together who are really ticked off that they couldn’t hold a lead for more than 12 minutes in three games against Kansas and want to do something about that.
It all comes back to time for this WVU program, and Mr. Huggins is officially on the clock.
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