MORGANTOWN — West Virginia grabbed 50 rebounds, got off to a 17-3 lead and held Kansas State to just 42% shooting and three 3-pointers.
And lost.
As impressive as those numbers were, there were so many others that were just as ugly for the No. 24 Mountaineers, who fell to K-State 82-76 in overtime on Saturday inside Bramlage Coliseum in the Big 12 opener for both schools.
Maybe nothing is as deflating than this: It was the 10th consecutive Big 12 road loss for the Mountaineers (10-3, 0-1 Big 12), who went 0-9 in conference road games last season and finished in last place.
WVU is right back there again, although there are still 17 more conference games to go this season.
“I know we went through an absolutely miserable year a year ago,” WVU head coach Bob Huggins said on his radio postgame show. “We’re off to a start that’s miserable in this one. I know (people) are probably tired of hearing me say I’ll fix it. I thought I had.”
It looked fixed early on for the Mountaineers, who were playing their first game as a nationally-ranked team since 2021, but the Wildcats (12-1, 1-0) found a way to hang in there and mounted a second-half charge behind the play of point guard Markquis Nowell, who finished with 23 points and 10 assists.
“We were passing the ball and cutting. I mean, we were looking like a basketball team,” Huggins said. “We were defending better. We’re not a very good defensive team, but we were defending better.”
And then came a major letdown, a lot of fouls and WVU’s combination of guards were nowhere near as effective as Nowell was for K-State.
Nowell had 19 points and eight assists in the second half and overtime after struggling over the first 20 minutes. Meanwhile WVU’s trio of Kedrian Johnson, Erik Stevenson and Joe Toussaint combined to shoot just 6 of 25 from the field and all three eventually fouled out.
Johnson was just 1 of 10 from the field, with the one coming with 0.9 seconds in regulation, as he nailed a 3-pointer after Emmitt Matthews Jr. saved a ball from going out of bounds and tapped it out to him. That tied the game at 66 going into overtime, where Kansas State scored the first six points and never relinquished the lead again.
Stevenson fouled out with 1:25 remaining in regulation with the Mountaineers trailing 62-61, thinking he had only four fouls. He had picked up a technical foul earlier in the game that also went down as a personal foul, which may have mixed up his math.
For WVU, there was a lot mix ups on this night.
We could begin with the fact the Mountaineers went just 20 of 38 on foul shots, which was caused mostly by WVU’s most inefficient foul shooters — Jimmy Bell Jr. and Mohamed Wague — getting to the free-throw line the most. They combined to go 6 of 18, while the rest of the team was 14 of 20.
You could also look at Kansas State scoring 48 points in the paint, a mixture of Nowell breaking down his defenders either on back-door cuts or simply driving into the lane, as well as the Wildcats rebounding the ball better after getting dominated on the boards in the first half.
And the fouling just never stopped. WVU had 27 whistles, while K-State had 26. The Mountaineers lost their top three guards. The Wildcats saw forwards Abayomi Iyiola and Ismael Massoud foul out. Iyiola had a surprising game with 14 points and eight rebounds — he averages three points and two rebounds — after filling in for the injured David N’Guessan.
But, as good as K-State was in the second half and overtime, Huggins saw this as a game that WVU “gave away,” and then didn’t hold back his feelings on why the Mountaineers came up short.
“We’ve got a few guys who are really big at look at me, look at what I’m doing,” he said. “It screwed the game up. I’ve been blessed. I’ve had some special guys who loved the game. Special guys who said, ‘I’m going to be somebody at this game’ and meant it.
“We have a bunch of BSers. They don’t really want to be special. They want to hang on.”
WVU will no longer be hanging on to its national ranking, and now must go to Oklahoma State for a second consecutive road game on Monday, before returning home to play nationally-ranked Kansas and Baylor in what appears to be an uphill start to conference play.
“The bad news is (Bramlage Coliseum) is probably one of the easier places to play in the league,” Huggins said. “We’re getting ready to go play at one of the harder places in the league to play, and then we’re going home to play against the hardest team in the league to play, so we’ve put ourselves in a bind.”
WVU forward Tre Mitchell recorded his first double-double of the season with 16 points and 13 rebounds, while Wague also had a double-double with 10 points and 10 rebounds. While Johnson struggled with his shot, he did finish with nine points, nine rebounds and seven assists.
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