MORGANTOWN — It’s been nearly three months since Bob Huggins stood in front of a WVU Coliseum crowd anticipating the start of another men’s basketball season.
Just days before, the Big 12 preseason poll had been released and the Mountaineers were picked to finish ninth.
Huggins took that opportunity to try and generate some enthusiasm with one simple question: “What do you all think, are we going to be ninth?”
The crowd, on that night, of course answered with a resounding no.
We can only be thankful that was back in October and that Huggins isn’t grabbing any microphones now and asking that same question.
He probably wouldn’t like the answer, not after No. 3 Kansas walked into the Coliseum on Saturday and thoroughly dominated the Mountaineers to the tune of a 76-62 victory in front of a sold-out Gold Rush crowd.
It ended up being a major rush to get to the doors and out to the parking lot for WVU’s fans, as the Jayhawks (14-1, 3-0 Big 12) walked into Morgantown and connected on six of their first seven 3-pointers.
That led to a 22-10 lead right off the bat for Kansas — so much for the home-court advantage — and the Jayhawks answered every push the Mountaineers had until they had run out of them. The Jayhawks held a lead for nearly 37 minutes of a 40-minute contest.
“Well, when you’re playing the (No. 3) ranked team in the country, everything is important,” Huggins began. “Every pass that you throw that you make your guys turn their hands over hurts you. Every time you dribbled it off your foot, every time you miss a wide-open cutter, it hurts. We didn’t make shots.”
Poor play has hurt the Mountaineers (10-5, 0-3) since the start of Big 12 play, the No. 1 reason they are tied for last place with Baylor, which visits the Coliseum on Wednesday.
And so the question has to be asked: Have the Mountaineers already dug too big of a hole to get out of?
WVU players don’t believe so. WVU guard Joe Toussaint spoke after the game of embracing the grind that is Big 12 play and taking pride in getting back to competitive play.
Of course — and with no disrespect here at all — that’s what players are supposed to believe and say. It’s the same things WVU players said last season that saw the Mountaineers finish in last place in the conference with a 4-14 record.
Even while losing seven games in a row at one point last season, WVU players kept talking about not looking in the past and continuing to focus on the upcoming challenges.
Eventually, the obstacles became to much to overcome for that team.
This is a different roster. There are a ton of new faces that weren’t here last season. To this point, though, not much has changed.
In a league that is ranked so far above the others in terms of strength of schedule, the reality is WVU probably only needs to get to eight Big 12 wins to be in position for the NCAA tournament.
Maybe, just maybe, even seven would get you there, but with the way WVU keeps losing momentum, how do the Mountaineers get to seven or eight wins in this league?
It’s tough to forecast WVU reaching that spot right now, which is a tough thing to say with 15 conference games still on the schedule.
But, WVU hasn’t won a Big 12 road game since the end of the 2020-21 season. The Mountaineers still have seven road games remaining.
WVU has lost 11 in a row against AP Top 25 teams, and there are going to be a host of ranked teams coming up, including one more game against these darned Jayhawks.
The Mountaineers are no longer in a bind — the words Huggins used after the team dropped two road games to begin conference play — they are securely in a vice clamp now.
Seven wins? Eight wins? The Mountaineers are having a hard enough time getting one.
Back on that evening in October, no one would have predicted this — except maybe the Big 12 coaches who picked WVU to finish ninth to begin with — but the Mountaineers find themselves in a hard reality at the moment.
It’s time for them to either sink or swim. If sink ends up being the answer, that makes it two extremely tough seasons to deal with for WVU fans.
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