WVU faces many obstacles, distractions when it travels to Oklahoma

MORGANTOWN — It is a world of college basketball that seemingly spins faster than the ball on one’s finger.

Courtesy of the transfer portal, players are here one day, somewhere else the next.

Blink and you may have missed both North Carolina and Kentucky — two of the bluest blue bloods there are — went from being ranked in the top five in the country to unranked.

That’s college basketball these days, it runs at the speed of a fast break.

WVU STATS

Except maybe at Oklahoma, where second-year head coach Porter Moser has the Sooners playing comfortably in a La-Z-Boy recliner as opposed to a fast-paced run and gun.

It’s a style of play the Sooners (10-6, 1-3 Big 12) will have on full display at noon Saturday, when they host a WVU team looking to break an 11-game Big 12 road losing streak.

“That’s the way they play the game,” WVU head coach Bob Huggins said. “There’s a lot of ways to play the game. Some people like to play it really fast. Some people like to play it slow. (Moser) is probably as good as there is in college basketball at slowing the game down to their pace and making people defend for an extended period of time.”

Take this stat, for example: No team in the Big 12 shoots the ball better than the Sooners, who are making 49% of their shots.

The flip side is Oklahoma has also made the fewest shots and taken the fewest shots in the league.

“That’s the purpose of playing a little slower is to make people guard longer,” Huggins said. “They wait until someone has a breakdown. We haven’t really had to play against that a whole lot.”

Oklahoma’s style also keeps games close. The Sooners’ six losses this season have come by an average of 3.8 points.

In terms of someone having a breakdown, that appears to be what’s headed for the Mountaineers (10-6, 0-4), whose program is filled with distractions at the moment other than just the road losing streak.

Longtime associate head coach Larry Harrison was fired Thursday after 16 years at the school.

That came just one day after the team learned that Manhattan transfer Jose Perez was not granted immediate eligibility after his appeal to the NCAA Committee for Legislative Relief was denied.

The week before all of that, WVU guard Erik Stevenson apologized publicly for his actions that led to two technical fouls in the team’s first two Big 12 games of the season. He has since gone 7 of 28 shooting and 2 of 12 from 3-point range.

A loss today would equal the Mountaineers’ worst start ever in Big 12 play, they’re down an assistant coach and WVU is shooting just 38% as a team in Big 12 games, yet Huggins remains, well, optimistic.

“I think this team is going to be a good team,” Huggins said. “I think it’s going to be a team that’s an NCAA-tournament team, and a team that’s going to compete in the hardest league in the country and compete very well.

“The reality of it is it’s not like we haven’t competed. We’ve had opportunities. Obviously we haven’t made free throws. We’ve missed open shots at critical times.”

On top of all that, Oklahoma has won the last six meetings and WVU hasn’t won at the Lloyd Noble Center since 2018.

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