MORGANTOWN — A moment of clarity hit Bob Huggins in the second half of West Virginia’s 69-61 loss against No. 7 Texas on Saturday.
Where he had believed some things had been fixed through constant drilling in practice, they all reared their ugly heads against the Longhorns.
“If you want to make a recipe for losing, just go back and look at our last 10 minutes, because we just dropped balls,” Huggins began. “They didn’t take them from us. We just dropped them.”
WVU had a combined 27 turnovers in games against Baylor, Oklahoma and TCU, but then committed 20 against Texas.
Three costly turnovers came on inbounds plays. One inbounds pass thrown along the baseline ended up in the courtside seats.
On yet another inbounds play, WVU was called for traveling while trying to get the ball in play.
“You can’t turn the ball over 20 times,” Huggins said. “We talked about that earlier in the year. We had it down to where we were turning it over six times a game, which isn’t good, but it’s way better than 20. Now we’re back to 20, and not playing against pressure. We just throw the ball to the wrong team.”
In his postgame radio interview, Huggins referred to the Mountaineers (11-8, 1-6 Big 12) as “a bad basketball team.”
“I’ll take every bit of the blame,” Huggins said. “I’m not going to make excuses. I’m not going to lead people on. We’re a bad basketball team right now. We’ve got to get it fixed. I’m going to work like crazy to do everything I can possibly do. It’s frustrating. It’s humiliating.”
Coming off a victory against TCU for the Mountaineers’ first Big 12 win of the season, Huggins was hoping to find his players going with a new sense of purpose in a united effort to climb up the conference standings.
Instead, “We were just out there. We had no bounce,” Huggins said. “I thought we’d be really jacked up for it. I didn’t see a lot of emotion or enthusiasm.”
Huggins’ honesty spilled into his substitution patterns, in that guard Joe Toussaint only played four minutes in the second half.
“It’s my fault,” Huggins said. “I was kind of caught up in did we play Kedy (Johnson) too much? Should I have got him out and which one of our guys, Eric (Stevenson) or Seth (Wilson), was going to make a shot? Neither one of them were making shots. That’s kind of what happened. That’s 100% my fault. Joe deserves to play a lot of minutes. We’ve got guys who played who don’t deserve minutes. They haven’t earned minutes.”
Including Big 12 tournament games, WVU is 17-28 in league play over the last three seasons and 32-52 over the last five.
WVU had two third-place finishes in the Big 12 over that time, but also two last-place finishes, as well.
“What kills me is I sat here and said we’ll fix it. To the people of the state of West Virginia, I told them I will fix it, and I thought we were on that road to fixing it,” Huggins said. “Obviously we’re not. It’s frustrating. I’m not the kind of person who wants to let people down. It hurts me to let people down, and I feel like I’ve let the great fans in this state down. We had 14,100 people here, to play like that?”
Huggins made no mention of lineup changes, but he also hinted on his radio interview that players coming off the bench are becoming a problem, too.
“We have guys who don’t have a clue what [the plays] are,” he said. “Don’t have a clue, but they want to play. You look down there, and instead of playing, they’re down there running their mouth. If they could play the game on their mouth, boy they could get up and down real good, because that’s all they do is run their mouth.
“You get tired of it, so you say, ‘Hey, come on man [get in].’ Then, you put them in and they have no idea what they’re doing.”
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