MORGANTOWN — The frustration, Josh Eilert admitted, settled in early.
“I think everybody was frustrated,” the WVU men’s basketball coach said following the Mountaineers’ 89-55 loss against No. 3 Houston on Saturday. “When you don’t see shots fall when you have open looks, that kind of snowballed that frustration.”
The job Houston did with its defense was “masterful,” Eilert said, but the more disappointing part was how quickly the Mountaineers went away from its game plan.
“We got out of character in terms of what we were trying to do defensively,” Eilert said. “Some of that just got thrown out the window. We weren’t carrying the game plan over from the practice floor.”
WVU spent the majority of the game going one-on-five on offense and the Mountaineers’ defense was nonexistent.
It all came after push came to shove and WVU ended up with its worst game of the season at the start of Big 12 play.
The problem on the horizon?
“I told our guys, this league is a bear,” Eilert said. “You’ve got to turn the page, because it’s going to be battle after battle.”
This is not a problem that’s going to go away any time soon, and it’s still a question of how much can be fixed once Jesse Edwards returns to the lineup in a few weeks after surgery on his fractured right wrist.
Offensively, Edwards gives Eilert a full set of options, but if those options continue to play isolation ball and take it one against everyone else without running a cohesive offense, it’s still going to be tough to watch.
Why? This is a defensive league. The Big 12 has been a conference built on defense going back the last few years.
Only two other teams reached 80 points — TCU and Kansas — in the opening weekend of conference games. There were nearly as many teams in the 50s and 60s as there were in the 70s on Big 12 opening day.
Which flips the page to WVU’s defensive woes.
The Mountaineers aren’t stacking up well on that side of the floor compared to everyone else in the league.
WVU (5-9, 0-1 Big 12) is the only team in the Big 12 allowing more than 70 points a game.
Only TCU and Baylor allow opponents to have better shooting nights from the floor.
Houston shot 53.1%, becoming the first team this season to hit better than half its shots against WVU, but the sixth team to shoot better than 43% in a game.
Rebounding and defending the paint may be the greatest issue.
WVU’s opponents are averaging 37.6 rebounds per game, the most against any Big 12 school and Houston outscored WVU 48-20 in the lane Saturday.
“We’ve got Akok Akok out there and Pat Suemnick playing some minutes at (center), but our depth at (center) is very minimal,” Eilert said. “One of my biggest issues going into the season was worrying about Jesse Edwards getting into foul trouble. I never thought I’d be playing without him for four or five weeks. It was a concern of mine not having a backup (center) and now we don’t even have one.”
And the Mountaineers don’t have a break, either. After having already faced the No. 1 team in the NCAA NET rankings in Houston, WVU is scheduled to face five teams — Kansas State, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and UCF — who are all ranked in the top 80 of the NET.
