WVU travels to Texas seeking its first road win of the season

MORGANTOWN — It’s the question Josh Eilert can’t escape until it’s accomplished.

The road woes for the WVU men’s basketball team are once again at the front of the line, as the Mountaineers (8-14, 3-6 Big 12) travel to the state of Texas for a two-game road swing that begins at 3 p.m. Saturday against Texas, before facing TCU on Monday.

“I don’t know if I’ve found anything to single out by any means,” Eilert said. “It certainly gets a lot harder. This league is as hard as anywhere to win on the road.”

WVU STATS

WVU’s last true road win came on Feb. 27, 2023, a victory at Iowa State that is now almost a year ago.

The Mountaineers are 0-4 in Big 12 road games this season. Counting neutral-court games in the non-conference schedule, WVU is 0-8 away from the Coliseum.

Even worse, WVU is the only team in the conference that has yet to taste victory away from home.

The stats would tell you offense is the core of the problem. At home, WVU averages 71.2 points. On the road, that drops to 63.5.

WVU opponents average 71.6 points inside the Coliseum and 74.9 points when the Mountaineers are away from Morgantown.

“It’s not just us,” Eilert continued. “I think teams struggle on the road in this conference in general.”

That much is true, as a Big 12 team is twice as likely to win at home in conference games, with the home teams sporting a 44-22 record in Big 12 play.

Oddly enough, the one outlier is Texas (15-8, 4-6). The Longhorns are just 1-4 inside the Moody Center in league play.

With a struggling WVU coming to town, it may be completely unknown whose fortunes are about to change.

“It’s a difficult challenge in this league to get a win on the road,” Eilert said. “I think we’re the one team in our conference that hasn’t left our arena and got a road win or a neutral-court win. All of our wins have come at home and we’ve got to figure that out.”

And this is where the story could take a twist, but can’t. Albert Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

So, you would like to tell Eilert to try something different, advice that can go anywhere from both technical to the superstitious.

“Each situation is different and my idea was to travel out to these arenas and practice there in the evenings,” Eilert said. “This situation, (against Texas), the arena is being used the night before, so we can’t get in there. We’ll practice (in Morgantown) before we leave.

“There’s lots of different trains of thought and nothing has worked thus far. We’ll keep on trying to manipulate that to find out what’s the sweet spot.”

The Mountaineers have had success against the Longhorns, picking up a 76-73 win inside the Coliseum last month.

Meanwhile, Texas has lost three of its last four games — all at home — but still has a 93.6% chance to beat WVU, according to ESPN’s probability numbers.

WVU is coming off its bye week, in that the Mountaineers did not have a mid-week game before facing the Longhorns.

“It’s been a great week to get our legs under us and work on us as a team,” Eilert said. “It was nice to have a week off from the Big 12 scheduling to be able to do those things.”