MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — Jordan McCabe understood the repercussions of West Virginia’s 58-49 loss on Wednesday against No. 3 Kansas well before he sat down in the big comfy sofa chair to face the media’s questions.
“There’s going to be a bunch of people jumping off the bandwagon,” he began. “They’re going to talk about being on a two-game skid and losing at home, but we know where we are as a team.”
By people, West Virginia’s sophomore point guard was not referring to the fans.
His attention at that moment was directed at the Joe Lunardi’s of the world and the other NCAA tournament “experts” and “bracketologists” and maybe even to the NCAA selection committee, who will ultimately decide the Mountaineers’ fate in four weeks.
It’s the second part of McCabe’s quote — the “we know where we are as a team” part — that was most interesting.
Because there is no telling at the moment who these Mountaineers (18-6, 6-5 Big 12) actually are.
There are ideas, the kind that maybe begin with a strong statement of facts, but then eventually tail off into nothingness, as your mind begins to take in the bigger picture.
The 14th-ranked team in the country — for now — is not unbeatable at home. The Jayhawks proved just that on Wednesday by holding the Mountaineers absolutely scoreless over the final 5:07 of the game.
The Mountaineers are not the world’s worst team on the road, either, although WVU’s lone Big 12 road win came against the conference’s worst team on an early January night when Oklahoma State just happened to play as poorly as the Mountaineers did.
WVU is young, but it is a youthful team that returned four starters in McCabe, Emmitt Matthews Jr., Derek Culver and Jermaine Haley who accounted for 65 collegiate starts a season ago.
Those four have now accounted for 158 starts, which is not exactly the textbook definition of inexperience.
“We turned it over 19 times and they turned it over 13,” McCabe said. “The best teams in the country, top-five teams, they don’t turn it over like we did. You can say, ‘Oh, they’re young,’ but it’s on us as a unit and on myself as a point guard to get us ready to cut those down. We may have gotten away with it earlier, but you’re not going to get away with it against teams you’re going to see in the Final Four.”
In truth, there is no simple answer to just who West Virginia is as a unit, and that answer comes with numerous subheads and then those subheads probably have a few subheads, too.
For starters, we begin with just the basic facts.
West Virginia was a 15-21 team a season ago. Through 24 games in 2018-19, the Mountaineers were 10-14.
Not only is that an eight-game improvement from the program’s worst recorded season in history, but it’s an improvement that has seen WVU in the national rankings for eight consecutive weeks.
Go back to last March, just after the Mountaineers had given up 109 points to some team called Coastal Carolina in the CBI, if someone told you then that basically the same core of WVU players would finish 11-7 or 10-6 in Big 12 play a season later, you would have taken it no questions asked.
Odds are, that’s pretty much the ballpark of where WVU fits into the scheme of conference play this season.
And this is where we introduce the first subhead: It’s only after the non-conference success WVU had this season that an 11-7 or 10-6 Big 12 record becomes disappointing.
A team that basically went into Ohio State’s backyard and beat the then-No. 2-ranked team in the country should not have to settle for the middle of the pack in the Big 12.
That same team went on the road and took the school’s biggest rival in Pitt and took the Panthers completely out of their game in their home arena, and then went on to beat a pretty good Wichita State team to win the Cancun Challenge.
If the three blind mice in stripes would have called the game the way it was meant to be officiated, West Virginia would have taken care of St. John’s in Madison Square Garden, too.
Well, suddenly, that Big 12 projection is just downright depressing, which leads us to subhead No. 2:
“I know we have a tough strength of schedule, but honestly, they were games that we were supposed to win,” Haley said.
Ohio State turned out to be fool’s gold.
Pitt is in the middle of the pack in an ACC field projected to have no more than four teams in the NCAA tournament right now.
Rhode Island is good, for an Atlantic 10 school. Akron is good, for a Mid-American Conference school.
Wichita State was nationally-ranked for a spell, but the Shockers are in the midst of their own three-game skid at the moment.
When it’s all said and done, the Mountaineers picked a really good season to be good, because no one is great.
Kentucky is not loaded with future NBA all-stars. Neither is Duke, Kansas or Gonzaga.
North Carolina is in last place in the ACC and Michigan State coach Tom Izzo is complaining about how Spartans fans are venting their frustrations at his players through social media.
If top-ranked Baylor goes on to win the national championship, no one is going to start comparing the Bears to 1976 Indiana or 1990 UNLV.
The 2020 NBA Draft might be the first time when the league’s 14 worst teams are praying NOT to win the lottery.
From November through mid-January, the Mountaineers were able to take advantage by winning, which suddenly got everyone’s expectations blown sky high.
Everyone is coming back down to Earth now, as WVU has lost two in a row with a road game looming on Saturday against No. 1 Baylor.
It’s the fall back to reality that is disappointing, but maybe we shouldn’t lose sight of just how far this program has come in the last 11 months, either.
It’s those road losses at K-State, Texas Tech and Oklahoma over the last two months that will ultimately haunt this team in terms of West Virginia’s final Big 12 record and NCAA tournament seed.
Maybe the players learned a lesson from those games. Maybe not.
We’ll find out later in road games at Texas and TCU that will both have just as much say about the Mountaineers’ immediate future as Saturday’s date with the Bears.
Until then, what can truly be said about WVU is it went from awful to good and still has a puncher’s chance to be special.
That is, if the Mountaineer decide to show up for the rest of the fight.
“We’re not going to go winless. We’re definitely going to win some more games,” Haley said. “We have opportunities and I think what our guys don’t realize is that every team we play, we match-up better than them because of our size. It’s a matter of executing and doing what our coaches are telling us.”
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