MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Not to get into a whole lot of detail about this, but the games we love to watch today have all changed.
The NFL is all about quarterbacks and passing, and defense is no longer the standard to winning championships. Professional baseball has been taken over by analytics, and basketball belongs to the fast guards who fire away from 3-point range.
And that’s fine. It’s hard to argue that Tom Brady and Stephen Curry aren’t more valuable in today’s game than Walter Payton and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were in theirs.
What gets lost in the shuffle, though, is that the more our games change in style with the times, the fundamental basis of building a winning team remains steadfast.
“Before when you were talking, you’d have two guys off in the corner talking about something; I don’t know what the hell they were talking about,” West Virginia basketball coach Bob Huggins said Tuesday after the Mountaineers’ 104-96 triple-overtime win against TCU. “Some guys are over there getting a drink of water or something.”
That was the atmosphere of a West Virginia practice for basically the first three months of the season. It’s the prime example of how winning ends and losing begins.
You can have the best pocket passer or the top shot-blocker or the most feared home-run hitter around.
You could have a roster filled with names that some computer says are the best fit for each position and it means nothing without the right chemistry.
Over the first three months, West Virginia may have had all of its players in the same boat, but some were rowing upstream, while others rowed the opposite direction.
If you’ve got guys with agendas other than winning or guys with the wrong attitude or bad character or care more about themselves than the team, then it is simply not going to work.
It was that way in 1930. It will be the same way in 2030.
We are not calling out former players Esa Ahmad and Wes Harris here, because it simply does no good to do so. They are strictly college students now after being dismissed from the team on Feb. 11 for violating athletics department policy.
We are not pointing fingers at Sagaba Konate and the saga that has been his right knee injury, because it’s not the fair thing to do.
But there is no denying the sudden transformation this team has undergone in its last two games. There is no denying the different type of energy that pours out of these players now.
“They listen,” Huggins said. “When I talk now, I’ve got 10 (sets of) eyes on me.
“It’s the atmosphere of old. It’s not what we had. It’s the atmosphere that made us pretty good.”
More to the point, it’s suddenly fun again to be a member of this basketball team.
“It’s so fun,” said freshman guard Jordan McCabe, who had himself a night with 25 points, 11 assists and six steals against the Horned Frogs. “The energy in the locker room afterward just kind of summed it all up. You could just kind of sit back and feel it. Everybody was smiling and you could feel the weight coming off their shoulders.”
The next obvious question: What does it all mean?
Talent level and depth will still be a concern with the Mountaineers for the rest of the season. Sometimes you just go up against teams with more talent and chemistry.
Are the Mountaineers going to ride this wave of momentum and suddenly become a feel-good story at the end of the year?
“I told them, ‘We’re not giving up,’”Huggins said. “That’s not in my DNA and there’s a lot of them that I don’t think is in their DNA. We need to make a run at the end of the year and then we need to go to the [Big 12] tournament and win. I don’t think a postseason deal is totally out of the question. I mean, it’s going to be tough. We’re minus six (from a .500 record) right now.”
That’s right, Huggins is thinking postseason and let me voice the opinion that a trip to the CBI — if WVU were to somehow turn it around enough to warrant an invite — shouldn’t be viewed as some kind of bad joke. Huggins isn’t thinking CBI at the moment, but here’s hoping he wouldn’t dismiss the idea altogether.
“We’ve got one more at home [against Iowa State], where we generally play a little better,” Huggins said. “We got Oklahoma on the road and Oklahoma State on the road. We can win. I’m not saying we will, but we can win. Those are games I think we can win and then we go to Kansas City. It’s happened before.”
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