ESPN’s Jay Bilas has always seemed like a pretty neat guy, certainly smart enough to have a Juris Doctor from Duke, engaging enough to be a member of the Screen Actors’ Guild, bright enough to speak on anything in college basketball and sharp enough to do a killer Bill Raftery impression. Onions!

Never got the impression he was particularly opinionated or, to say the least, ornery. Yet he showed me something when he put one man in his crosshairs.

Beilein has taken great pains to suggest that his players don’t know a basketball from a bowling ball, that his players are “learning how to play college basketball” and that when the Michigan coaches “give their wisdom to them, it’s got to be almost a Montessori experience.” What?! Beilein makes his players sound so stupid and clueless that it is insulting. First, and I say this as a guy who thinks that basketball is far more complicated than most seem to understand, to refer to your own basketball understanding as “wisdom” seems a bit much. Knowledge, yes. Wisdom, take a pill. Even John Wooden wouldn’t refer to his own knowledge as “wisdom.” Second, if your system is so complicated that you need to refer to recruited athletes and students admitted to the University of Michigan as the basketball equivalent of toddlers, maybe you should simplify things so you can compete favorably with Harvard, Central Michigan or Western Kentucky.

Meanwhile, Bob Huggins has blown the doors off the anything-but-bare cupboard Beilein left behind in Morgantown, but it will take a long time before some of the praise even begins to make sense to me. Look, it’s clear Huggins’ team can rebound, but a few people, including Marquette coach Tom Crean, say these guys rebound as well as anyone in the country. This is WVU UWV we’re talking about!