A flip through the season’s scrapbook takes us back to the very beginning where, even then, it was apparent WVU would wrestle with reactions to calls this season.

Back then, the Mountaineers were outside the Big East and playing before crews that hadn’t seen them play too often and pretty much let their style slide in the games. That style included not only the aggressive defense and rebounding, but also the dialogues with the officials and the incredulous responses to many whistles. 

The feeling then was this could become an issue as the season progressed. Maybe the Mountaineers were in danger of developing a reputation. Perhaps people would cross a line with their indifference. Surely the way games were alled would change in the Big East and, as such, it was possible WVU would have a hard time handling it.

Well, no one has made a spectacle on the court this season and even Bob Huggins’ ejection Monday was kind of petty and the game could have ended without his exit, but there are admissions now the Mountaineers don’t always handle these matters as well as they need to.

“We should know better,” WVU forward Devin Ebanks said. “We’re fairly young, but we’re not that young. We should know better.”

One player said the standard reaction has become “arms down, hands out, ‘I can’t believe you’re calling this. What are you doing?'”

“We have a habit of doing it a lot,” WVU senior Da’Sean Butler said. “When things don’t go our way on one end, it affects us on the other end and the other team benefits. Everyone complains.

“I think we’re doing a better job, as opposed to earlier in the year when we sat back and complained on every play, but I think we need to do a better job and realize how important it is to continue to play through it.”

This is an extraordinarily emotional game and the sentiment always rises right about now. The Mountaineers are in a critical stage. For most of the season, they’ve been not only an elite team in the league, but the country. Now their standing is precarious on both perches, though salvageable.

The point is maybe it’s only natural it’s coming out now, which then makes it much more important for the Mountaineers to get a handle on it now. Not sure how easy that’ll be, though. For 27 games, they’ve been conditioned to play — and react — in a certain way and a lot of their play is reinforced in practice, where WVU goes hard every day and, in doing so, does a lot of the things it is found guilty of during the games.

And with the new rules that forbid a lot of that stuff and thus empower guards, “our league has become impossible to officiate,” according to UConn Coach Jim Calhoun.

That brings up a larger point, which is the premise for the linked-to article. Officials are not only significant variables in the game, but they’ve allowed and insisted on such a scenario and maybe that, more than anything else, has to be addressed. If the way the players perform and coaches behave is to be standardized, then shouldn’t the same go for officials?