I got the sense WVU wasn’t too impressed with Rutgers and a fake tough guy attitude. The day before the game, Deniz Kilicli accurately predicted the Scarlet Knights would be pumped up, play way too aggressively, foul a lot and soon be down 20 or so points. And then after the game, he was asked what WVU had seen go wrong in Monday’s loss to UConn that was better and decisive Saturday after the 84-60 win against Rutgers.

“We didn’t play UConn, that’s one thing,” Kilicli said. “We played Rutgers, not UConn. It’s easy. It’s pretty simple. They don’t have two or three players that can play. They have one freshman who kind of plays one day and doesn’t want to play on the other.”

Well, that’s that then.

WVU is now 35-8 after a loss in four-plus seasons under Bob Huggins — I didn’t count losing in the NCAA Tournament and then winning the next season’s opener — and sometimes it’s as easy as that. Yet the days between the UConn loss and the Rutgers win weren’t easy. Kilicli called the span “hell.”

WVU flew back to campus Monday night from Hartford, Conn., and was off Tuesday. The team practiced 2 hours, 45 minutes Wednesday, though Huggins initially wanted to go for about 90 minutes before realizing his players weren’t worthy of leaving so soon.

“They decided they didn’t want to do that,” Huggins said. “That was on them, not me.”

Practice was better Thursday, but Huggins said Friday was “just awful and I absolutely wore them out.”

So with that out there, and with Kilicli’s comparison to the underworld and some other players making similar suggestions, I asked Huggins if he agreed that “this was an especially difficult week.”

“I think playing the Marshall game in the middle of the conference season is a disaster,” Huggins said. “It doesn’t help either team. They won last year and went out and just got drilled the next game out. It ought to be in the preseason. It should not be where it is.”

Um … ah, yes. Marshall is up next and with a 13-4 record after a tricky and impressive home win Saturday against UCF. The schools has its best team in many, many years. I’ve had some tell me it’s the best since the 1970s. The Thundering Herd do three things to affect the Mountaineers: Rebound, guard and defend the 3. This is not Rutgers.

“Marshall is better than these guys,” Kilicli said.