Watch me go out on a limb here: I think Mike Carey is a really good basketball coach.

No offense to his Xs an Os, but I’m partial to the way he gets through to his players more than what he teaches his players. Let’s be honest: At a certain level, basketball is basketball and you can only teach so many things. The message is the message, but the audience is more receptive and malleable if they respect the way it’s being delivered.

And that has become Carey’s thing, and perhaps improbably. Watch the guy go and you’d think he might rub people the wrong way. You’d think it might not be for everyone. You’d probably be right, but only for a small sample. For the people who accept and adapt and understand the intent is to stand a player up and not to knock a player down, for the people Carey wants to be around, it really works.

“On the court, Coach Carey is always intense and even if he says something jokingly on the court, you don’t want to smile because he’s just so intense,” center Ayana Dunning said.

“As a player and as a team, you’re so committed and so focused on the court that you know him screaming and hollering at us is his way of teaching us as players and as a team.”

This was all on display Wednesday night as WVU won its third consecutive game, each against a ranked opponent, with a come-from-behind 60-50 victory against No. 21 Rutgers …

WVU looked and behaved a lot like a team still stuck on Sunday’s win against Notre Dame. Rutgers, coached by a Hall of Famer, was taking what it wanted on offense and the Mountaineers were playing the wrong way with turnovers and jumpers. At halftime, WVU trailed by seven points and there was a rather obvious explanation.

That was properly vetted in the locker room, where Carey did that thing he does when he gets through to his players.

“At halftime, Coach asked us what percentage do we think they’re shooting,” forward Asya Bussie said. “I was going to say 70, but I was too scared to say that.”

Good for Bussie. She would have been wrong. Rutgers was shooting 71.4 percent.

“I’ve never seen a team shoot 71 percent on us since I’ve been here,” said Carey, who’s worked at WVU for 11 seasons and 222 wins.

The Mountaineers were in territory that was once foreign, but has become a little more familiar of late. They’d trailed at the half just four other times this season, but two were in the past three games.

Carey got to work.

“Nicely,” he said. “I asked them, pretty please, to maybe start playing defense.”

He also asked his players to remember where they were at that moment and not days before.

“Notre Dame is gone. Notre Dame is done,” he told the Mountaineers. “Either wake up and get focused or everyone who was telling you how great you were will be telling you how bad you are.”