WVU’s mercurial, combustible 24-year-old center Aaric Murray was dismissed from the team today.

Actually, that’s not accurate. The Mountaineers put a headline atop a story that states: “Murray Has Departed WVU Program.”

“We came to a mutual agreement that it would be in his best interest to finish his collegiate career somewhere else,” said Huggins.

You don’t need to be 6-foot-11 to keep that one from going over your head. With careful wording, WVU is doing one last solid for Murray, who had a habit of being a distraction, whether that happened during a season he sat out (arrest), during practice (benchings) or during games (technical fouls).

And these transgressions happened at his former college, that after they happened when he was growing up in Philadelphia. Life and basketball were not and are not easy for Murray, for myriad factors, and it would certainly seem like it all caught up to him again today.

That’s unfortunate. We forget amid concern about wins and losses that college shapes lives, first and foremost, and we can agree Murray needed and admittedly sought shaping. The lesson learned his first season is especially ironic on this morning. “I definitely learned games aren’t won during game day,” he said. “They’re won during the offseason. I wasn’t working as hard as I should have been.”

Murray did want to be at WVU for the coming season. He might not have had many other options, and it would not be hard to argue that it was his behavior that created that predicament, but he wanted to stay because he really believed it could help him.

And Huggins, the coach with the long list of former players who stay in touch and thank him for the arm he draped across their shoulders to help show them the way at their most impressionable stages of life, agreed. Remember, it was his call whether Murray would be brought back for the 2013-14 season.

I thought all along that no matter who Huggins signed between last March and the first game of the coming season, the most important matter of business was getting Murray in line. He has talent that cannot be questioned, but he has displayed difficulty harnessing that talent because he is susceptible to other elements. If there were a way to ignore the elements and embrace the talent, then Murray and the Mountaineers might really have something.

He can shoot, he can rebound and he can block shots, but he can only do those things when motivated. WVU needed that guy, the one who found a switch to flip over the summer, and then flipped it and taped it in the ON position, to be a man in the middle.

You might like the potential of Remi Dibo and Jonathan Holton and you might see promise in Nathan Adrian, Devin Williams and Elijah Macon, but Murray had been there and seen it and he seemed to fit the Big 12’s version of a mobile center. He would have been a very nice asset to have for a team that needed assets. The Mountaineers would have been a better team with Murray, but seem better off without him.