WVU isn’t as bad as it looked Saturday night. Truth be told, while probably closer to their overall record than something too many step beyond it, the Mountaineers are also more like a team that had won five out of seven than they are the one that was zapped by the Longhorns.

So in closing, WVU doesn’t have a Texas-sized problem. It just has a problem with Texas. It’s really somewhat striking to see how well the Longhorns have played against WVU relative to other opponents — and consider that Texas is 20-5! — and how the Mountaineers have had issues against Texas that they haven’t had against others. Since there are many examples, here’s but a sample:

As poorly as WVU has defended this season, it hadn’t allowed a shooting percentage as large as it did against Texas in more than two years. The Mountaineers never found a way to keep guards out of the paint for easy shots or assists.

“We couldn’t guard,” Huggins said. “Couldn’t. Didn’t. Wouldn’t. You can’t let people shoot that well, especially when you’re not making any shots.”

And while WVU has made a habit of staying close or cutting into deficits, Texas led by double digits the final 22:11 last month and the final 17:45 on Saturday. That’s more than half of the time they’ve spent on the floor together.

The Mountaineers are prone to scoring droughts because they rely on jumpers and because they give up easy scores more often than they find them. Yet Saturday’s game was only the seventh that saw them fall behind by 10 or more points.

Only Missouri, Kansas State and Texas have built 20-point leads. WVU rallied to get as close as six points against Missouri and avenged a 22-point loss to Kansas State with a 10-point win. Texas has built 21-point leads in both victories and can take credit for two of WVU’s four double-digit losses this season.

Good news for WVU: No more games against Texas this season. Bad news: It’s not impossible that the Mountaineers finish seventh in the league, which history suggests would probably put them in the position to win a few games in the Big 12 Tournament to get into the NCAA Tournament. If WVU were to win the 7-10 game on the first day of the Big 12 Tournament, it could draw Texas as the 2 seed in the quarterfinal round. Sub-optimal. Unless you believe in that silly “hardest thing to do in sports is beat a team three times in a season” axiom.

But let me reiterate: A loss to Texas, even a big one like that one, shouldn’t really change the tenor of the conversations about postseason possibilities. There are five regular season games left — with updated expected outcomes granting WVU just two wins, but basically a one-possession chance at home against Kansas — and a pretty relevant blueprint for what the Mountaineers must accomplish and avoid.

Last season, the Big 12 had half its league — five of 10 teams — in the NCAA tournament. All of them had at least 20 regular season wins and 11 victories in league play.

WVU would need five wins between its final five regular season games and the Big 12 tournament to reach 20, and to sweep its remaining home schedule and split a pair of tough road games to get to 11 conference victories.

That is a tall task, but don’t discount the Mountaineers if they can’t pull that off. If, say, West Virginia goes 3-2 down the stretch and picks up another win in Kansas City, it’ll be 19-14 overall. Two years ago, when the Mountaineers last reached the NCAA tournament, WVU received an at-large berth at 19-13.

There have been 17 teams reach the Big Dance with 13 losses, 11 of which had fewer than 20 wins.

Only six teams have received an at-large invitation with 14 losses. The last team to pull it off Arizona in 2008, when the Wildcats went 19-14 in the regular season, earned a No. 10 seed in the West Regional and lost in the first round to … West Virginia.