Devin Williams said a lot after Saturday night’s loss, although it was only him and Gary Browne before Bob Huggins. Browne would have rather been about a hundred different places, and he was as disappointed in the defeat as he was determined not to let it happen again. Williams, though, was a little different.

I think if you ask the people covering the team, he’s a/the favorite to talk to. He’s honest. He’s not emotional. When he does dip into a cliche, it has purpose and a place. In short, his quotes have high utility, and his Texas postmortem was no different. WVU got a “collective ass whipping” that felt like “walking down the same road, man.” His coach, of course, had a slightly different take, not believing this year is like last year, and Browne was just mad enough to vow to make sure 77-50 wouldn’t happen again without ever getting into the history of the matchup and whatever frustrations may be attached to it.

Anyhow, Williams said something else without much other prompting that, on the surface, seems plausible if not realistic.

In its last six halves of basketball, each played against a ranked Big 12 team, No. 18 West Virginia has shot 36.1, 28.1, 40, 50, 28 and 20.7 percent from the floor.

Take a guess what three halves saw the Mountaineers staring at a 2-3 zone.

“I guess now we know what everyone’s going to be doing to us,” forward Devin Williams said after No. 17 Texas played its 2-3 for 40 minutes of a 77-50 win Saturday. “Eventually we have to figure it out or it might be the same result.”

I’m torn here. Does a man-to-man team abandon what it does and go zone against WVU? Seems smart given the evidence to support such a move. But does abandoning what you do to do something that might affect the other team welcome a risk? What if Abandoning Opponent can’t play zone? Or does WVU’s recent history against zones suggest it’s worth devoting two practices to in order to stump the Mountaineers?

We might find out.

Iowa State played, like, no 2-3 this season before necessity intervened and foul-troubled Fred Hoiberg threw it out there against WVU. It worked pretty well. The Cyclones weren’t terribly good at it, but the Mountaineers, without a post presence and without 3-point shooting, couldn’t talk Iowa State out of it.

TCU has played some 2-3 in the past (including against WVU last season, though I can’t find any mention of it in my notes from the Jan. 3 game this season) and you do wonder if Trent Johnson, who just played Texas and no doubt saw on the floor Monday and what he saw on film from the Longhorns, might use this week of practices to give it a whirl against WVU.

This is not like asking Dana Holgorsen to run the option. It’s two guys up top and three down low and … yeah, that’s a 2-3. There’s some extending and sliding and trapping and collapsing involved, but we’re talking about college players who have all played and been taught one before and millionaire coaches teaching it to them. It’s not a hard defense if you’re going to go to it in foul trouble or to protect the paint, but it’s also something a good offensive team can pass, drive and shoot through to scare the opposing coach out of it. The Mountaineers just seem to lag when confronted with one, and slowing them down is a really good idea.

Huggins said people were open against Texas, but the passes didn’t go where they were supposed to go. Not surprisingly, Browne and Williams thought it was hard to run offense against the zone.

At least they all agreed something was wrong.

“You can’t see it on TV, but when you’re at the game, it’s kind of difficult to see passing lanes because they’re big,” said guard Gary Browne, who had a team-high two assists and four of the team’s 14 points in the paint. “But we didn’t do a good job getting the ball in the high post, and I include myself in that. We didn’t give ourselves chances to make plays.”

The Mountaineers had a plan, but it rarely worked.

“The high post was wide open all the time, but every time we caught it, we didn’t make the best decision,” Browne said.

Huggins reminded players during play and during timeouts to stick to — or maybe remember — the approach they’d worked on in practice. When the game was over, Huggins didn’t think his players made the necessary passes. Those passers weren’t convinced the passes were available.

“I felt like sometimes I caught it in the high post and there was a lot of standing,” Williams said. “The coaches were staying on me about making that pass to the guy who was supposed to be sealing off the middle, but it seemed like we got stagnant and everyone stood in one place. The ball didn’t stick. I think everyone else got stuck in one spot.”