Devin Williams enters tonight’s quarterfinal in something that is not a groove. He treated study hall like he treats a defender’s torso and was benched for the start of the Texas Tech game, and after barely scoring in that game, Williams went to Baylor and shot 1-for-9 with a handful of left-handed misses.

He was 2-for-15 in those two games, and though he defended and rebounded quite well against the Bears, West Virginia already has a guy who rebounds and defends well. Williams has to be a scorer for the Mountaineers to make a run here and wherever they go next, and that’s not come easy for the big fella.

“There’s a heck of a lot more contact now than what there was before,” Bob Huggins said. “Until you’ve tried to do it, it’s hard. You can go out and practice all you want, but that contact is going to bring the ball down. That’s just the way it is.”

Huggins sees what everyone sees. Mechanically speaking, Williams has not been right. His head isn’t up. The shots come out fast. His body isn’t square with the target. It looks like he’s in a rush.

It leads to missed shots that go hard off the backboard or the rim, and it’s fair to say some of that is because of the presence or the presumption of contact. As Huggins said, it’s hard to get the ball up when you’re getting whacked, and if you know that to be true, you’re going to put a little more onto the shot to get it up and over the rim, and that negates the sort of finesse you need around the basket.

The Big 12 is also bigger than a lot of people realize. Height and weight. Williams is made to deal with size every game. Seriously, everyone has big bodies to throw at the 6-foot-9, 255-pound Williams, and he’ll see more tonight in the form of Karviar Shepherd and Vlad Brodziansky and Chris Washburn and Devonta Abron.

So pardon Williams if he appears to hasten his game to work around those obstacles.

“I don’t think he hurries because he knows he’s not going to get any breaks,” Huggins said. “The problem about being that big and strong is they don’t think it affects you as much, I guess, so you have absorb more contact. That’s a hard thing to practice.”