Was it just 12 days or was it 12 months ago when West Virginia was beating No. 1 Baylor and ratcheting up the Big 12 championship race? It feels like a long time ago, and the Mountaineers have played three increasingly troubling games, winning one, perhaps fortunately, and losing the last two.

The game comes at you fast, especially when you aren’t looking, and judging by sights and sounds, WVU has not been on guard for a while. It almost doesn’t seem real, but this is really happening.

In the span of five days, the Mountaineers (15-4, 4-3 Big 12) dropped from second place in the Big 12 standings — and a game out of first place — and aimed at Tuesday’s home game against Kansas, which is No. 1 in the coaches’ poll and No. 2 in the media poll, to a multi-team tie for third place with a three-game gap between them and the 12-time defending regular season Big 12 champion Jayhawks.

“There’s a difference between being the hunter and the hunted,” said WVU coach Bob Huggins, who watched his team surrender 40 points in the paint a game after allowing 48. “The old proverb about the dog with the bone is always in danger — we’re not very good on top. We ought to know we have to scratch and claw. That’s kind of what we are, and we got a little bit complacent.”

With losses to Temple, Texas Tech, Oklahoma and now the Wildcats, WVU has as many losses to unranked teams as it did the previous two seasons combined. The Wildcats, who are now 11-1 at home and led by at least 11 points in all but one of those games, had lost eight straight games to ranked teams and were 0-3 this season. K-State is now 2-4 against teams in the RPI’s top 100.

Sorry about the game post last night. The WiFi in there didn’t connect. I asked for help and a bunch of people looked at it and said they’d be back and never came back, so I was relegated to in-game tweets. And I probably had a better time in Bramlage Coliseum than the Mountaineers, who have dropped from No. 22 to No. 40 in the RPI and will likely be in the teens in both polls tomorrow.

This is a pretty revealing box score: Five opponents in double figures again, 40 points in the paint, 31 fouls, 23 turnovers, only seven steals. And good luck catching up when the other team shoots 54 percent in the second half. That’s quite a recipe.

WVU won at Texas but didn’t play especially well or poorly in any one stretch. There was the one strong run and then the stunning drought against Oklahoma. Against K-State, the Mountaineers started poorly and took back control and then just collapsed at the end of the first half. They were slow to start the second half and then rallied again and then fell apart at the end again.

There’s a slight deterioration in quality of play there, and watching these games, it just feels the Mountaineers land their punch and the referee stands over the opponent and WVU goes back to its corner and can’t believe the other team beat the 10 count. That’s a bad habit for a team that puts runs on people. Runs are good. Expecting them to be definitive is not.

Three losses in six games by a total of 11 points and two losses in overtime, that’s not embarrassing, but it’s not who and what Bob Huggins saw in the first two months of the season.