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Midwest region: (5) WVU v. (12) Buffalo

March 15, 2015 by Mike Casazza
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Elijah Macon is fired up upon seeing the draw Sunday night. WVU, which was No. 24 in Sunday’s RPI and No. 19 in the NCAA tournament’s selection committee rankings, plays at a yet-to-be-determined time Friday against Buffalo.

It’s the quintessential 12-5 game. I watched Buffalo for the first time Saturday night, considered 12-5 or 13-6 possibilities and thought, “This is the sort of team that can give WVU trouble.” The Bulls, coached by former Duke All-American Bobby Hurley, take care of the ball and have two very good guards. They rebound like crazy. They take and make a lot of free throws. They were No. 28 in the RPI and No. 48 in the NCAA seeding.

True, they come from the MAC, but they’ve won eight in a row and beat Central Michigan for the bid after losing to the Chippewas twice in the regular season. They like their chances.

To the more fortunate team Friday, it’s the winner of Maryland v. Valparaiso. We can go down that road later, but Maryland has a great guard and some size. Valpo is sort of an upstart team that has a wealth of young talent. But let’s go one step beyond that, because it’s amazing in that it was so predictable: Bob Huggins could see John Calipari in the Sweet Sixteen. The NCAA will never not do that, it seems.

 

Hallelujah

March 14, 2015 by Mike Casazza

Back when this idea was conceived and ground was first broken, this was supposed to be done during the season, right around the Kansas State home game and definitely in time for the bowl game and a little boost for the postseason. Spring football starts tomorrow at West Virginia, and late is better than never unless you’re talking about audits or chicken pox.

So kudos to the Mountaineers for getting another piece of the facilities puzzle in place. Between the enhanced offices and the spectacular weight room and this, WVU’s got a few of the corner pieces in place, and the school will start filling in the middle with that super bond and all the work included in those plans. No new turf this year, no new surface on the practice field and an indoor facility that’s still smaller-than-functional, but all in due time, no?

And since we’re reminiscing about back when this started, let’s flash back to the summer of 2013 and Dana Holgorsen’s excited and impromptu guided tour of his football facilities and the pointed remark that brought this to the forefront.

“Now this is by far — look, I do some of this on purpose, but this is by far the absolute worst team room in all of Division I,” he says.

It’s a strong statement, so strong one wonders if it’s actually happening on the record.

“It’s the absolute worst team room in all of college football,” he repeats.

Holgorsen scrambles to make a point.

“Sit right here,” he says, pointing to a random seat in the back row on the right side of the room. He takes a seat directly in front of the one he had just pointed to.

“Can you see?” he says.

You cannot see around Holgorsen, who isn’t a large person, and you cannot get a clear view of the projector screen at the front of the room on the right side. If there were more people in the room, the projector screen on the left side of the room would be hard to see, too.

“That in itself right there is ridiculous,” Holgorsen says. “Can you imagine Quinton Spain sitting in that chair? It’s unbelievable, but that’s why I’m out raising money to get a team room we can function with.”

Holgorsen said there are “huge” plans for a new team meeting room.

“I’ve got about half the money raised,” he says, adding that Matt Borman, the MAC’s executive director, has been his co-pilot for this mission.

The fundraising, Holgorsen says, consists mostly of just asking people for money.

“It’s the same thing we did for the weight room,” he says. “It was the worst weight room in all of Division I football. What do you do? You raise money to get it to where it’s functional. Are there bigger weight rooms? Yeah. Are there better or more functional weight rooms? I have a hard time saying there’s something that’s better or more functional.”

I know it’s a long read, but it’s worth the effort, just to make it to the very end, where he offers up even more on the team room, what it once was and what it would eventually become. Memphis!

Help is needed, help is on the way

March 13, 2015 by Mike Casazza

(Thanks again to BlueGoldNews.com. The postseason has different postgame procedures, most notably an open locker room, but that 30-minute window happens when the coach and select players have a press conference. I opted for the locker room.)

Yesterday wasn’t a total loss for Bob Huggins and West Virginia’s basketball team. True, true, the Mountaineers coughed up the Big 12 quarterfinal against Baylor and lost 80-70.

Baylor, which led by no more than five points in the first half, took a 55-49 lead on Prince’s layup with 13:21 remaining. The Mountaineers answered with an 11-2 run that saw the Bears call two timeouts, turn the ball over twice and miss all four of their shots. Paige and Williams both made two baskets and Brandon Watkins had his first basket since he scored a career-high 14 points against Kansas State on Feb. 11.

Williams then missed the front end of a one-and-one up 60-57 and Jonathan Motley beat everyone down the floor for a dunk over a scurrying Williams. Phillip’s jumper was answered by one from Baylor, and Phillip’s turnover preceded Prince’s third 3-pointer of the game. That was the 10th and final lead change of the game and put Baylor up 64-62.

Huggins called a timeout and Elijah Macon rebounded Phillip’s miss and tipped in a third shot on the possession to tie the score for the 11th and final time with 6:37 left to play. Gathers scored inside and Macon missed the front end of the one-and-one before O’Neale made 1 of 2 at the foul line for a 67-64 lead.

Williams made two free throws and Gathers missed a pair before Carter’s open 3 rattled out. Miles rebounded a Baylor miss and dribbled the ball up the floor while telling his teammates to slow down the pace. He promptly tried a long pass to the left side that Prince stole.

“Stupid play on my part,” Miles said. “It shouldn’t have happened.”

Prince dribbled to his basket, bobbled the ball as he went up and caught it as he was fading out of bounds under the basket, but found Gathers at the rim for a dunk. Carter then lost his dribble up top and Medford took it the other way for a basket.

“It’s one thing to get a turnover,” Bears coach Scott Drew said. “It’s another thing to get a turnover and a conversion.”

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Take two

by Mike Casazza

Kevin White is going to work out at WVU’s pro day today, which on the surface seems sort of surprising given the way he aced the draft combine. But he’s not running the 40, and he’ll simply run routes and catch passes and do things that aren’t likely to hurt or help his position in next month’s NFL Draft, but it gives the eyes of the NFL decision-makers another chance to see and believe. White’s performance at the combine last month might need a follow up because it surprised even those who know him best.

“I knew he was going to run fast,” receivers coach Lonnie Galloway said, “but I didn’t think he’d go 4.3.”

Technically, a confirmed 4.35.

Also not surprising: Mario Alford will work out and run the 40 because his combine 40 was a brow-archer as well — though not in a good way. The 4.43 was slower than people expected, and possibly also slower than people recorded.

“A lot of scouts had him at 4.38 unofficially,” Galloway said. “Everyone probably had him running 4.3 or something like that. I don’t know what his deal was, but everyone knows he’s fast. I’d be surprised if Mario doesn’t go 4.3 flat, or at least 4.3-something this time.”

(Update: Lonnie was right and wrong. How’s 4.25 sound?)

WVU v. Baylor: Semi-charmed kind of game

March 12, 2015 by Mike Casazza
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You are looking live inside the Sprint Center, and what really hangs above today’s quarterfinal game between No. 4 seed and 16th ranked Baylor and No. 5 seed and 18th ranked West Virginia is the grip the Bears have had on the Mountaineers all season. WVU beat every team it played this season except LSU, Iowa State and Baylor. WVU lost by a point to the likely NCAA-bound Tigers, by two and by 20 to Iowa State (a 14-point lead was squandered in the first game and the second one was close for a minute) and then by 30 combined points to the Bears. It’s the only team the Mountaineers didn’t have a clue what to do with this season, trailing by 26 points at one point in the Coliseum and 20 in the Ferrell Center.

You can’t qualify the first game, really, but WVU was in a low spot. The spanking from Texas stung and the Mountaineers really were fortunate to beat TCU in overtime. The win at Kansas State was, at the time, promising because WVU played a pretty good second half offensively, but we know more now about the Wildcats than we did then. The Mountaineers never trailed against Texas Tech, but that was tight for a while and Robert Turner made the first half more interesting than it needed to be in a game WVU won by 19 points.

Then came a Devin Williams-less loss by 19 points at Oklahoma, which had lost at WVU by 21 three weeks earlier, and the debacle against Baylor, when the Bears looked like one of the scariest teams in the country.

You probably can qualify the second game, though. WVU went without Juwan Staten and promptly lost Gary Browne and, not to rush to the defense of the Big 12’s coach of the year, it’s hard to adjust on the fly when the irreplaceable point guard is gone and his replacement bows out early on in a road game.

True, Jevon Carter happened, and he made seven 3-pointers, and WVU was within nine points in the second half, but the team never got the push it needed to come all the way back. That said, the second 20 minutes were better than the first, and the second game was probably better than the first.

This is not a place to discuss whether or not it’s hard to beat a team three times in a year. It’s not. If you’re better twice — say, 15 points per game better — why can’t you be better three times?

No, this is a place to explore whether WVU can live the charmed life the third time these two teams get together.

The answer is: Yes. Now, will the Mountaineers live it? I don’t know. I do know this isn’t some sort of foregone conclusion today and that WVU can make some shots and get some stops and maybe find a break along the way to make it happen.

And the Mountaineers will probably have a little extra help today … and possibly a lot of extra help.

That’s Gary Browne in the background and Juwan Staten in the foreground in today’s warmups. Browne is ready to go, and he says he’s about 75 percent, though he told us before yesterday’s practice he hadn’t pressed the three times he practiced since returning from his ankle injury — and that might have changed yesterday. Staten didn’t do anything in the shoot around yesterday, but put up some shots, whatever that means, at practice. No one’s saying he practiced or if he posed for Twitter, but the word is today he won’t play unless the situation grows dire.

That said, neither seems to be shelved much longer.

And back to the point: It’s March, and a 4/5 game against against two teams separated by two spots in the rankings is not a Cinderella scenario. Someone’s got to put a leash on Rico Gathers. The rebounding cannot be one-sided. You can’t set Baylor loose in transition with badly missed shots or live-ball turnovers.

And the 2-3 zone cannot be a problem. WVU spent a lot of time on pump fakes and step-in jumpers in the shoot around and then put its post players through the wringers.

And if you’re job has you running the gauntlet, I’ve got you covered.

Continue reading…

Partners in pressure

March 11, 2015 by Mike Casazza

So Bob Huggins reached for the top shelf and dusted off the full-court press this season. It’s a difference-maker throughout a regular season, of course, but it matters more in the postseason when teams don’t have a lot of time to attempt to simulate what the Mountaineers do.

Respect due to the Big 12 coach of the year, but he was second in line in Morgantown. Tony Gibson, the football team’s defensive coordinator, restored the equally unpredictable 3-3-5 odd stack this past season and then unleashed his players with a bevy of blitzes.

He did over 100 yards what Huggins does over 94 feet. Gibson is a basketball fanatic, though, and he understands, appreciates and identifies with what Huggins is doing this season and why.

“We weren’t good at turnovers,” Gibson said, as aware as anyone his defense was No. 113 nationally in turnovers gained last season. “But here’s what it did for us: All those fast-tempo teams, it slowed them down, and we were better on third down. We were ninth in the country in third-down defense and we were 15th in the country in three-and-outs because we put pressure on them and we got off the field. Sometimes that’s better than a turnover.”

WVU played one more game and 57 fewer snaps last season than the year before, meaning not only that there were fewer opportunities for turnovers, but that the offense had the ball more often, and that’s the key to any sport.

Huggins’ team doesn’t shoot very well. Lately the free-throw line has been a struggle, too. But by stealing the ball and turning teams over, by taking that aggression to the backboards, WVU creates enough extra shots to score a sufficient amount of points.

The Mountaineers average around three fewer points per game this season than they did last season. They only take about two more shots per game this season and the average number of possessions per game is just about the same. But opponents only average 0.95 points per possession now, a top 50 average nationally. A season ago it was in the top 100 at 1.12, and the scoring average has plummeted from 75.1 points per game to 66.4 because WVU makes every possession an adventure.

“The thing I see that I understand about basketball is what it does to the guy with the ball,” Gibson said. “It rattles him. It’s like with the quarterback — he has the ball. If you put heat on him, the first thing he does is pick it up, and he starts to panic and his eyes go everywhere. And when he knows he’s about to get trapped, he looks everywhere instead of doing what his coach told him. You can dictate the tempo and get them all out of whack.

“I saw the Kansas game here and Kansas didn’t run a set play it looked like the whole first half. It sped them up,” Gibson said. “I don’t know if it’s anxiety or nerves or what, but the press rattles you and completely throws off the tempo, and it’s hard to win when you play that way.”

News from Kansas City

by Mike Casazza

So that’s the good news from the Sprint Center this morning. Gary Browne, injured in the most recent game against tomorrow’s opponent, got loose and then went through all the drills during the team’s shoot around. He only went to the side once in between to work with the trainer, and that seemed procedural, almost like, “How’d that feel, G? Good? I think you’re fine.” It was not a full-speed session, and Brown barely broke a sweat, but he wasn’t limited in what he did.

That said, the title is not “Good news from Kansas City.” It would seem Juwan Staten is out again tomorrow.

(Update: Browne said hes 75 percent and that he has a high ankle sprain, a bone bruise and strained tendons. “I’m going to try to go tomorrow,” he said. “They need me out there, and next week I’ll be 100 percent.”

Browne started practicing three days ago, but said he hasn’t pressed at all — though that may change today. The Mountaineers had a real practice after leaving here.

Call Staten doubtful for tomorrow. “He probably in all likelihood won’t play tomorrow. That hasn’t been determined, but in all likelihood he won’t,” Bob Huggins said.

Huggins wouldn’t/couldn’t elaborate on what’s wrong with Staten (Groin? Knee? Both? One more than the other?) and if he’d had an MRI. On both topics, he deferred to the team’s trainer. “The older I get, the less I get into other people’s business,” he said.)

What’s that sound?

by Mike Casazza

Bob Huggins is in his office, the one in the basketball practice facility, the one with a balcony that overlooks the court. He’s in there one morning or afternoon or evening, any day during either of the past two weeks. Down below, he hears the door open. A ball hits the floor and someone with squeaky sneakers is dribbling. The squeaks stop. The dribble goes silent. The noiseless window is shattered by composite leather spinning through nylon netting.

Huggins moves to the balcony. He looks down. It’s Tarik Phillip. Again. The conversations are getting through to Phillip, and Phillip is getting better on the floor for the Mountaineers.

 

The worth of Devin Williams

March 10, 2015 by Mike Casazza

I don’t think anyone’s going to argue that Devin Williams has had to adjust more without Juwan Staten and Gary Browne than anyone else, even the other starters or the reserves who have had to improve their roles and increase their presence. Those were the guards who could get the ball to Williams inside. Those were guards who could defend and keep the lid on an offense and not let guards spill toward Williams at the back end of the press.

Staten and Williams were effective on high screens. Browne was a developing shooter. They had keys to a zone or pack-line defense that would otherwise collapse to crowd the lane. Williams has had to become a little more offensive, a slightly better and more efficient scorer, and that’s not his game.

But I’d also argue that no one had to adjust more from last year to this year than Williams. He was the only true post player last season. Now he works with one or two others at a time. He didn’t play the last line of the press last year, something he does really well this season to little fanfare. He could rely on Eron Harris and Terry Henderson to space a defense and give him room inside. Without them and with another teammate playing close to the basket, the crowd inside is greater.

His numbers are better this season than they were last season, but they’re pretty similar, too. And maybe because of that, he was only honorable mention all-Big 12, though it may seem he’s one of the 15 best players in the conference, just because of what he means to the team that tied for third place in the top RPI conference. Then again, maybe he is somewhere between 16 and 20, though only because the league is that good. But if it’s that good and blessed with bigs, isn’t Williams then worth more?

Around and around you can go with Williams, his season, his stats and what he means to the Mountaineers, but he’s an ideal fit for this team this year. Williams was as big a reason as any that Bob Huggins decided to press, because of his footwork and his rebounding, but Williams also doesn’t need a lot of shots to do his damage, and he’s not going to get a lot of shots (or minutes) on a team that plays 11 or 12 every game.

The fit is worth the most of all because though he knows he’d have better numbers if he played more minutes on a team with an eight-man rotation, he values wins most.

“It’s never as good as I want it to be, but I try to keep in mind, especially because of last year, that I’ve got to continue to play and that if I have one bad game, there are more games to come,” he said. “I believe I’m preparing better and going about that the right way, but as long as we win, that’s all I care about what comes out of it. As long as we win, we all get a piece of the pie, so I go out there and play basketball the best way I can.”

Williams’ scoring and rebounding averages are above what they were last year, but not by much. He averaged 8.4 points and 7.2 rebounds last year, when he shot just 41.4 percent. He’s two percentage points higher this season, and further proof of his improvements as a post player comes from his work at the foul line. Williams was 79-of-139 last season (57.2 percent), but he’s 117-of-170 (68.8 percent) this season. He was 14-of-15 against the Cowboys, and his point total reflected his work with many of his foul shots coming after offensive rebounds or on the post.

“I think he continues to expand what he can do, but I think as important as that is he doesn’t get away from what he’s really good at,” Huggins said. “He’s a terrific rebounder. They told me in the NBA for years and years and years if you rebound in high school and you rebound in college, you’re probably going to rebound in their league. I don’t think he’ll ever not do that.”

C’mon coach, chill out

by Mike Casazza