The Sock 'Em, Bust 'Em Board Because that's our custom

Oliver Luck goes deep

May 8, 2013 by Mike Casazza

A long read, but a good one. Join the athletic director as he stands before this hard-to-believe baseball season and takes us back to the blank easel to explain what was done to get to where the Mountaineers are today — in first place in the Big 12.

How did Luck put this all together?

First, he was amazed to see that baseball was not fully funded when he came in, just as the rifle team that year won the NCAA championship also wasn’t fully funded.

“It didn’t take much to fully fund baseball, just like it didn’t take much to fully fund the rifle team. I don’t know why it wasn’t fully funded, but it wasn’t,” he said. “The incremental dollars it took to fully fund baseball wasn’t very much, five figures, that’s all it was.”

That was the first decision, to put the money into the program.

Then he decided that he couldn’t reach the level he was hoping to get to with longtime coach Greg Van Sant.

Dibo’s coming!

by Mike Casazza

The sharpshooting Parisian who spent the past two seasons at Casper (Wyo.) College and made more than 40-percent of his 3-point attempts while standing 6 feet, 9 inches above the ground committed to WVU Tuesday. With Jonathan Holton signing Monday and Dibo’s paperwork a formality, Bob Huggins is done with the Class of 2013-14.

If you’re keeping score at home, that would mean no Donte Grantham — trust me, I asked.

From what I gather, Mr. Dibo’s last name is pronounced DEE-bo (I’ve also heard a very European De-BO). I don’t think it’s DIE-bo, or die-BO. And clearly I hope it’s DEE-bo because of all the fun we could have for two years.

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!!!

May 7, 2013 by Mike Casazza

Just spotted this when I was moving around the Big 12 spring games. Oklahoma State has three quarterbacks and seems conflicted about picking one. So during the spring game the Cowboys used two at once.

Oklahoma State fans excited about the idea of seeing Wes Lunt and J.W. Walsh both in the backfield for multiple snaps Saturday will have to reel in their joy.

The three-back set of Lunt, Walsh and fullback Kye Staley that the Cowboys trotted out during OSU’s spring game on Saturday was something new to coach Mike Gundy.

“That was actually the first time I had seen that myself,” Gundy said. “Those guys, they come up with some stuff for the spring game.

How Marlon LeBlanc was victimized by expansion

by Mike Casazza

Oh, the move from the soccer strong Big East to the “Hey, we’ve got Akron! It’s a power!” Mid-American Conference was one thing. It robbed the men’s — and the women’s — soccer team of a bunch of guaranteed RPI games against conference opponents. It also left strength of schedule with a bunch of so-so conference opponents — and that, too, includes women’s soccer.

But a critical period of indecision in the winter of 2012 left Marlon LeBlanc in scheduling limbo.

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Once more, with Holton

by Mike Casazza

Time to shovel some dirt on this issue, before we brush it off 22 days from now when Jonathan Holton makes what we presume to be his final court appearance.

So to review, yes, Mr. Holton made mistakes of some variety 14 months and he has a few more things to clean up in that arena before he can enroll at WVU.

And, yes, he’s also at the mercy of what many others are as one-year junior college players. It generally takes two years to get an associate degree. So he has work to do there, too, but it doesn’t sound like anything he can’t conquer.

In fact, he did a lot in between Rhode Island and Palm Beach State so that he could 1) enroll at Palm Beach State and 2) enroll at a Division I school for the 2013-14 season.

Wouldn’t you know it …

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And Jonathan Holton has signed his papers

May 6, 2013 by Mike Casazza

Had a feeling we might hear more about this today, and we have.

Jonathan Holton has signed with WVU and Bob Huggins has just one more scholarship to award for the 2013 class, though we really are getting close to the end of the early signing period on May 20.

Horton has signed a grant-in-aid, which is essentially the same as a scholarship. College players can only sign one national letter-of-intent in their careers and Holton did that at Rhode Island.

“Jonathan is a prototype Big 12 forward,” says Huggins. “He can really score it off the bounce, play with his back to the basket, stretch defenses to make 3-pointers, as well as being a terrific offensive rebounder. He should give us immediate help on the front line.”

At Palm Beach State this past season, Holton averaged 17.5 points and 14.1 rebounds per game and shot 39.6 percent from 3-point range. He earned NJCAA and FCSAA player of the week honors during his outstanding season. Holton is rated by JucoRecruiting.com as the 13th-best junior college player in the 2013 class.

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The new normal! WVU baseball leads Big 12

by Mike Casazza

Welp, WVU took two of three from Oklahoma, and was probably mad after the fact that it didn’t sweep the series. The Mountaineers got seven innings and 11 strikeouts from their ace Friday and led in the eighth inning, but lost in the 10th.

Yet it was the Sooners who were made as word popped up all across Twitter Sunday that the Big 12’s preseason favorite refused to shake hands after the game — and no one I’ve talked to knows why.

So that part is a surprise. The other stuff?

“Nothing this team does surprises me now,” Mazey said Sunday after WVU defeated the preseason Big 12 favorites, 9-6, to move into a tie for first with the Sooners.

“This team is capable of anything.”

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Bob Huggins digs deep

by Mike Casazza

Once upon a time not long ago, Jonathan Holton was a promising frontcourt force at the University of Rhode Island.

Not long after the season ended, the promise was broken.

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Friday Feedback

May 3, 2013 by Mike Casazza

Welcome to the Friday Feedback, which will bang a drum, slowly, for WVU’s baseball team and its three-game series this weekend against 10th-ranked and Big 12-leading Oklahoma. Given the formal conclusion to the TIF Tuesday and the build toward this series, it’s a pretty enormous opportunity for the Mountaineers.

And to think, they’re three months deep with five Big 12 series in their pocket and still haven’t had that yearbook moment.

A series sweep could put WVU in first place in the standings. A series win could force a tie for first. Either is subject to what Baylor (24-20, 11-6) does in a three-game series at Kansas.

“I don’t know that there’s been that defining moment for us yet,” West Virginia Coach Randy Mazey said. “Usually there is one in a season when something happens and you realize it’s a defining moment. Maybe it’s still coming, but we haven’t had that yet.

“I think it’s been a gradual thing. It’s taken this team a while to get to know the coaching staff and what we’re all about and the way we attack things. And it’s taken a while for us to get to know them.”

To more important matters: Softball. A two-summer hiatus ended this week in a local rec league and, boy, have things changed. I’m not talking about my skills. They’re still refined, Edmondsonian even, though my endoskeleton seems livid about this. I’m talking about this zero tolerance profanity rule that governs the use of the F word. You get ejected from the game and the next game. I don’t know how to describe this without earning a retroactive suspension.

We were informed of this at our first game at 10 p.m. Wednesday because we were in the presence of women and children, never mind the language of some of the women there or that infants were at a 10 p.m. game or that there is a culture of pre- and in-game drinking and smoking. No F bombs, please! Anything else, go right ahead.

This is a challenge — lose a line drive in the lights and nearly lose your teeth because of that and try to bite your tongue … dive for a sinking liner and watch it skip by and fight the urge — but it’s a good one. Softball is therapeutic, if not for the activity and the camaraderie, than for checking yourself. If nothing else, it forces you to take personal inventory.

Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, track your contributions. (Thanks for hanging in this week. We put some intentional speed bumps in place, but we’re back on the Autobahn now.)

The 25314 said:

Wait, but I thought it takes awhile to adjust to the Big 12′s style of play, and it takes awhile to recruit the kind of kids and depth to play in the Big 12, and that travel is just unfair and too hard on the players, and the depth of the league makes it too hard to compete?

Seriously, how do you feel about a 14-2 record in “home” games. WVU played — and will only play — eight games at Hawley Field this season. Everything else in a 56-game schedule is a hike. So, yeah, I think we’re over that explanation now.

ClarenceOveur said:

The 25314,

What is it about a surprise successful season that you don’t understand?

Then again … Hey, I don’t think Mr. Zip Code is overlooking that. I think he’s enjoying the surprise in the presence of the oft supplied rationalization of struggles of other teams on campus. Let’s not forget, Mazey recruited 15 new players and seven are pitchers. Sure, he’s a Big 12-ish guy, having been at TCU, so maybe he had a better idea about who and what he needed. But those are big numbers. I guess the discussion to have, whether here now or later, is how much the Big 12 Style matters in the three sports. That is, if you don’t have it, does it matter more in one sport than another? I think you could argue baseball is baseball. There are no spread offenses or zone defenses, no tall cornerbacks or stretch 4s. If you can pitch it, you can win. No?

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Let’s circle back now

May 2, 2013 by Mike Casazza

So on April 1, Nolan Nawrocki swung a sledgehammer at Geno Smith. His Pro Football Weekly scouting report was a harshly worded criticism that was a lightning rod for pre-draft conversation.

We really didn’t talk about it here, save for an occasional joke or reference for fun. The one thing that bothered me most was how the scouting report was dismissed so quickly and free of thought. It was a rallying point for people here, a source of anger because it was just so mean, never mind that it might have merit. I mean, ex-teammates were being interviewed to give their two cents — like they wouldn’t disagree.

I guess I have a hard time taking a guy to task for having an opinion when it’s his job to have an opinion. If you don’t like it, fine. But if you don’t like it, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain truth. I’ll repeat what little I’ve said of it before: Tone down the rhetoric and make the presentation a little less over-the-top and I think a lot of people could agree with a lot of the things that were written.

On May 1, Jason Cole wrote another equally unflattering — and perhaps more unflattering, given the time that’s passed since the PFW piece — story about Geno. This wasn’t opinion. This was sourced by league executives for multiple teams that met with Geno before the draft.

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