Friday morning I was able to confirm and report Robert Sands was going pro. He’d told the NFL and was telling those around him … and that explained why he left the Champs Sports Bowl with mementos.
Later that day I was bombarded with email and texts and tweets (!) that I was perhaps mistaken and quite likely a fool who’d read a Sands tweet and run with it.
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From Robert J. Hertzel Saturday morning, which was only hours before WVU played at — and beat — Georgetown:
He can play the game of basketball; rest assured on that. He just does it without calling any attention to himself.
We thought as this year started, with Da’Sean Butler and Devin Ebanks gone, that Kevin Jones would go into a phone booth and emerge as Superman, but that wasn’t to be. He tried to push the envelope early, but that only hurt his game.
He is what he is, 15 points and 7 rebounds.
Jones’ line on Saturday? Try 15 and 8. This is all valuable intel because Saturday you saw guys put on those T-shirts, if not physically, then mentally, that read “Do what you do.”
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3:15: Story with quotes for your approval.
Paging Ryan McLean. WVU faces Georgetown, its three guards and the Princeton offense here at the Verizon Center … where a lot of WVU fans have gathered.
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Welcome to the Friday Feedback, which will attempt to take the toboggan down the mountain and to the nation’s capital this afternoon. And does no one want to stay on this toboggan with me? The way people are bailing has me developing a complex. I’ll survive.
One wonders about your basketball team, though. Saturday offers another difficult road test against a Georgetown team that’s had a similar slip. The Hoyas were ranked No. 9 and 11-1 in non-conference play. They then had three games in a Wednesday-Saturday-Monday span and lost on the road against Notre Dame and St. John’s to begin and end that stretch.
If the Mountaineers are going to make a move, they must do it with some road wins. And that won’t be easy because, thus far, it hasn’t been easy.
The Mountaineers are 2-2 on the road with large leads and close final scores involved in each. They led at Miami by 13 points with 12 minutes to play, but lost 79-76. They trailed by 12 in the first half against Duquesne in Pittsburgh’s new Consol Center and won 64-61 after the Dukes missed two free throws that would have tied the score with nine seconds to go.
WVU trailed 9-0 early against Marquette and was down 11 in the first half. A rally produced a lead in the second half before a botched series of possessions on offense and defense in the final 90 seconds led to a 79-74 loss. DePaul trailed by 14 points in the second half Tuesday, but tied the score late and had a chance to win the game on its final possession.
After every occasion, the Mountaineers have made mention of poor play and doing things they don’t normally do, which is characteristic of the road experience.
“It’s got a lot to do with familiarity, it’s got a lot to do with confidence,” Huggins said. “I think people play with a lot more confidence at home. I think a lot of times on the road, when a couple things don’t go your way, you lose your confidence and don’t play as freely as you would at home.”
I might be alone — again! — on this, or there may be just a few people along for the ride, but I do think WVU is developing something. Yes, it was a loss, but the Marquette game was more encouraging than discouraging. The game at DePaul has been tough for the Mountaineers even when they’ve been good. What happened — big lead, big slip — wasn’t all that surprising.
If the majority of the minutes find their way to the same five or six players and the rotations settle and guys embrace the do-what-you-do mentality, it can work. They do miss the personalities of Da’Sean and Devin, though. That’s a very big reason the road has been so tough and things like that are not easily replaced.
Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, carry a big stick. (Not a proud moment for the city.)
The Artist Formerly Known as EER96 said:
I hope I am wrong, but I don’t see this team winning 20 games. They are in real trouble of not making the tournament this year.
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Lively discourse, once again. Enjoy!
Oh, and the Feedback returns tomorrow. It’s going to be difficult to limit the inclusions. Don’t be offended.
This will probably pop some eyes, but WVU is preparing to pay offensive assistants $2.55 million in base salary for the 2011 season. In 2010, WVU paid its nine offensive and defensive assistants $1.925 million.
In all, WVU will pay assistants $1.5 million more in base salary for the 2011 season than it did this past season — a 78-percent jump.
Something to think about and to talk about in today’s 1 p.m. live chat.
(Base salary, by the way, is what the contract guarantees. Assistants will make more than that — sometimes far more than that, in the case of a Jeff Casteel — with income from camps and incentives and the like, but it’s not a cement figure. The base salary is. It’s something we can talk about because it’s something I can grab a hold of and show you for the purpose to discussion and, in this case, comparison. Stop emailing me to say the numbers are wrong. They’re not. I’m pretty sure I know since I can read contracts in front of me.)
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Football season is over. Your curiosities and my compulsions are not. The weekly WVU sports chat carries on tomorrow, this time in a new slot: 1 p.m. We’re going to try to keep it there because it works a whole lot better for me and my daily schedule.
Previously, the spot was occupied by a fellow up north who is no longer with us. Talk about mixed emotions. People are saddened and relieved by this news, I can assure you.
I’m also sure many of you will have plenty of things to say about that. Consider tomorrow your day of mourning/congratulations/cheap shots, as well as another opportunity to talk about your Mountaineers.
You may commence the questions and the snark now, either in the comments section here or in the queue. Here’s your link to the queue and the live chat — 100% guaranteed not to work when I’m in the air on the way back to Morgantown and totally unable to address the inevitable issue until I return to my office.
Win the day, everyone.
Their antics were a little underwhelming. There were some funny lines and a few red-faced moments, most of which I cannot print, but mostly it was a much different night at Allstate Arena.
Surely that was because their team was in the game, they were captivated by the two freshmen (Brandon Young and Cleveland Melvin) and their attention was devoted to what would have qualified as a nice little upset.
I’m happy for them.
Nevertheless, WVU survived WVU as well as DePaul and managed a win it really had to have.
A 14-point lead with 10:08 remaining the game was down to five with 5:04 to go and then again with 2:08 left, but the Mountaineers answered DePaul’s punches and dodged a haymaker at the end to take a 67-65 victory before 8,189 at Allstate Arena.
“We’re not consistent,” forward Deniz Kilicli said. “We’re not playing the whole game. We get up 10, 14 points like this and we start taking stupid shots and making bad decisions.”
For a second straight game, the Mountaineers had issues with late execution. After giving up a dunk on an offensive rebound, throwing the ball away and finally wasting a possession by missing a layup when down by three points late in Saturday’s loss against Marquette, WVU had another frantic finish.
On their final possession, the Mountaineers couldn’t get open after a timeout and Darryl “Truck” Bryant shot in the lane and came up short. They gave the Blue Demons a potential game-winning possession, but Brandon Young missed a jumper down by one and WVU survived.
“We went 1-3-1 because we hadn’t played it and hoped we could try to make them run a little more clock than they wanted,” WVU Coach Bob Huggins said. “If they make it, we lose.”
It doesn’t automatically translate into great things, but there are some things to keep an eye on, namely John Flowers doing everything, Casey and the Turk scoring in tandem, Kevin Jones spinning balls off the glass with aplomb and Joe Mazzulla plotting against himself to pick his moments.
As for the students, they had their moments, and it begins with pregame propoganda.
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Big day for you, what with the news from that school up north. Something else is afoot elsewhere, but I couldn’t nail that down today. Add to all the the shenanigans you may witness tonight LIVE from the Allstate Arena and it’s a near little Tuesday.
I won’t be doing much on-site tonight because I’ll be on deadline — and if I remember correctly, AA is the one place where my laptop absolutely would not establish and sustain a connection to the Internet last season. Feel free to let loose your commentary here. Enjoy!
