Apparently Georgetown’s leading scorer and top shot-maker Austin Freeman will not play tonight. Advantage, West Virginia as it marches toward a top-four finish in the Big East and a two-round bye in the conference tournament.
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By the most general indications, the NFL Combine was a bit of a dud. The league is trending toward passing and quarterbacks are generally the most exciting prospects in any draft. This year, there are a few, but with neither Jimmy Clausen, Sam Bradford or Colt McCoy throwing — the latter two due to injuries — and only McCoy choosing to break a sweat at the combine, this year was missing much of the intrigue.
Having said that, there was personnel there to watch a number of pretty good, pretty interesting quarterbacks ready to audition in the void — Daryll Clark, Armanti Edwards, Max Hall, Dan Lefevour, Zac Robinson, Jevan Snead and a guy from Florida whose name escapes me.
Of all them, maybe no one did quite as well for himself as did Jarrett Brown.
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In a move that might best be filed under “Other Shoe Drops … Officials Huddle to Debate Charge/Block,” the Big East applied a bold conference tournament ban on reigning national official of the year (!) Mike Kitts and Jim Haney for their Morgantown malfeasance and the way the crew handled the WVU-Louisville ending.
On the game’s most controversial play, a loose ball sailed out of bounds, directly at Kitts’ face. Kitts, whom three Big East coaches assessed as being a good ref, instinctively turned to avoid contact.
Neither Jones nor Haney had an angle on the play. None of the three signaled which team should have possession. In such a case, the ball is supposed to go to the team that has the possession arrow in its favor. But Haney and Kitts, in a procedural error, checked the replay monitor. The ball was awarded to West Virginia with 6.7 seconds left.
On the game’s most controversial play … I loved that, as in there were other candidates. Your boy Les Jones was also on the whistle that day and probably would have also been banned from the Garden party, but he’s already signed up to officiate the ACC Tournament. Figure the other two will do something similar. Kitts has done 82 games entering the weekend and just 16 were in the Big East. Haney had called 67 and 11 were in the Big East.
Ready, set, open post!
Welcome to the 98th edition of the Friday Feedback. I know what you’re thinking about 100 Friday Feedbacks and I’ll spare you the suspense: Yes, it’ll be commemorated; no, there’ll be no magicians.
I was given $5 to go to the LaundroMutt to wash the message board grime off the blog, only to find it wasn’t necessary. Things got pretty intense, a little personal and a tad ugly … but only in an Elisha Cuthbert way. It may have looked bad, but when you got close, it was actually OK. Plus, there are no rights and wrongs. If there were, we wouldn’t be here to discuss and debate.
Huggins v. Beilein is an appropriate representation. Again, I don’t think we can accurately say one is/can be better than the other if only because there are too many variables. I also think it’s impossible to compare, not only because they’re so different, but because the samples are too brief.
Were Beilein’s teams more fun to watch? Probably so and a Huggins team doesn’t paint as pretty a picture, but I think there’s something to be said about the potential for sustained success when you lean on defense and rebounding rather than 3-pointers and backcuts. That’s not a knock on Beilein, but when you don’t guard and rebound and a team takes away your offensive strengths, you can be in trouble. It’s harder to take away Huggins’ strentghs and I think the way this team struggles to shoot is more of a rare occurrence than people seem to think. Then again, Beilein’s teams won in March.
Beilein arrived in a different and more fortuitous scenario. WVU was rock bottom. Forget the 8-20. They couldn’t get Huggins. They couldn’t keep Dakich. Beilein had a lot of rope. There were almost no expectations unless you consider avoiding the NCAA’s death penalty an expectation. He really started with a blank slate and had the, um, freedom to recruit Herber and Durisseau-Collins, retain Pittsnogle and invite his son along and let them grow. As good as Huggins was his first year, Beilein was better. Try starting four freshman as a first-year coach in the Big East. That team didn’t belong going 14-15. And then Beilein, quite frankly, got lucky scandal erupted at St. Bonaventure and the school was hit with a postseason ban, which then urged Mike Gansey to transfer. Imagine if that never happened.
Huggins, meanwhile, came in with far greater expectations based in no small part because of what Beilein had accomplished and facilitated. (Devil’s Advocate: Say Huggins resigned April 15 to become athletic director and Andy Kennedy was hired as coach. Wouldn’t Kennedy then have even greater expectations?)
But Huggins won and you might argue that team didn’t belong going 26-11. Granted, he had an older roster with more talent and those kids desperately wanted to prove people wrong, but they were playing a very different game in a much stronger Big East … and remember, they were 11-7 in the conference and then beat UConn in the Big East tourney, but they needed Joe Mazzulla’s overtime-forcing layup to win at St. John’s as a postseason catapult and then jumped on board while Joe Alexander made the leap. It’s a razor’s edge sometimes.
The difference? The success came quicker for Huggins, which accelerated the arrival of heightened expectations. Beilein was allowed to grow into his success … and remember, they probably don’t make the 2005 NCAA Tournament and then make the run unless they beat Villanova in the semifinals.
I guess things today are only as good as they were yesterday and Huggins has been good, though some of it has to do with a foundation that was in place for his arrival. Ask Frank Martin about that out at Kansas State.
I really like John and I’ll always admire him for a lot of different reasons. I think he could be where Huggins is now — recruiting nationally, playing the third-toughest schedule while sitting at No. 5 in the RPI, starring on television, so on and so forth — or at least in a comparable position, but not as quickly as Huggins has arrived. I think his Mountaineers could compete nationally, but I think Huggins’ Mountaineers are capable of making it a more regular event.
The way Beilein worked, his teams were more likely to be really good for a year or two every two or three years — it takes time to learn mentally and mature physically to be great in his systems — though I’ll allow we might not know for sure what might have been at WVU, or anywhere else, because he rarely stays for long. Huggins, because his ideals aren’t as “complicated” or attached to experience and are reached easier by the talented players he recruits, seems to have more staying power. Seems.
The best part? We don’t know and it can all change tomorrow. Heck, it will all change, but we never know how.
Onto the Feedback. As always, comments appear as posted. In other words, accidents happen.
SheikYbuti said:
The heck with comparing Huggins and Beilein; I find it more provocative to compare Huggins and Mike Carey (except for their respective wardrobes). Which of their teams will advance farther in the NCAA tourney? Depending on the day, my mind changes like . . . well, like a girl changes clothes.
Both teams are well-regarded, but only the women have a frickin’ baller.
And away we go…
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Hey, No. 5 in the RPI with the nation’s third-toughest schedule, a statistical success by even obscure measures, you’d have to think WVU has conquered it all this season.
“We’ve proven all the things we can’t do,” he said. “There’s nothing else to prove. We can stop that now and just do the things we’re good at doing.”
The leading candidate for the Bob Huggins Sardonic Less-is-More Quote of the Season.
Villanova has a really good, really savvy team that, because it follows the lead of its older players, great guards and Philly state of mind, is rarely overwhelmed. The enormity or moments and atmospheres rarely affect the Wildcats — and I’m telling you, Pitt’s home-court advantage is just different.
That said, the wily Wildcats are about to play a game Saturday before the largest on-campus crowd ever and I’ll be surprised and impressed if Villanova leaves the Carrier Dome with a win.
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There may not be a more unusual team in the Big East than Cincinnati. Now 15-11and 7-8 in the Big East following Wednesday’s win against DePaul — more on that in a moment — the Bearcats visit the Coliseum Saturday for a 2 p.m. game and a third straight win against the Mountaineers.
U.C. has top-tier Big East talent and a few players who will/could play in the NBA. U.C. has also used 16 different starting lineups this season, which is frankly astonishing.
There are, of course, a few ways to look at that: A) The Bearcats have that many talented players. B) The Bearcats have that many indistinguishable players. C) The Bearcats don’t have that many players who fit A and/or B. D) The Bearcats are big into matchups.
I’ll go with D which is interesting as it relates to the Mountaineers, who themselves can be difficult for opponents to match up against. U.C.’s adaptiveness actually suits them well and last year its team matched up very well against WVU’s and can probably do so again Saturday. In fact, this year’s team has done pretty well matching up against teams that normally pose the matchup problems.
But what of these Bearcats?
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I think we probably assumed the 30 or so minutes Bob Huggins spent behind closed locker room doors Monday night was spent lecturing and probably raising the voice one or two times, that the postgame press conference would be — and was — dominated by talk of the officiating and the two technical fouls.
Yet the players provided a different picture and gave us the idea it wasn’t so hostile in the locker room and Huggins didn’t really want to talk about the whistles and seemed more interested in going down another road he never got to travel.
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And I think this — the subject line on an email from overtheSEC — might be an understatement. And I’m delighted. All the things we knew and thought we knew about officiating and the way games and teams are adjuticated are now on paper.
Here’s the summary from a self-described “stats and excel nerd.” My clarifications are in [italicized brackets]:
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A flip through the season’s scrapbook takes us back to the very beginning where, even then, it was apparent WVU would wrestle with reactions to calls this season.
Back then, the Mountaineers were outside the Big East and playing before crews that hadn’t seen them play too often and pretty much let their style slide in the games. That style included not only the aggressive defense and rebounding, but also the dialogues with the officials and the incredulous responses to many whistles.
The feeling then was this could become an issue as the season progressed. Maybe the Mountaineers were in danger of developing a reputation. Perhaps people would cross a line with their indifference. Surely the way games were alled would change in the Big East and, as such, it was possible WVU would have a hard time handling it.
Well, no one has made a spectacle on the court this season and even Bob Huggins’ ejection Monday was kind of petty and the game could have ended without his exit, but there are admissions now the Mountaineers don’t always handle these matters as well as they need to.
“We should know better,” WVU forward Devin Ebanks said. “We’re fairly young, but we’re not that young. We should know better.”
One player said the standard reaction has become “arms down, hands out, ‘I can’t believe you’re calling this. What are you doing?'”
“We have a habit of doing it a lot,” WVU senior Da’Sean Butler said. “When things don’t go our way on one end, it affects us on the other end and the other team benefits. Everyone complains.
“I think we’re doing a better job, as opposed to earlier in the year when we sat back and complained on every play, but I think we need to do a better job and realize how important it is to continue to play through it.”
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