WVU — Perhaps Mercifully — Approaching Season Finish Line
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MORGANTOWN - We have come to that moment in time we have all dreaded for some time now; that moment when basketball reality slaps us all in the face.
It is a time when basketball fans should be excited in the moment, but instead are caught in some kind of weird Twilight Zone of suspended animation.
There can be no expectations of winning the tournament, certainly not any real expectations that they can win the opening game, considering they are playing a team that just three days prior slapped a 92-56 beating on them.
One would like to believe that at this time of year, even the most underwhelming of underdogs has a puncher's chance, and certainly a case that WVU does can be made since they did bet those same Cincinnati Bearcats at home by four points earlier in the season, but no one has ever described this WVU team as a puncher.
Mostly it's been soft on defense, if not totally disinterested in that aspect of the game.
Considering that over the last four games they have allowed 360 points, 90 points per outing, which makes up the last four losses in a five-game losing streak they bring into the tournament.
That it is this bad is an indictment on everyone connected with the program, from Coach Josh Eilert on down, for it was the one deficiency he pointed out in his preseason press conference, not before the games began, but as official practice for this season began.
"Every time I sit in a staff meeting, I think about that we drill defense, we drill defense and we drill defense and every time we get to 5-on-5 we probably don't do as good a job of carrying all those things over," he said during that initial press conference.
We are now at the end of the season and it is at its lowest ebb … and remember this, the roster is now full and has played together for almost a dozen games and the opposition was hardly Oklahoma or Kansas.
Eilert has done his best to get his point across, but by now this is a team simply limping toward the finish line, physically and psychologically beaten down through a 9-22 season and a last-place finish in a conference where the expectations going in was to be a middle of the road team.
After the latest game, that second Cincinnati matchup, Eilert tried to explain what was happening.
"We don't have a lot of natural defenders on the floor, so there's going to be a lot of gaps, a lot of help. Every time we tried to change the defense on them, they got what they wanted. I think three lobs behind the zone. There was no way to stop the bleeding," he said.
He knows that as interim coach, he won't be back next year and your heart goes out to him, because he had no chance right from the start.
At least now, with the end staring him and his players in the face, he hopes his team can muster up some pride and passion and at least regain a bit of respect in the tournament.
"We play the same team (they just lost to) and if we don't have a bad taste in mouth after three days going into that and don't compete at the highest level on Tuesday, we ought to look ourselves in the mirror and figure out if we really want to play the game of basketball," Eilert said.
The problem now is that West Virginia fans are caught in the awkward position of not wanting to look back on the past year but having no future to look toward, they are caught in that Twilight Zone mist of being nowhere.
In college athletics today, the future is always hazy for you don't know who will make up your roster, but in West Virginia you don't know who will coach the team that becomes your roster and while we are in an era of fast turnarounds with the transfer portal, there's always the danger you will be wrong on your choices unless you can land the elite … and WVU right now does not fit the profile of a program able to coax the best transfers into town.
No one believes WVU can make a run deep into the Big 12 Tournament, at least not unless they can activate assistant coach Da'Sean Butler, who may just have some conference tournament miracles left in his bag of tricks.