Mountaineers mens basketball head coach Ross Hodge, pictured during a practice with WVU

MORGANTOWN — Jasper Floyd has been on both sides of the thrill of victory and agony of defeat.

He won a junior college national championship at Northwest Florida State in 2022 and then was part of North Texas’ semifinal run in the NIT a season ago. The Mean Green fell to UC Irvine in the semifinals.

He finds himself in an altogether different situation now, taking over at point guard at West Virginia, a completely rebuilt program under first-year head coach Ross Hodge.

The odds, Floyd is told, are steep that he’ll have one final shot at competing for a college title.

He already knows why. Floyd is one 12 new scholarship players on the Mountaineers’ roster, with only two of those 12 having any type of experience playing at the Power Five Conference level.

This is only Hodge’s third season as a Division I head coach, his first at the Power Five degree.

None of that sounds like a recipe for immediate success.

“For me and the team, we really don’t care about that,” Floyd said.

That is not meant to be read as a statement of cockiness from the guard.

Rather, it’s sort of the team-wide sentiment.

So what if there’s not much of a track record for first-year head coaches taking a rebuilt-from-scratch roster deep into the NCAA tournament or competing for conference titles.

Doesn’t mean it can’t happen.

“I’ve got to push back a little bit on that, because that is the mindset,” Hodge said when told it was going to be difficult for his first WVU team to win in the Big 12.

“Now, we know it’s difficult to win one game in the Big 12. It’s difficult to win a college basketball game, period, let alone 20 games, let alone league championships, let alone national championships.”

Is it a path that needs some clearing off? You bet. In the minds of the WVU players and coaches, there is a path, though.

“It’s not lost on me how difficult that is, but at the same time, there is a way to win each game you play,” Hodge continued. “Our big picture goals are we do want to win the Big 12 championship, ultimately the national championship.

“In that short term right now I’m just trying to get our guys to sprint back on defense and stay in a stance.”

If there is an early story to be told about these Mountaineers, it’s that the players have realized early they are in this story together.

“This team is unique, for sure. This team gels together very well,” is how Floyd explained it. “We all want to work well together, and that’s not just on the court.”

Floyd continued by saying that when he evaluates the roster Hodge constructed, there is a certain characteristic found in each of the players.

“Perseverance, that’s a good one,” Floyd said. “Not everything is always going to go well. We all do a really good job of sticking together through tough times.”

To be sure, it is also a roster filled with players who have a bit of a chip on their collective shoulders.

At different times, maybe they were told they weren’t big enough or good enough to compete at a high level.

Maybe they were simply under-recruited or overlooked.

At other schools, that motivation led to players like Treysen Eaglestaff developing into a player who explored the 2025 NBA Draft, before withdrawing and then transferring to WVU.

It led to Honor Huff leading the nation in 3-pointers a season ago at Chattanooga.

It led Floyd and teammate Brenen Lorient to those NIT semifinals. Lorient, too, followed Hodge from North Texas to WVU.

It is a group that is accustomed to different, if not lower expectations, and then they went out and surpassed them.

“For most of us, the odds have been stacked against us our whole lives,” Floyd said. “The odds, they really don’t matter.”