WVU basketball might end up missing the NCAA Tournament. That statement seemed impossible just a few weeks ago.
With three wins over top-10 opponents and four ranked wins overall, Darian DeVries’s surprise Mountaineers were practically a lock to be playing in March. Boasting one of the strongest resumes in the country, it seemed nothing short of a total collapse could keep West Virginia from coasting into March Madness.
Fast forward a couple of weeks, and we are now in the middle of the exact type of collapse that could put WVU on a one-way trip to the bubble and keep the Mountaineers on their couches come tournament time.
West Virginia has lost four of its last five games in what should have been the easiest part of its Big 12 schedule. After fairing well in a stretch that featured top teams in Kansas, Iowa State and Houston, the Mountaineers have faltered against the bottom half of the league.
After upsetting then-No. 2 Iowa on Jan. 18, WVU had a 13-4 record. Not only did a tournament bid seem all but assured, but a 20-win season was absolutely possible and the Mountaineers were even in prime position to contend for the Big 12 regular season title.
Javon Small was the frontrunner for Big 12 Player of the Year and DeVries was the runaway pick for Big 12 Coach of the Year, if not the national coach of the year.
A couple of bad weeks later and that is all gone. The Mountaineers have fallen to the middle of the pack in the conference and will have to fight tooth and nail over their final nine games to make the tournament. DeVries has been passed up by Texas Tech’s Grant McCasland as the coach of the year favorite and Small’s position at the top of the player of the year race is hanging on by a thread.
The reason for this skid has been simple, opposing teams have figured out the blueprint for beating West Virginia.
Following WVU’s loss to Arizona State, I said I wasn’t worried because I didn’t think many other teams would be able to replicate what the Sun Devils did. Not many teams in the Big 12 have the same size and strength ASU used to bother the Mountaineers that night.
Boy, was I wrong. It hasn’t mattered if teams aren’t built like ASU, they’ve been doing exactly what the Sun Devils did to great success.
This blueprint, simply put, is to double-team Small as soon as he crosses half court and force someone else on WVU to put the ball through the hoop. The Mountaineers, repeatedly, have shown they cannot handle this.
There has been no No. 2 scoring option behind Small this season, and with the recent announcement of Tucker DeVries’s season-ending surgery, it seems there will be no No. 2 for the rest of the year.
Small is good enough to score even with the extra attention — he’s averaging 16 points in the four recent losses, scoring 22 against Kansas State and 20 against TCU — but he is not getting very much help from the rest of the team. Unsurprisingly, WVU’s only win during this stretch came when Joseph Yesufu scored 16 points off the bench at Cincinnati.
Part of this has to be on DeVries. As good as he had the Mountaineers playing earlier this year, they’ve been stuck in the mud for a couple of weeks now. There have been minimal adjustments made to combat what teams have thrown at the team other than playing Small off the ball for a handful of possessions every game.
Part of this is also on the players. Jonathan Powell and Amani Hansberry have lost their shooting touch lately, combining to shoot 9-48 (18.8%) from three over the last five games. Other than Yesufu’s 16 points at Cincinnati, no one other than Small has scored more than 13 points in the last five games.
If there was ever a time for WVU to right the ship and get its season back on track, it would be these next two games against Utah and BYU. The Mountaineers are home for both games against two teams right around them in the Big 12 standings with similar overall records.
Utah and BYU are very much on the outside looking in at the tournament, however, because they don’t have the same kind of marquee wins WVU basketball does. But if the Mountaineers can’t beat teams like these, those great wins won’t matter much if the selection committee is forced to keep them out of the field in March.