Following the opening seven minutes or so, West Virginia was never in it during their 94-60 loss on Saturday to No. 5 Texas. The story of the game was West Virginia’s 20 turnovers coupled with Texas shooting 47 percent from the field, and making 10 three-pointers.
“They made shots, we turned the ball over,” West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins said. “I don’t think we were prepared for the physicality. We hadn’t seen that all year and I think that bothered us.”
One of the Mountaineers who seemed to be bothered the most by Texas’ physicality was former Longhorn Tre Mitchell. Mitchell had five turnovers as Texas swarmed him when he would touch the ball in the high post area.
“I didn’t know what to do with Tre. He wasn’t Tre. He wasn’t as confident. He wasn’t as focused maybe,” Huggins said on his postgame radio show. “He wasn’t Tre.”
Physicality is obviously nothing new to Huggins and the Mountaineers, but the West Virginia head coach said the Longhorns took it up to another level today. As for trying to appeal to the referees, Huggins said that is a task which will probably end up wasting your time.
“They’re bad listeners if you haven’t figured that out by now they’re bad listeners,” Huggins said. “They don’t listen real well. It’s as they say an exercise in futility to try to speak to them.”
Texas was led offensively by Sir’Jabari Rice. Rice scored a season-high 24 points, making five of his six shots, while going 4 for 5 from deep and adding 10 makes at the free throw line.
“He made shots. Make shots, you’re very valuable,” Huggins said of Rice.
Overall the message was simple for Huggins — Texas made shots, WVU didn’t. WVU turned the ball over excessively, Texas didn’t.
“They shot the ball extremely, extremely well. We went back to turning the ball over excessively, which I thought we kind of had fixed. We just threw it out of bounds and there was nobody there to catch it,” Huggins said. “It was terrible. Turning the ball over left and right, didn’t make shots, they made shots.”
As for how the Mountaineers regroup ahead of a Monday tilt against No. 14 Baylor, Huggins says the grind is getting to WVU.
“This has been a really hard run. This is a hard run for anybody,” Huggins said.
West Virginia will play their third game in six days against the Bears, with all three games coming against opponents ranked inside the top-14.
“Playing as many games as we’ve played, travel the way we traveled, it’s rough,” Huggins added. “The other teams in this league have no idea. They complain about coming to Morgantown — how about what we do.”
Baylor and WVU are set to tip-off from Waco on Monday at 9:00 p.m.
