Between The Eers: Back to Reality
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:02 - I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.
00:14 I felt like yesterday was going to be a tough one
00:18 for the Mountaineers and it was.
00:20 Welcome in everybody.
00:22 Wednesday, good Wednesday morning here on Between the Ears.
00:26 I'm Skylar Callahan, West Virginia's falling to UCF,
00:29 72 to 59.
00:31 And after what was really a fun afternoon
00:36 or evening last Saturday against Kansas,
00:39 really provided some false hope,
00:42 some false excitement around Morgantown
00:45 and throughout the state.
00:46 I feel for the fans because you get that sliver of hope.
00:54 You feel like Jesse Edwards is about to come back.
00:57 This is about to be the first time the full boats together.
01:01 The schedule is kind of lightening up here a little bit
01:03 in the Big 12.
01:04 And maybe there's a chance they can get on a run, maybe.
01:09 But then you have last night
01:11 and that's what sends us back to the reality.
01:16 And the reality is this team's just not good.
01:21 It's just not very good.
01:22 And it's not their fault, obviously.
01:26 They've got a lot of things that have went wrong
01:28 for them this season.
01:29 They've had a lot of things go against them.
01:32 The eligibility issues, the suspension, to Kirk Creasa,
01:35 a lot of things that were out of their control.
01:39 So is this a different team
01:42 if Kirk Creasa, Raekwon Battle, Noah Farrakhan
01:49 were ready to go, strapped up and ready to go game one?
01:56 Compared to what they've had to go through?
02:00 Yes, absolutely.
02:01 Are they a team that's, let's say 19 games in?
02:08 Are they going to have, I don't know,
02:11 say a 14 and five record?
02:14 Probably not, but the record would probably be reversed.
02:17 It'd probably be about 12 and seven or 13 and six
02:20 or somewhere in that range.
02:21 You're not going to lose some of the games
02:22 that they lost early on.
02:25 But that's the issue,
02:29 is that this team just hasn't had the amount of time
02:32 together that they needed to be able to figure out things
02:36 on both ends, particularly defensively,
02:39 where they've struggled all year long.
02:41 And they don't really know how to play together.
02:44 They're trying to figure that out
02:46 while playing in the damn toughest league in the country.
02:49 And that's the thing.
02:52 You're going to see with this team,
02:54 the remainder of the year,
02:55 there's going to be some nights
02:57 where they're going to beat some teams
02:59 they probably have no business beating,
03:01 but then they're going to also lose some games
03:04 where you would think they'd probably win.
03:06 Saturday is a perfect example,
03:09 this past Saturday and this upcoming Saturday.
03:12 You got Kansas, a team that was favored
03:15 by double digit points on the road,
03:17 and you put up your best shooting performance
03:20 in quite some time.
03:21 And that's what it really took for you to beat them
03:24 because you gave up 85 points.
03:26 If you don't shoot the ball the way you did,
03:29 or even if you shoot slightly worse than what you did,
03:33 you lose that game because of the defense,
03:37 because the communication,
03:38 because the knowing of what each guy
03:40 is going to do on the floor with you.
03:42 So, then you have Saturday, this upcoming Saturday,
03:48 against Oklahoma State,
03:49 a team that has not won a Big 12 Conference game yet.
03:52 They were up by like 13 or 14 last night on TCU and lost.
03:55 It's a game you should win,
03:59 whether you have Jesse Edwards or not,
04:01 it's a game you absolutely should win,
04:04 even if it's on the road.
04:07 But then again, it's hard to tell with this team.
04:10 It's really hard to tell.
04:12 I've said before over the years,
04:15 I've had a hard time predicting what this team's going to do
04:19 on a night-to-night basis.
04:20 This team, it's almost impossible.
04:23 You have no idea what's going to happen
04:25 in terms of, I guess, what will happen at home.
04:29 On the road's a little different story.
04:31 It's a team that's really had some troubles on the road.
04:33 They're 0-3 now.
04:35 In true road games, they're 0-6, I believe,
04:38 in all games away from Morgantown,
04:40 so that's counting the neutral games at Ohio State
04:43 and the mid-season tournaments.
04:46 But, I mean, last night is a perfect example
04:50 of what I'm talking about on the defensive end.
04:53 You get out-rebounded 45-34,
04:56 and I guess that's kind of expected
04:58 because Ibrahim Adiolo is a beast underneath,
05:01 and Pat Sumnick can only do so much.
05:05 And I get that he had the night
05:07 that he did against Hunter Dickinson,
05:09 but to ask him to do that two times in a row
05:13 against a guy that's clearly bigger, longer,
05:17 stronger than he is, that's all task.
05:21 But as a team, there's ways you can kind of eliminate that.
05:24 There's ways that you can take a guy
05:26 like Ibrahim Adiolo out of the game
05:29 and away from the glass.
05:31 There's ways to strategize that,
05:34 and I'm sure Josh Island tried to do that.
05:37 It just wasn't executed.
05:38 You look at fast break points, 24-6, that can't happen.
05:43 Both teams had 11 turnovers in the game.
05:47 One team had six fast break points, the other had 24.
05:51 You got to stop the ball.
05:56 Stop the ball, run the floor.
05:57 Points in the paint, 26-16,
06:02 which has been an issue all season long.
06:05 It was even an issue in the Kansas game.
06:07 But if you're going to have that happen,
06:12 you can't give up 24 fast break points.
06:16 You can't have both.
06:18 If one of them happens, okay, fine,
06:20 but you've got to be able to clamp down somewhere else.
06:24 That, to me, was what the difference
06:26 in last night's game was.
06:27 So yes, 72 points doesn't look or sound like a lot,
06:32 but when you dive into the numbers,
06:35 there's some glaring issues there.
06:36 So my thing is with this team is,
06:41 there's going to be a lot of ups and downs,
06:44 and the fans are just going to have to understand that.
06:47 Like, I got a lot of questions in my mailbag
06:49 on Saturday after the game against Kansas.
06:52 You know, what is West Virginia going to do,
06:56 X, Y, and Z, to get to the NCAA tournament?
06:58 And I didn't really want to go too deep into it
07:01 because I already kind of knew it was not going to happen.
07:04 You know, people were asking me,
07:07 what are they going to do to get ranked?
07:09 To get ranked?
07:11 Hell, let's just talk about getting to 500 first
07:14 before we talk about getting ranked.
07:17 That's something that, even if you won
07:22 the rest of your games, I'm not even sure if that happens
07:24 because of the resume.
07:26 So it's a tough situation this team has been placed in.
07:33 Like I said, this team is not what it would be
07:39 had those guys played from the opening jump.
07:42 First game of the season, and they had those eight or nine
07:46 kind of by games, if you will,
07:49 to kind of form that chemistry,
07:51 understand what Josh Eilert really wants out of them.
07:54 They understand their role,
07:57 and you know kind of who's the guys
08:00 that you want taking the shots,
08:02 who is your guys off the bench.
08:07 You know your rotations.
08:09 You know what lineups work well together.
08:11 They've been fighting this game by game
08:13 because they don't know.
08:15 They don't know, and they're trying to figure this out
08:17 again in the toughest league in the country.
08:19 So the reality is, again, this team is just not good.
08:25 It's not good right now, and it's not to their fault
08:29 because of the situation,
08:31 but the situation is the situation.
08:34 It's not a good team.
08:37 It's a talented team,
08:39 but it's a team that's got so much going against them,
08:42 it's going to be hard for them to really climb out
08:44 of the hole that they're in,
08:46 and you feel for Josh Eilert, man,
08:50 because he has just been put through so damn much,
08:53 and that's why Saturday, I think, was a big moment for him,
08:59 to be able to get that win against Kansas,
09:00 to be able to celebrate that in front of the home crowd.
09:03 He deserves it.
09:05 That team deserves it.
09:06 So I don't know.
09:08 Like I said, it's not a surprise
09:14 what they did at UCF last night.
09:17 This is more the reality than it is,
09:19 than what happened against Kansas,
09:21 but hopefully you find some middle ground somewhere.
09:25 You start to make some ground
09:26 in the Big 12 Conference standings.
09:28 Two and four right now,
09:29 you got some winnable games coming up.
09:30 You get to 500 in Conference play,
09:32 then heck, who knows?
09:35 You probably won't get hot down the stretch necessarily,
09:37 but at least you can kind of keep your head above water
09:42 and give yourself a chance going to Kansas City
09:46 to play your best basketball
09:48 when you need to play your best basketball.
09:50 So that'll do it for me today.
09:53 We're going to get back into some football talk tomorrow.
09:56 Here on Between Ears,
09:57 make sure you hit the subscribe button
09:58 on YouTube and Mountain Ears.
09:59 Now give us a like and a follow on X at the same handle,
10:04 and we'll be back tomorrow with another episode.
10:06 (upbeat music)
10:09 (upbeat music)
10:11 (upbeat music)
10:14 (upbeat music)