Mountaineers Now Postgame Show: TCU Defeats West Virginia, 81-65
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 Deja vu.
00:11 It is as West Virginia falls again.
00:13 Hello, everybody.
00:14 I'm Skylar Callin.
00:14 Welcome to the Mountaineers.
00:16 Now a post-game show presented by Country Roads Air
00:18 and Dug Cleaning.
00:19 That's Christopher Hall.
00:20 Again, West Virginia drops to TCU 81 to 65.
00:24 Raekwon Battle led the Mountaineers
00:26 in scoring on 7 of 17 shooting, 21 points,
00:30 his best offensive performance in quite some time.
00:34 Quince Lozinski also had a pretty decent night
00:37 offensively, 15 points to go with five boards and five
00:41 assists.
00:42 But when you look at this one, it
00:43 was the defense and the turnovers, in my opinion,
00:46 as West Virginia gave it away 19 times in this game.
00:50 TCU shot 31 of 64 from the field.
00:53 They scored 44 of their 81 points inside the painted area.
00:58 And Chris, this was just a disastrous two-game road trip.
01:03 I mean, again, the record is what
01:05 it is at this point in the season.
01:06 But you would have liked to at least come away
01:08 with one of these two blowout losses.
01:12 Can't feel good about this thing.
01:14 No.
01:15 You're not taking care of the ball.
01:16 They're not playing defense.
01:18 They're not physically tough enough.
01:19 And they're not physically-- or they're not
01:21 mentally tough enough.
01:22 So that's the story of this team.
01:25 Seen it all year.
01:26 They're not getting any better.
01:28 Looks like they've quit.
01:31 Kind of understandably so, human nature.
01:33 They faced a ton of adversity, probably mentally
01:35 and physically tired.
01:36 But they're not getting better.
01:40 And they're going to hit much more--
01:42 you hear a lot of coaches say these are learning experiences
01:46 for life.
01:46 You're going to hit a lot of adversity.
01:47 And you're probably going to hit a lot of it
01:49 at once at some point in your life.
01:50 And they have not handled it well.
01:53 Some of it's out of their control.
01:55 But if you're not putting that effort on the defensive end,
01:59 we can't argue rebounding.
02:00 They've won the rebounding battle at least two times.
02:03 Albeit it's only been by one rebound.
02:05 But no second chance opportunities.
02:08 There's no fight on the offensive end.
02:09 And defensively, they'd still do the same mistakes.
02:12 And when someone comes up and is physical with them,
02:15 they don't respond.
02:17 They're just not physically tough enough to handle it.
02:19 It scouts out.
02:21 So hopefully they just don't get matched up
02:23 with Candace in the conference tournament.
02:25 Because that one's probably going
02:26 to be ugly since they didn't do it the first time around.
02:28 They'll probably get just absolutely pounded.
02:31 Yeah, I mean, defensively, this team's a mess.
02:35 But really, I mean, on the road, they are just
02:37 atrocious scoring the ball.
02:39 I mean, I don't know what it is.
02:41 I mean, I guess just playing at home,
02:43 you're used to the sights that surround you.
02:45 I don't know.
02:47 But this team barely averages 60 points on the road.
02:50 You're not beating anybody unless it's maybe
02:52 Virginia, which is not even in your conference.
02:56 And even in that case, you're probably
02:58 getting held to like 40 or 35.
03:00 But you're not winning games when you score 60-some points.
03:03 And on this road trip, they averaged, I believe,
03:05 61 and 1/2, 58.
03:07 The other night against Texas, 65 tonight against TCU.
03:11 I mean, are they even running anything at times?
03:14 Because to me, it just looks like they're just
03:16 trying to go ISO.
03:18 And if a play gets shut down or whatever,
03:21 it's like they don't know what to do.
03:23 They don't know how to react to it.
03:24 They don't have like another action or another cut
03:26 that they can go to.
03:28 And everyone just stands there.
03:30 There is.
03:30 They're just walking through it.
03:32 And again, teams are just being physical with them
03:34 and cutting them off.
03:35 And they just stand there.
03:36 They don't know how to fight through it.
03:37 You got to make the official blow the whistle.
03:40 Don't call their off the ball stuff.
03:41 They have to hold you.
03:42 They're all fast enough.
03:43 They're all athletic enough.
03:45 They don't know how to handle these bigger physical teams.
03:47 And it's shown the last two games.
03:49 There's 34 turnovers.
03:51 Yeah, Emmanuel Miller, Tennyson, and Jameer Nelson
03:56 all had 14 points for TCU.
03:59 And that's one a pretty balanced attack for them.
04:03 But I don't know what's going to have
04:05 to happen for this team to turn it around.
04:07 They got Baylor coming up on Saturday,
04:10 UCF next Tuesday.
04:12 So a couple of games at home.
04:16 I mean, outside of just getting organized,
04:18 I mean, what has to go right?
04:20 I mean, it feels like this team's checked out
04:22 at this point, like you mentioned earlier.
04:25 Can you uncheck yourself out?
04:29 Well, yeah, absolutely.
04:31 You just have to want to go win.
04:33 Go prove that you're not soft.
04:36 Because right now, they're playing soft.
04:37 All around, they're just soft.
04:38 So it's gut check time for these guys.
04:43 I'm sure at some point, they ought to have aspirations NBA.
04:45 I don't think that's realistic for anybody.
04:47 But if you're going to play overseas and be a professional,
04:50 you're going to have off nights.
04:51 And you're going to have to fight through it.
04:53 Goes back to adversity.
04:54 You're going to hit all kinds of adversity in your life.
04:56 And you're going to have spells where it's just
04:57 all going wrong at once.
04:58 And right now, they just not handled it well.
05:01 It's almost like they're just accepting the losses
05:04 and just moving on.
05:05 So they want to show that they're competitors
05:08 and they want to win.
05:09 They can absolutely correct it.
05:10 It's all correctable things.
05:11 They just got to want it.
05:12 And right now, they just have not shown that they have
05:15 any want to do anything.
05:17 Yeah, I mean, I feel for Josh.
05:19 Because like you said, he's gone.
05:20 This whole team's gone through a lot.
05:22 And he didn't ask for any of this.
05:24 But at the same time, I mean, you have two games like this.
05:28 Really, you can go back to last Saturday with BYU.
05:31 Start to wonder if he's just getting tuned out
05:33 and if that messaging is just not going through.
05:35 I mean, again, when you're 8 and 15 or now 8 and 16,
05:39 that's bound to happen.
05:40 But--
05:41 Yeah, I mean, all these guys can play overseas.
05:44 And we'll play overseas.
05:45 There's going to be guys that have eligibility left,
05:47 whether they're here next year or somewhere else.
05:50 Coaches are going to see this.
05:52 That's the biggest key.
05:53 You're going to have to change.
05:55 Why not change now?
05:57 And they are definitely talented enough to make a run,
06:01 without a doubt.
06:02 They haven't shown it until you win two games.
06:04 But it just goes back to the mentality.
06:05 Like, you just got to come in every day,
06:07 every night with that mentality.
06:09 You want to win, you'll do what it takes to win.
06:11 They're just-- they're not showing it at all right now.
06:14 So we'll see if they're just waiting to turn it on
06:17 until March.
06:17 I don't know why on earth they would think they could do that.
06:20 But they all are 19, 22-year-old kids.
06:23 So you get that a lot.
06:26 Yeah, I mean, at the very least, you're
06:28 going to have eight more opportunities.
06:30 You've got seven here left in regular season.
06:33 You are guaranteed that one in Kansas City.
06:35 And then after that, probably nothing.
06:37 So you've got at least eight opportunities
06:39 to put more stuff on tape, whether it's, again,
06:41 for folks at the next level overseas, the next coach here
06:46 at WVU, whether that's Tyler or somebody else,
06:48 or even other places that might be opening up their doors for
06:51 you through the transfer portal.
06:52 So there's tons of opportunity.
06:54 And even though the record isn't what it is,
06:57 you just got to go put good stuff on tape at this point.
07:00 That's all you can really worry about.
07:02 So West Virginia falls again, 81-65 to TCU.
07:05 They're at 8-16 on the season.
07:07 And I believe 3-8 now--
07:09 I don't have it up here on my screen--
07:10 but 3-8 in Big 12 Conference play.
07:13 They'll have the next few days off before returning
07:16 to action on Saturday at the WVU Coliseum to take on Baylor.
07:21 That one will tip off at 6 PM on ESPN2.
07:25 And we'll see if West Virginia can get back in the win column.
07:27 Because that's the only place they've won this year, Chris.
07:29 Maybe they can get one of these next two.
07:32 So we'll see what happens.
07:33 Baylor's just as physical, just as big.
07:35 So--
07:36 Probably not.
07:38 Now if they continue to play soft,
07:39 that they are not going to win.
07:41 It's going to be ugly again.
07:43 The good news is baseball is here, folks.
07:45 So we will have you covered for that stuff.
07:47 We'll actually probably do a season preview at some point
07:50 this week or something.
07:51 But anyways, thanks for tuning in for this episode
07:55 of the Mountaineers Now postgame show presented by Country
07:58 Roads Air Duct Cleaning.
07:59 Take me into comfort.
08:00 For Christopher Hall, I'm Skylar Callie.
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08:09 Thank you guys for watching.
08:11 We'll see you later.
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