By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — As West Virginia University football seems to find itself at a crossroads in its direction, three consecutive 11-win seasons morphing into two consecutive 9-victory years, the school is peaking as a basketball power both on the men’s and women’s side.
In fact, a case could be made, speaking in general terms, that WVU’s basketball programs run by Bob Huggins on the men’s side and Mike Carey on the women’s have combined into one of the nation’s top basketball schools.
After both teams defeated Marshall in Charleston’s Capital Classic at the Civic Center on Wednesday, the men winning, 68-60, and the women dancing away with a 74-42 victory, the two Mountaineer teams possessed a combined record of 31-4 while competing in the Big East Conference.
Convert that success to the polls, and the Mountaineers are one of nine Top 25 schools ranked in both of the ESPN polls and in both of the AP polls.
Here is the list of schools and their positions in the ESPN poll (men-women):
Texas (1-23), Kentucky (2-25), Duke (6-7), Tennessee (8-3), West Virginia (12-11), Georgetown (14-18), Connecticut (21-1), North Carolina (23-15), Ohio State (25-4).
The AP has a number of differences:
Texas (1-21), Duke (7-6), Tennessee (8-3), West Virginia (11-16), Georgetown (12-19), Georgia Tech (19-22), Ohio State (21-5), North Carolina (24-14), Baylor (25-16).
That is rather an elite group where there is Top 25 parity between men’s and women’s programs, including many of the legendary programs in college basketball – Texas, Kentucky, Duke, Georgetown, Connecticut, North Carolina and Ohio State.
Certainly, it would appear that the Mountaineers are caught up in upward mobility in both sports.
Bob Huggins, on the men’s side, has not yet fully implemented his program, still squeezing every ounce he can out of John Beilein recruits Da’Sean Butler and Wellington Smith, a credit as much to the players’ abilities to adapt to his system as it was for him to convert them from as radically different a program as you could possibly imagine.
And, as for Mike Carey, he is moving up the rankings on a weekly basis with a team that possesses not a senior and that is without a really dominant big person or a star player.
Interestingly, the two are quite similar in their approach to the game.
Both put defense first — hard-nosed, man-to-man defense.
Huggins’ team gives up a rock-ribbed 62 points a game. Carey’s allows only 50 a game and has held 11 opponents to 50 or fewer points this year, the low being a ridiculous 28 scored by Radford.
Both have personalities that are demanding, driving their players hard, yet finding ways to have warm moments with them also. It is about the game when they are snarling, and snarl they do, and the game only.
Take the Marshall game, which WVU was running away with. Carey didn’t know they were keeping score, coaching his women harder than had they been in a close game.
“Every time we mess up, he lets us know,” said forward Korinne Campbell after the Marshall game. “He never lets anything go, in practice and on the court. Even if we’re up by 50, he’ll let us know when we’re messing up on defense.”
It’s no different with Huggins, who has been known to push his players to the limit.
What you do see from both coaches is teams that improve, that get better if not game by game, then month by month.
“All the times we’ve been ticked off because we blew a lead or didn’t do all the right things, we kind of learned from that,” point guard Joe Mazzulla said after the Marshall victory. “We used the experiences from the past few games, and all the moral victories we thought we had earlier in the year, I think they came back to help us in this one. I thought we did a great job executing in the last five minutes of the game.”
Perhaps the greatest lesson was that what happened in the past is over with … at least once Huggins gets through making his point about it.
Coming down the stretch of the Marshall game, the usually reliable Kevin Jones missed a rather easy shot. You could see the blood drain to his feet, and the look on his face was that of a child who’d just been told that Dairy Queen at the corner was closing for the winter.
Guess who got the next shot … and made it.
“I guess it’s a sign of us growing up and knowing what to do when we’re in that situation,” Jones said. “We know how to make the right plays and get the ball to the right guys when it counts.”
So there it was, two games in one night, women and men, both ranked, both roaring through January and aiming at March, giving WVU the reputation of being more than just a place where they play football.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
