West Virginia’s men’s basketball team suffered their first loss of the season on Friday night, falling to Marquette, 82-71. The Mountaineers went into halftime up twelve points, before a 23-point swing in the second half. Seemingly everything went wrong, but none of it surprised Head Coach Bob Huggins.
“The same thing that’s gone wrong every time we have an outing this year,” said Huggins. “….Every game that we’ve had, we’ve come out and played pretty good in the first half, and played flat in the second half. We had to have missed ten layups in the second half. We had to miss another seven or eight paint touch shots.”
On Thursday night, the Mountaineers converted 15-of-20 layups and dunks in a win over Elon. After the game, Huggins blasted his team for their soft play around the basket, contradicting what the stats said. This game, though, was more in line with what he had been preaching, as West Virginia converted just 5-of-18 layups in the game.
“It just blows my mind where you’re on the inside, the guy is behind you, and you got to double pump and miss a layup,” said Huggins. “I don’t know if it’s fashionable or [what].”
On the other side, Marquette shot 64% from the field in the second half and made 8-of-13 three-point attempts.
“They were all penetrate and pitch shots,” said Huggins. “We got straight-lined whoever touched it….. we stood around. How many times did they drive it to the goal and maybe one of our guys got there to stop the guy and the rest of the guys just stood there and looked…..”
With the loss, WVU will play in the third place game on Sunday evening at 5:00pm against Clemson. He left his radio interview to go watch film on the Tigers, but says he’s not sure how to get his team’s second half efforts to improve.
“If I knew [why], I’d fix it,” he said. “What am I supposed to do? Go in there and throw things? Scream and yell at halftime when we’re up twelve?”
