Morgantown, West Virginia – Like Neal Brown did with the West Virginia football team, Bob Huggins continues to roll out the same players, offense, defense and strategy every game and hopes for different results.
Unfortunately, after five consecutive losses, the schedule only gets worse in the coming weeks. The Mountaineers play Baylor (#4), Texas Tech (#13) and Iowa State (#23) in their next 3 games and could have an 8 game losing streak following this run.
West Virginia is not only one of the worst rebounding teams in the nation (268th in the nation out of 358 teams), they are also one of the worst shooting (261st in field goal percentage, 249th in free throw percentage) and passing teams (341st in assists) in the country.
Bob Huggins is one of the best to have ever done it, but ultimately he must see the statistics and results and realize that immediate, sweeping changes are necessary.
Perhaps Huggins should consider changing his offensive strategy, which he has not done for decades. Maybe a full-time move to Press Virginia would rejuvenate the team. Or, maybe he should do what he’s threatened to do for weeks and actually kick some of the players with bad attitudes off the team.
Something. Anything. This clearly isn’t working and it’s unacceptable to just continue to take loss after loss without adjustments.
The most frightening part of this situation for Bob Huggins and the West Virginia basketball program is that it will only get worse next season when the Mountaineers lose almost all of their key players, including Taz Sherman, Sean McNeil, Gabe Osabuohien, Kedrian Johnson, Malik Curry, Pauly Paulicap and Dimon Carrigan.
Perhaps there could be some hope from the transfer portal, but Bob Huggins has recently said that he doesn’t like to use it and doesn’t think it’s the way to fix his program. It feels like this could unfortunately be a very long, difficult fix ahead for Huggins. Is he really up to a massive rebuild at this stage in his career?
