West Virginia’s week from hell comes to an abysmal end after an embarrassing home loss of 49 to 0 by Texas Tech. In all my years following West Virginia sports, I can’t remember a worse week than the week that we’ve just witnessed for WVU athletics. We saw a basketball team that was looking like they could be something special go down to a tournament in Charleston, South Carolina, and absolutely get humbled and humiliated by Clemson and Xavier – the loss to Xavier was especially tough, a team that we easily should’ve beat.
We saw our #21 ranked girls basketball team drop a hard fought game in the Baha Mar Hoops Pink Flamingo Championship game against Ohio State 83 to 81. We saw our men’s soccer team come back from an unbelievable deficit against St Johns the week before only to lose to 10th ranked High Point by a score of 3 to 2 the following week. We saw our womens soccer team lose a heartbreaker to #2 ranked Georgetown 4-3 on PK”s. Then to cap It all off, we witness what is probably the worst defeat that I could remember by a West Virginia football team at home end the season, apparently our worst loss since 1904. A week where we had such high hopes between basketball, both men and women’s soccer, ends in heartbreak and a reality check of the state of West Virginia athletics.
Most concerning of course were the lopsided basketball and football loses. While I’ve firmly been on the Ross Hodge bandwagon this season, the 2 loses in Charleston raised some serious concerns for me. Blowing that late 11 point lead to Clemson certainly hurt, and raised questions on how we’re going to compete with the deeper more athletic teams throughout the season, especially in the Big 12. Losing to Xavier in the way we did set off all sorts of concerns. Hodge not being able to figure out how to adjust defensively to shut down Xaviers perimeter shooting is a major concern. Defense was not something I worried about with this team, till then. Combine that with some really bad offensive sets and lack of intensity, this team has me worried moving forward.
All and all, this was a really tough week for WVU athletics – a week that began with hope and optimism was met with the hard truth – WVU athletics has a long way to go to become elite and win across all sports at the level fans and boosters have come to expect.
