Men’s Basketball
WVU is now three games into the Big 12 season, and the first two went more or less how one would have expected. A road loss to top 5 Iowa State, a home win over an average Cincy team. However, they came through with a big upset win at home to Top 25 Kansas (although the loss might knock KU out of the top 25). There have been a couple things I’ve seen from this team a bit too often, which give me flashbacks to some of the problems of the Bob Huggins teams. One is the offense has a tendency to have at least one really bad scoring drought. Sometimes they turn leads in to nailbiters or even deficits. Other times, WVU sees a close game turn into a substantial deficit. No team is going to avoid scoring droughts entirely, but this team is having them too frequently. Another aspect is poor free throw shooting. There are 361 teams in Division 1, and WVU ranks #276 with 69.1%. If you are in a close game, you don’t want to give away too many points on the free throw line. Finally, WVU has been good on defense, with one notable exception: 3-point shooting. In KenPom’s defensive statistics, WVU is 54 th overall, and among his key “4 Factors” WVU ranks 35,86,35,and 32. WVU is seventh overall in defensive 2-point shot percentage. But they are just 231 th in defensive 3-points shooting percentage. And when you watch the game, it’s easy to see why: WVU leaves too many wide open three-point shots. In the Kansas win, they managed to avoid a bad scoring drought, and they did make free throws down the stretch – but missed several in the first 30 minutes of the game. Still, I like Ross Hodge and this team. Hopefully we can see more performances like the one we saw against Kansas.
Next up are two very winnable games: Colorado at home, and Arizona State on the road. In the Big 12, WVU is 11 th of 16 teams in the KenPom ratings (the Big 12 has 6 of his Top 20, the most of any conference), but the Buffaloes and Sun Devils are 2 of the teams below the Mountaineers (the others are Cincy, Kansas State, and Utah). It will be interesting to see how much WVU can start to shore up their weaknesses before the schedule turns much tougher again.
The women’s team lost first Big 12 game to undefeated Texas Tech, in a tightly fought contest in Morgantown. They were plagued, in part, by poor free throw shooting (12/20 from the line), which is worse than they typically shoot, so hopefully that was a temporary blip. Still, the game showed that WVU is ready to match top 20 or better teams, and there’s a decent chance they will turn a close loss into a win in the near future.
There are a few ways to look at the portal. One is by sheer numbers of incoming and outgoing players. Another might be to look at the number of starters lost, although that can be misleading (a key backup, or a player expected to start in the fall could be a noteworthy loss, but wouldn’t be in listed as a “lost starter”). And it’s often hard to project how much impact a player might make. Sometimes a player ends up not being a good fit for his new team’s scheme.
Sometimes a player ends up being better than expected – for example, Trinidad Chambliss was a national championship winning quarterback at Ferris State, but when he signed with Ole Miss, it was thought he would be a back-up to Austin Simmons. But when Simmons got hurt, Chambliss came in and exceeded expectations, and ended up helping Ole Miss to the national semi-finals.
One rating service, On3, tries to look at the net impact of the transfer portal for each team – it looks at how much a team’s overall talent has improved or declined with the various comings and goings. In WVU’s case, they are in the Top 10 of the On3 portal rankings, meaning WVU has been one of the better teams in the country at improving themselves in the portal.
They appear to be doing a pretty good job of filling needs, and I will look more in depth on that once the portal activity has slowed down. But there are reasons to be optimistic for the 2026 season.
Notes: The men’s basketball game vs Colorado is Saturday at 6:00pm, and will be on CBS Sports Network (not CBS, but their sports network). It is also a Throwback themed game…The Arizona State game is Wednesday, Jan 21, at 9:00pm, and is streamed on Peacock…Upcoming women’s games are at Cincinnati on Sunday at 2:00, and home against a very good Arizona State team on Wednesday, Jan 21, at 7:00pm. Both will be streamed on ESPN Plus…The gymnastics team started their season last year slowly, and kept improving to eventually make the NCAA Regionals. This year also started slowly with a 193.45 in their season opener at Florida, which is similar to their start last year.
