Mountaineers Lose Third In A Row: Now What?

With last night's loss to Pitt, the Mountaineers have dropped their 3rd contest in a row to fall to 5-5 in the Big East (15-8 overall) with 8 games remaining. That's still good enough for 8th place in the league at the moment, but this team was tied for second place less than a week ago. The general rule of thumb that is typically perpetuated is that you need at least a .500 record in your conference in order to make the NCAA tournament as an at-large team. The latest edition of Lunardi's Bracketology still has WVU at a #5 seed, but falling.

If things aren't straightened out quickly, a once promising season for an admittedly young team could go down as a forgettable one. And for season that KJ is putting together, that would be an awful way to send him out. A players only meeting was reportedly scheduled for today to discuss what this team needs to do to be able to have a successful season. As far as this blog is concerned, everyone on the team except Jones needs to take a long look at themselves and decide how they want this season to play out. And at the same time, KJ needs to continue the leadership he has displayed so far.

Simply put, this team needs wins and needs them fairly quickly. Here's the remaining schedule:

On that list, we only see two, maybe three games that "should" be wins (I say "should", because we all saw what happened last week in the Garden against St. John's). The games versus Providence, DePaul and possibly an improved USF squad, I believe fall in the "should win" category. They are all winnable games, regardless. And as we've seen already a couple times this year, they are all, equally, possible losses. Win those three games and then find a way to win another 2, hopefully more. If WVU can find a way to put the struggles behind them, come together and do what Huggs asks of them, 5 wins out of the eight remaining games is certainly achievable. That would give them a final regular season record of 20 wins heading into the BET. Any less than that and this team finds itself squarely on the "Bubble" and dependent on other teams' resumes not looking better than WVU's.