MORGANTOWN -
As soon as he finished with the media, Bob Huggins returned
to the court where his team had just hung on for a victory over Eastern
Kentucky.
He would not wait until West Virginia's next film session to
begin the work needed to fix what he saw transpire in a second half that nearly
erased all of a 13-point halftime deficit before his Mountaineers held on for a
74-67 win.
Huggins, walking across the Coliseum court after his press
conference, told his event staff escort to go on without him. He branched off
from his normal route and found assistant coach Ron Everhart and immediately
began an animated conversation, clearly focused on what had just wrapped up on
that floor minutes ago.
When he had finished discussing these things with Everhart,
Huggins took a seat behind one of the baskets next to his associate head coach,
Larry Harrison.
Harrison sat quietly while Huggins signed autographs for a
group of fans who had made their way onto the court.
Business was on the agenda. A talk about all that has gone wrong
for the better part of the season, what of it had carried over into the final
20 minutes against the Colonels and how those parts of the game could be fixed
in time for Oklahoma's trip to Morgantown on Jan. 5.
There is no time available for wasting, so Huggins had no
other choice.
"I understand I recruited them, I've got to fix it," Huggins
had said to close his press conference. "I understand that."
Understanding where to begin to make the fixes may be the
bigger task for the coach in his sixth season at West Virginia.
The Big 12 is a bit of an unknown for West Virginia, but
with the non-conference portion of the schedule mostly in the books, the
Mountaineers know they cannot perform as they did in jumping out to a 7-5
record and expect to win consistently against their new league opponents.
"I really thought we got better," Huggins said. "I, honest
to God, other than doing really dumb things in the first half, I thought by
God, it kind of looks like my team again, you know? It kind of looks like my
team, kind of looks like we're playing like my team and then as soon as I [am]
dumb enough to start thinking that, we come out and let them shoot 63 percent
in the second half."
When one half goes so well and the next sees everything fall
apart, the attention has to be on what did not work rather than the successes
of the initial 20 minutes. For WVU's part, there will be plenty to watch on
film in the coming days and critique in a search for improvements.
"We came out tough, played great defense, made shots, thought
we were going to put them away early, but we let them creep back in there the
second half and had to grind it out. We just have to put two halves together,"
Juwan Staten said after he put together a strong showing against EKU.
"I think we've got to concentrate a little more," Deniz
Kilicli began to explain before admitting the truth. "I don't know, man. I
don't know. If I knew it, I'd be able to fix it."
Maybe Huggins does know. Maybe he doesn't.
His job, though, is to find the answers. He didn't sign up
to coach the Mountaineers believing that every season would be simple and that
the adversity that did rear its head would simply go away without real work.
So he stayed after the game. He kept his assistants close by
with an earful of instruction, while being mindful of the fact that the best
answers may be some he had not yet thought of.
The cleaning crew moved about the Coliseum, sweeping up what
had been left behind and washing away all that remained from the last night of
prep before conference play, but Huggins remained.
It's his job to fix it.
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