West Virginia BB: Bob Huggins Breaks Down His Team, for Better or Worse

The thing with law school, they say, is that they spend the first year breaking you down, making you feel like a worthless insect.

The next two years they build you back up again from nothing, which partly explains why there are so many arrogant young lawyers: Had you survived such a process, you might think highly of yourself, as well.

It looks to me like WVU basketball coach Bob Huggins is doing the same thing to his team this year.

Over the past few games, WVU has lost the one thing it could always do—shoot. The loss to Cincinnati was one of historic proportion. WVU shot 20 percent from the field, its all-time lowest.

Always a reliable free-throw shooting team, the Mountaineers’s touch from 15 feet, unguarded, has abandoned them, costing them wins against Pitt and Georgetown.

Aside from blaming Huggins’s sartorial choices—me and my buddies like to call his look “Clarksburg mafia,” or “hillbilly Soprano”—I think Huggins is physically breaking down his team.

Which may not be a bad thing.

John Beilein built this team to shoot and shoot well in open space. He yielded rebounds, and the physical pounding they cause, for a barrage of three-pointers. When his team was on, opponents got killed, and swiftly, sometimes finding themselves suddenly down by 15 within the span of a few minutes.

And I won’t question their toughness—I’d take Mike Gansey or J.D. Collins in a scrap anytime, but Huggins built his teams at Cincinnati to be 35-game brawlers; it is why they looked the way they did.

He sent these Mountaineers to the weight room as soon as he got to WVU last year. He told them to crash the boards. He makes them jump onto a running treadmill if they screw up in practice. (No lie. Talk about slapstick moments. And subdural hematomas. But that will be an issue down the road for the civil courts.)

And they were strong out of the gates, but in the past few games, the fatigue is on full display, and most evidently at the free-throw line.

Think about how hard it is, after running the floor Huggins-style for 30 minutes, having just gotten hacked for trying to execute a play you were not born to make, and then to stand still at the line and, flatfoot, with shaky legs, trying sink a shot.

A more physical WVU team will emerge from the other side of this process, but it will not be produced this season.

This may be the beginning of a bad slide for the Mountaineers; it seems unlikely they will make the NCAA tournament at this point, unless they make a deep run in the Big East tournament.

By then, however, the Mountaineers may be limping along on legs like a boxer’s in the 15th round.