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Jan 24, 2024 By Bob Hertzel 5 min read

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Someday somebody’s going to make a billion dollars, not in the stock market, not in a lottery, not in discovering oil in their backyard.

No, that would be too easy.

Instead, someone is going to solve the mysteries of college basketball.

Certainly, it would take more than a team of the FBI’s best agents, NCIS’s top scientists and the CIA’s latest computers to figure it out.

Front and center here is how West Virginia’s basketball team can go out on Saturday and upset the No. 3 team in the nation, the legendary Kansas Jayhawks, then three days come completely undone against a Central Florida team that brings size, strength and defense to the party but nowhere near the skill that KU possesses.

The result was that WVU was outrun, outmuscled, outrebounded and outscored, 72-59, in Orlando.

Now you may want to blame it on the road as compared to the comfy feeling WVU gets at home, but it remains a mystery why the home court is such an advantage.

To wit, WVU is 0-7 this year away from its home court. In its four home games, its has upset No. 25 Texas and No. 3 Kansas.

In the seven losses away from the Coliseum this year, they have been outscored by 84 points, 12 a game … although it must be stated that they did drop a game by two points to Virginia and three to Ohio State, which they could have won.

But that’s too easy, blaming it on the road. It is a complex equation that involves not only the travel, the unfamiliarity of the court and the background, the roar of a crowd that is against you.

It’s more about what’s inside you and your ability to adapt to negativity that comes with all that and officials that sometimes call the game the way the home team wants to play it.

All of that came into play in this game as WVU got off sleepwalking and seemed a bit intimidated by the size and strength and defensive prowess of the Knights as they jumped to a quick 10-3 lead, then built it to 32-16.

“It’s hard in this league, especially as good as they are defensively, to get anything going,” coach Josh Eilert said. “When you dig that hole, good luck trying to get out of it. I keep telling these guys we got to fight, fight and fight to the bitter end. We’re not going to quit by any means.”

“We got disconnected in so many ways. Offensively, defensively … we just weren’t clicking on all cylinders and working well out there. A lot of it is discipline. We’ll look at this stuff and try to learn from it but we were out there and pretty disconnected. We have to fix that quick.”

The size of the front line of UCF (12-6, 3-3 Big 12), especially 7-foot, 246-pound Ibrahima Diallo, who was averaging 6 points and 6.5 rebounds a game but who scored 14 points with 12 rebounds and intimidated with 3 “official” blocked shots but seemed while watching it like 6 and if you were shooting it had to seem like every shot.

The size and strength took WVU completely out of its game, something that may not have happened at home, perhaps because it would be officiated differently, perhaps because it was just one of those mysteries.

They certainly took RaeQuan Battle out of the game, completely, as he had only 5 points when he picked up not only a cheerleader’s pom pom but his second technical in the second half. He played only 15 minutes.

“He’s frustrated,” said Eilert, who gave him a hug and a little lecture before Battle left for the locker room. “I understand his frustrations. He handled it the wrong way. He knows it. He popped off a couple of times and they got him for it. He deserved it. It’s a teaching moment. I gave him a hug and said we got to fix this. You have to let me deal with it. When things get tough, you need a little toughness to play through it until we figure a way to correct what we’re getting into.”

The dominance on the boards was there for everyone to see with 11 offensive rebounds, along with the 7 blocked shots and, the most important statistic of the evening, a plus-18 advantage for UCF in fastbreak points at 24-6.

“The biggest thing to me was those fastbreak points – 24-to-6 – They’re getting easy buckets, they’re going downhill and they are going downhill at a different pace than we’re trying to go downhill,” Eilert said. “I tell them all the time that the advantage goes to the aggressor.

“By no means were we the aggressor.”

What happened was a combination of all that, which almost certainly doesn’t come together if the game were in Morgantown, but it wasn’t so the best WVU could do was cut a 21-point lead down to 10 at one point in the second half while JoJo Harris was scoring hot, hitting five of eight 3s for 15 points.

WVU now falls to 7-12, 2-4 in the Big 12 and the road to the NCAA Tournament now has probably more curves than they can negotiate, but Eilert maintains they will keep on trucking … but that’s not really a good thing because where are you when you are trucking?

On the road.