MORGANTOWN — As far as WVU men’s basketball head coaches go, they’ve been coming and going lately at a pretty fast rate.
Their first impressions, pretty much, have been their only impressions in the Big 12 ranks.
Ross Hodge is the third Mountaineers’ coach in as many seasons, but the first impression he left Saturday on the conference’s elder statesman – Kansas coach Bill Self – was a doozy.
“He got them three lay-ups coming out of timeouts,” Self said after the No. 22 Jayhawks fell to WVU, 86-75, inside the Hope Coliseum. “To be honest, we walked over every one of them. Their offensive execution was a hell of a lot better than our defensive execution.
“To me, that’s a sign of a coach – you teach (players) how to play, everyone does – but if you can steal a couple of points now and then that really doesn’t come from having to grind every possession, that’s a positive. I thought they did a good job of that tonight.“
For Hodge, it was his first signature victory as the head guy of the Mountaineers, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
We all know what’s happened up to this point. The blown lead against Ohio State. Xavier hit, seemingly, 45 3-pointers in a game. Wake Forest’s Juke Harris put on an NBA-type performance last month.
All of those could have been wins that would have built a nice little early resumé for Hodge in his WVU tenure. They all ended up on the other side of that story.
There was a nice win against Pitt, but the Panthers really stink this season. And so, the question was floating around out there just what exactly did the Mountaineers have in Hodge.
At the very least, Hodge has quieted that discussion for now. This was a major breakthrough for him in his first season, but one that still has a long way to go with six games remaining against teams currently ranked in the AP Top 25.
Here’s the thing you have to love about Hodge, though, is that he never makes the situation about himself. He just beat a Hall-of-Famer in Self, dare we say outcoached a Hall-of-Famer, and he knows full well the sentiment that’s out there, yet you would never know it.
His direction has always been about his players, telling stories about their ability to buy in and believe even when the night is seemingly at its darkest hour.
Hodge could have made all kinds of grand gestures and statements in the postgame media scrum. He could have said, “See, I told ya all,” as he dropped the mic.
Actually, that would have been pretty cool.
That’s not what Hodge did at all. He took not one ounce of credit. It was his players’ day, not his.
Those players held their own in the first half against Kansas, even with starting point guard Jasper Floyd sitting out with foul trouble. They survived a future NBA player in Jayhawks’ guard Darryn Peterson going off for 23 points and then they thrived once Kansas appeared to be pulling away for yet another win when the Jayhawks led 59-51 with 14:52 remaining.
“It’s a combination of belief, which I think this group has always had, but then you actually have to go and do it,” was how Hodge tried to explain the situation. “The doing part was what was getting us. Again, we kind of talked about it in those early-season tough losses, if you can learn from those situations and not run from it and not hide from it, then you can actually improve and get better.
“It’s guys just stepping up. You’re in that moment. It’s teetering and Trey (Eaglestaff) just jumps up and makes two monster threes and then we start stringing some stops together.”
This is who Hodge is. He’s big on a positive culture. He’s big on belief and everyone being on the same page.
He’s also big on confidence. During a timeout, when Kansas was building its lead, he looked his players straight in their eyes and said, “We’re still going to win this game, but we’re going to look back at the stretch to now and what got us in this hole, and we’re all going to be very disappointed with how we executed defensively up to this point.”
One last thing
There was nowhere to put this dandy of a quote from Self, but it was just one more reason why he’s one of the most likable coaches in the Big 12, even though he coaches the one team everyone loves to hate in the league.
“We suck right now,” Self said of his team. “But, it’s right now. Everybody goes through ebbs and flows through the season. The last three games we haven’t played well. We have to flip it.
“The thing is with the three teams we’ve played thus far (in Big 12 play), the common denominator is those three teams played really well. That tells me that we’re not doing something to make them play poorly.”
