WVU men’s hoops begins ‘journey’ against Niagara
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MORGANTOWN - If nothing else, the WVU men's basketball team enters the 2026-27 season with its players and head coach Ross Hodge on the same thought process as far as the team's trajectory goes.
Take the conversation with WVU guard Finley Bizjack. It had only been a few minutes since the Mountaineers finished off Wheeling University in its final exhibition game when Bizjack sat down at the podium and began talking about the journey that lay ahead.
The Mountaineers - in their second season under Hodge - open the season by hosting Niagara inside the Hope Coliseum at 7 p.m. Monday.
They will do so with 12 new players on the roster, including six freshmen, yet expectations are for Hodge to get the Mountaineers back to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2023.
Getting there will require the completion of a puzzle, of sorts, but it's still early November, and the Mountaineers say they are still figuring out how that puzzle looks.
"I'd like to say that we're not even close to figuring everything out," Bizjack begins. "I've been on some teams that played their best basketball in November. We want to be playing our best basketball in February, March and, hopefully, April. Our goal is to go here and end up there."
As Bizjack says that, his hand begins down at the bottom and he displays a steady climb up to the top.
"You don't want to go from up here and then go down," he continued. "You want to stay trending upwards."
Hodge followed suit. In relaying a similar story, his hands went in the same motion Bizjack's did just minutes earlier.
"Do I feel like we're good enough right where we are to win the games that we need to win? Of course," Hodge began. "This will be a long journey to playing the best basketball. You want it to be like this."
Hodge's hand went from the bottom and made a steady climb upwards.
"You don't want the highs and lows," he continued. "It's a challenge for the players in the climate that we're in, because there are such emotional swings from one game to the next."
Those swings - for better or worse - begin Monday against the Purple Eagles, who are in their eighth season under head coach Greg Paulus, a one-time starting point guard at Duke. Over his first seven seasons, Paulus has yet to record a winning season and Niagara has finished no higher than fifth in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference.
On paper, it's a mismatch. It's a "buy game" - a term meaning WVU paid a lump sum of money for Niagara to play in Morgantown with no return game scheduled - designed to get the Mountaineers off on the right foot.
Yet it happens every season. A small school not only gets a nice chunk of change, but also walks out of the big school's house with an upset victory.
"Personally, I've dropped some buy games before," said Bizjack, a transfer from Butler which was upset by Appalachian State in 2024. "I think it's super important, like, how you win these games are important. Coach has been getting on us about not taking any opponent lightly. We have to respect everyone, but we also want to dominate them."
It's a nice idea, but this will be the first real college game for WVU freshman point guard Miles Sadler, as well as freshman center Amadou Seini, who will be a key player off the bench for the Mountaineers.
They may both have been highly recruited, but, as freshmen, have yet to realize what they don't know yet.
WVU's transfer portal additions know what a college season is all about, but not under the tutelage of Hodge.
And so, we go back to Hodge's words of this being a long journey for the Mountaineers. It could be an interesting one, too.
"There's a lot you don't know, and, unfortunately, you will not know until you get out there and play real games and get in real situations," Hodge said. "That's not unique to us. That's not an 'us' problem. That would be about an every-single-person problem in college athletics."