West Virginia competing, but must find wins in difficult stretch

West Virginia has now dropped six straight games, but in a league with as many available opportunities as the Big 12 Conference head coach Bob Huggins doesn’t believe his team is dead yet.

“We’re going to continue to fight the fight,” he said.

The Mountaineers now sit at 13-8 overall with home contests against ranked Texas Tech and Iowa State before a pair of road games at Oklahoma State and Kansas State.

This upcoming four-game stretch could very well ultimately decide the fate of this year’s basketball team considering the current trajectory although there will be six games remaining on the schedule after those are completed.

Still, of those 10 remaining games a total of half will come against teams currently ranked inside the top 25 and five more of those will be on the road.

It resulted in another loss, but there was some positives to be taken from how West Virginia battled on the road against Baylor in an 81-77 defeat. Yes, the Bears were down two guards, but the Mountaineers ran effective offense and looked as in sync as they have during this six-game losing streak.

Almost doesn’t count, but the team continues to fight despite the frustrating results.

“This has been a tough stretch for us, not only who we’re playing but obviously the results. I thought today we came out and played really well. ton of enthusiasm, ton of energy,” senior guard Sean McNeil said. “Yeah, we made some mistakes but that’s bound to happen. We played through them. I’m proud of everybody in there. We’ll bounce back coming home this coming week.”

That contest was made even more difficult when senior guard Taz Sherman, who had scored a career-high 29 points, was knocked from the game on an inadvertent blow to the face. But Huggins saw his players competing hard for the second straight game after questioning their effort earlier in the year.

“We hung in there with our best player and one of the best players, if not the best player in the league laying in the locker room with a concussion,” Huggins said. “So that showed a lot of strength that our other guys could come through.”

It was a spill over from the effort that’s been there in practice, but effort isn’t necessarily enough to beat talent. All six of the Mountaineers losses on this current streak have come to quadrant one teams and only one of the eight losses on the year is of the quadrant two variety.

But if the Mountaineers have dreams of heading back to the NCAA Tournament, it boils down to finding a way to string together some wins regardless of the challenges.

“We’ve lost games, but we’ve lost games to good people. We haven’t lost any games to bad people and now we’ve just got to go win,” Huggins said. “We’ve got the second half of the schedule; we’ve just got to go win. We’ve got to win on Saturday and continue to win.”

It goes without saying that the status of Sherman moving forward will be critical to the success of this team and it was encouraging that he tweeted a thumbs up after the Baylor game wrapped up. But the gauntlet has been laid for this West Virginia team and the margin for error is becoming smaller by the day. This team needs to find a way to win and string some of those together.

Or a ticket to the dance won’t be waiting.

----------

• Talk about it with West Virginia fans on The Blue Lot.

• SUBSCRIBE today to stay up on the latest on Mountaineer sports and recruiting.

• Get all of our WVU videos on YouTube by subscribing to the WVSports.com Channel

• Follow us on Twitter: @WVSportsDotCom, @rivalskeenan, @JaredSerre

•Like us on Facebook