West Virginia has now lost six of seven games with only two left.

The Mountaineers have essentially tumbled out of the national rankings and continues to free-fall in seeding projections for the NCAA tournament, too. It was only Feb. 8 when the program was projected as a No. 2 seed in the dance but that has fallen all the way down to No. 8 in some brackets.

“You’d hope we got enough fight to us that we can bounce back,” head coach Bob Huggins said.

Well, time is running out and this is a team that seems to be pressing and looking for any answers it can find. Not an optimal place to be at this stage of the season.

Where can you point the finger?

“If you want to blame a leader, blame me. It’s my responsibility,” Huggins said.

The veteran coach isn’t wrong. But essentially anybody that observed practice Thursday indicated how well things had gone and the Mountaineers had another solid effort Friday. There was good energy and shots were falling but it certainly didn’t translate into the game Saturday.

West Virginia looked out of sorts and struggled with things it had been instructed to avoid such as leaving shooters to help and backing off players that the scout said to press up on. That was especially true early in the first half, when the Sooners lead swelled from two to nine in around three-minutes.

“We need to know where our man is. We need to follow the scouting report,” Huggins lamented.

Shooting at essentially all levels continues to be a struggle as well with the Mountaineers now going 11-69 (16-percent) from three over the last four games and 9 of those connections coming from Sean McNeil and Taz Sherman. The rest of the team is 2-37 during that span and when you consider one of those was the Jermaine Haley heave at the end of the half it’s even more alarming.

From the foul line, the program is 28-55 from the free throw line over the last three or 51-percent.

That inability to put the ball in the basket has caused a trickle-down effect to other areas.

“When you miss as many shots as we’ve missed, we got guys on our team that are 1-27. That gets to you, so I don’t think you play as hard defensively. I look down our bench and we’ve got a bunch of guys with their heads down and If I missed that many I’d have my head down too, I think,” he said.

But even with the struggles from the field the defense being an issue is something that the Mountaineers have to find a way to rectify. The program has won games struggling to score earlier in the slate, but not being able to make shots and not getting stops is a poor combination.

Huggins has tried to play 1-3-1, 3-2, 1-1-3 and a number of other looks but has not had success of late and West Virginia simply has to try to do better.

“Even if we are missing shots we have to figure out ways to win and that’s on defense,” senior guard Jermaine Haley said. “We haven’t been playing the defense we were at the starting of the year.”

“We just need to come out and execute and play with the sense of urgency when we first started and have fun,” Haley added.

But how do you recapture a sense of urgency? Well, if losing six of seven down the stretch doesn’t do it, it’s going to be hard to salvage things at this stage of the year.

“If you hear that stat and don’t have a sense of urgency moving forward I think we have an issue,” senior guard Chase Harler said.

This team clearly has some issues to work out but the next opportunity will come at Iowa State Tuesday. The road hasn’t been kind to this club but the Mountaineers don’t have many opportunities left.

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