Ross Hodge Expresses Sharp Frustration with WVU’s Physicality vs. Xavier

Hodge felt like WVU had a clear advantage in the paint, but it didn't show up in Sunday's loss.

West Virginia University head coach Ross Hodge | Christopher Hall - West Virginia on SI

Ross Hodge and the West Virginia Mountaineers will be happy to return to Morgantown after going 0-2 in the Charleston Classic over the weekend, falling to Clemson and Xavier. The Musketeers drained 16 three-pointers in the 78-68 win.

Here's everything Hodge had to say in his postgame press conference.

Opening statement

“Want to start out by giving Coach Pitino and his crew a lot of credit. Coming into the game, we knew they were going to challenge us in a lot of defensive ways that we hadn’t necessarily been challenged yet this year with their spacing and their ability to shoot the ball from the four and their five. We felt like going in, our advantage was going to be physicality, but we just never could impose any sort of physicality in the game or on them. We let them get comfortable. They made 16 threes, and when you allow a good shooting team like that to establish a rhythm and start feeling good, that’s when they can really start making some difficult ones, and to their credit, they made them.”

Biggest issue in the game

“I didn’t think we impacted the ball enough defensively. I thought we allowed the ball to go where it wanted to go, when it wanted to go there. We weren’t impactful enough on the ball. I felt like we could have had an advantage closer to the basket, but when we got it down there, we either didn’t finish. The biggest disappointment for me was where we missed 33 shots, and the box score says we had seven offensive rebounds, but two of them were team, and then Trey had two at the very end. So really, you missed 33 shots and you had three offensive rebounds.”

What the issues were defending the three-ball

“I would say five felt like, man, those were really difficult shots. The other eleven felt like they were pretty in rhythm, and we weren’t able to impact the ball enough. The ball was able to find the open man on time, on target, in the shooting pocket.”

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