Ross Hodge Knew It — He Saw 'Gross' Performance Coming From a Mile Away

Not every win is a Mona Lisa. Sometimes they're just downright ugly. Last night, that happened to be the manner in which West Virginia took down Kansas State, 59-54.

The Mountaineers opened up the game scoreless for the first five minutes and forty-nine seconds, missing their first five shots from the floor and going 2/13 as a team in the first 11 minutes before they found some rhythm and made seven consecutive baskets.

WVU created some cushion early in the second half, extending the lead to ten, but that didn't last long. Turnovers and a ice cold stretch offensively allowed K-State to climb back in the game. The Mountaineers went SEVEN(!) minutes without scoring a point, and to make matters worse, the Wildcats weren't called for their first foul in the second half until the 2:18 mark.

“It’s going to be in my basketball Hall of Fame. I think the exact adjective I used was gross,” Hodge said when WVU play-by-play man Tony Caridi mentioned how we predicted this would be a sloppy one.

“You don’t always know. If I knew, I wouldn’t coach, and I’d go set up a fortune-telling booth and make more money doing that. But just the trip back, and you get back, the weather is bad. You condensed your routine on Sunday and Monday. We really condensed it to the middle of the day, and our guys put a lot of external work in. They come at night, they come in the mornings, and that was really negated on some levels. Kansas State had been close in a lot of games. A record is not indicative of what they could be, and on Saturday, that game was a three-point game with eight minutes to go (against Kansas). You knew they were going to come and fight. Just kind of had a feel that this one could be a grind. I just knew it was going to be a war. And it was. I told our guys in their we’ve had some great wins — Pitt comes to mind, Kansas at home, the first road win — but this one might be my favorite win we’ve had as a group because of what it took collectively and from a belief standpoint to get off to that bad of a start, to have that many sloppy periods of play, to miss some good looks, to not have some things go your way and just keep fighting and keep believing. That’s the mark of a good team.”

At the end of the day, a win is a win. No one is going to feel sorry for you when you don't beat the teams you should beat, so just landing on the right end of the scoreboard in this one is all you needed. Style points are rather irrelevant when you play in the Big 12 Conference because of how deep this league is, both from a talent and coaching standpoint.

It may have been an eyesore, but it's over, and WVU found a way to avoid a huge disappointment. Now, it's time to refocus, get back in the gym, and play a much cleaner brand of basketball on Saturday against Baylor.

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