West Virginia Puts in Work Before NCAA Brackets Revealed

West Virginia is heading into the NCAA tournament having lost three of their last four games, including a head-scratching home season finale loss to Oklahoma State, a team shorthanded with Big 12 Conference Player of the Year Cade Cunningham out of the lineup. However, the Mountaineers' sixth game in 12 days and fatigue and mounting minor injuries can be attributed to some of the issues regarding the late-season slide.

It was reoccurring problems throughout the stretch that had appeared during the course of the season. Most notably on the defensive end, allowing straight-line drives and poor rotations resulted in easy buckets, then offensively, unforced turnovers leading to easy baskets.

“We’ve missed free throws, we’ve turned the ball over – we’ve kind of kicked ourselves in the tail more than anybody else has kicked us in the tail,” said West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins following the unveiling of the NCAA tournament bracket. “It hadn’t been that - we just haven’t done a very good job of, one, making free throws down the stretch and two, taking care of the ball.”

West Virginia got some rest heading into the conference tournament, but All-Big 12 first team selection forward Derek Culver was fighting an illness and clearly wasn’t 100% as he was gasping for air in the Mountaineers opening round loss in the conference tournament on Thursday. As of Sunday, Culver was well. “He’s doing good. He’s running well,” stated Huggins. “We got to get him to be more assertive around the rim again.”

Despite the late run of games, Huggins revealed the players wanted to get into the practice facility and work on some of their deficiencies.

“They wanted to do some things, so we had an offensive practice yesterday, and we had a defensive practice today – not long, just kind of going over some things,” he said. But it’s hard when you don’t know who you’re playing and what you’re trying to do but just tried to kind of refresh them on some things that we had done maybe earlier in the year that, I thought, maybe good for us now.”

West Virginia was selected as a three seed in the Midwest Region of the NCAA tournament and will face Morehead State at approximately 9:50 pm EST and televised on TruTV.

You can follow us for future coverage by clicking "Follow" on the page's top righthand corner. Also, be sure to like us on Facebook & Twitter:

Facebook - @WVUonSI

Twitter - @SI_WVU and Christopher Hall @WVHallBilly