What Josh Eilert Said Following the loss to Cincinnati
The Cincinnati Bearcats (18-13, 7-11) pummeled the West Virginia Mountaineers (9-22, 4-14) Saturday afternoon 92-56.
Interim head coach Josh Eilert sat courtside with WVU play-by-play caller Tony Caridi to give his thoughts on the loss to the Bearcats.
Opening Statement
I thought we played fairly well in the first half. [We’re] down 14 The first half cut the seven and there's a lot of positives there that you could hang your hat on. I thought we’d jump in, have the ball coming in at half and then start to make a run but nothing went our way. The hardest thing is defense. The defense. I mean, whatever isolation situation they wanted, they got it right at the rim and I told them before the game, if we don't take pride in our defense, not only from an individual standpoint with our matchup and from a team standpoint, helping each other out, we can't win. That was that was certainly a message coming out of the TCU game where they shot 56% from the field, we shot 57 and came away with a loss. Consequently, it even got worse tonight.
What went wrong defensively
Little bit everything. I mean, we don't have a whole lot of, like, natural defenders on the floor. So, there's got to be a lot of gaps, we've got to be a lot of help. The one really natural defensive possession we had in that first half, Kobe went and helped his man. He saw the mismatch and went down there naturally doubled and we made some rotations and made a play. But every time we tried to change the defense on them, they got what they wanted, and I think three lobs behind the zone and there was no way to stop the bleeding. I kept on running through timeouts and was out of timeouts a 10-minute mark and makes things hard.
Heading into the Big 12 Championship
We'll see how we respond. I challenged them. We’ll see what we’re made of. If we turn around and play that same team and if we don't have a bad taste in our mouth for three straight days going into that and we don't compete at the highest level on Tuesday, then we have to look at ourselves in the mirror and figure out whether you really want to play game basketball.
