Is current Mountaineer malaise a collapse, or simply a correction?

COMMENTARY

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — As the stock market took a swan dive last week, economists and paper trading experts were quick to point out that we were not experiencing a crash, but a correction.

After glancing at your 401k account you may not care to distinguish between the two, but the idea is that the market was operating at such a high that it was destined to come back down to previous levels at some point.

We’ve reached that point, though it would apparently take a few more weeks or even months of dipping to quantify it as something worse.

Which brings us to West Virginia basketball.

West Virginia’s current slump feels like a full-fledged collapse. Just three weeks ago, the Mountaineers were tabbed by the NCAA selection committee as a No. 2 seed for the imaginary midseason NCAA tournament.

Now that it is finally March, they are headed as far in the opposite direction as you can imagine. West Virginia has lost six of seven, and has somehow fallen so far that it has lost its stranglehold on a bye in the Big 12 tournament.

After TCU’s stunning upset over Baylor on Saturday, the Horned Frogs picked up a tiebreaker over the Mountaineers based on holding the highest-quality conference victory. If the season ended today, TCU would be the No. 6 seed in the Big 12 tourney, while West Virginia would have to begin its tournament a day earlier as the No. 7 seed against a Kansas State team that apparently only plays well against WVU.

The frustration cascading from the stands at WVU Coliseum on Saturday afternoon says it’s a collapse.

Fans groaned as the offense stagnated at the end of the first half, watching another five-minute wander through a scoreless Sahara. One fan in the upper deck yelled very angrily when center Logan Routt was subbed into the game, then cursed even more angrily when Routt gave up a bucket and a foul that Oklahoma turned into a three-point play.

The anger was not contained to the cheap seats.

As the offensive woes carried over into the second half, one fan sitting in the front row directly across the floor from the West Virginia bench could be heard shouting “PUT TAZ IN!” from the other side of the arena.

Only a full-blown collapse is capable of producing emotion this ugly on a team’s home court.

But maybe what we are watching isn’t actually a collapse. Perhaps it is better labeled as a correction, albeit a very dramatic one.

While it doesn’t feel any better to describe it in that fashion — losing is miserable no matter how you slice it — there is a distinction in the world of sports, just as there is in finance.

A collapse would describe a talented team that chokes its way down the stretch, failing to meet its potential. Collapses make you wonder how the heck such a thing could happen to a team that once appeared to have few weaknesses.

In the case of a correction, a team plays its way back down to what you might expect its record to be in the preseason after getting off to a quick start. It is disappointing, but not surprising.

Before the year began, a .500 finish in the Big 12 would have felt like forward progress after last year’s 4-14 debacle. And statistically speaking, the Mountaineers very much appear to be a team with .500 talent. If they win their last two games, that’s precisely where they will be in league play.

The ceiling is only so high when you pass the ball as poorly and shoot as poorly from the free-throw line and three-point line as West Virginia does, and it’s not as if those trends just started during this recent slump. They’ve been clear deficiencies from the jump, and ones that make it difficult to sustain success.

It’s becoming harder for the Mountaineers to compensate in other areas that make up for those season-long weaknesses. Maybe that’s simply what the law of averages dictate. More likely, opposing coaches have figured out that the book on beating this team isn’t all that complicated.

WVU’s record would be a lot easier to swallow if the Mountaineers got here the same way as Oklahoma or Texas. The Sooners have bounced back-and-forth between wins and losses throughout conference play, while the Longhorns are getting hot after starting in a major hole.

West Virginia picked a far more agonizing path to its record, which is why it will be etched in our collective memory as a collapse.

But it is probably better for a West Virginia fan’s psyche to think of it as a reality check — the reality being that the Mountaineers are a slightly above-average, flawed basketball team who have had the misfortune of seeing all of their flaws exploited over a short period of time rather than over the course of a season.





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