MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — West Virginia’s men’s basketball team is assured of its first losing record in non-conference play in 32 years.
It’s a trying time for a program that had grown used to an abundance of success outside of league play, but is 4-7 under interim head coach Josh Eilert.
During a year-end press conference Thursday, West Virginia Director of Athletics Wren Baker addressed what’s the difficult stretch of six-plus weeks to start this season.
“The general public and you all for that matter, it’s like an iceberg and you see the tip of it,” Baker said. “You see what happens out there on game day. I get a chance to see the entire iceberg. I know the behind the scenes battles that have been faced — some that you’re aware of and some that you’re not even aware of. Just like I said with football before [the 2023 season], I get the focus from the public on wins and losses, because it’s the only metric they really have a window into, but I get a 360 view of everything that goes on in the program.
“My goal is to do a pretty thorough review of each of our programs at the end of the year. They’ve only played one-third of their games, so they still have two-thirds of the season left. It has certainly been a season full of challenges and I’ve been clear that coach Eilert has handled most if not all of those challenges well. He’ll have my full support throughout this season and at the conclusion of the season, we’ll decide where we go from there.”
Eilert is working under a 10-month contract he agreed to in June 2023 after former head coach Bob Huggins was arrested for DUI in Pittsburgh.
Since then, the only constants within the program seem to be change and misfortune.
Seven players from last season’s team left by way of the NCAA Transfer Portal, including four in the immediate aftermath of Huggins’ arrest. Half of those four — forward Tre Mitchell and guard Joe Toussaint — were integral pieces to a team that qualified for the NCAA Tournament last season.
When Eilert was tagged as interim head coach, he and his quickly-assembled coaching staff worked diligently to keep high-profile transfers Kerr Kriisa, RaeQuan Battle and Jesse Edwards at West Virginia. They were able to do just that and added several other transfers in Quinn Slazinski, Akok Akok, Noah Farrakhan and Jeremiah Bembry. There was also the addition of freshman forward Ofri Naveh, an Israel native discovered by first-year assistant coach Da’Sean Butler.
Nine of the 13 players on WVU’s roster are in their first season with the Mountaineers, and through 11 games, Eilert has yet to coach a contest with the luxury of having every player at his disposal.
Kriisa served a nine-game suspension to start his WVU career for receiving impermissible benefits during his time at Arizona.
Farrakhan missed the first nine games and Battle the first 10 as both were ineligible until a recent court ruling provided a preliminary injunction against the NCAA that prevents the organization from not allowing two-time transfers to play until at least the conclusion of the 2023-24 athletics season.
Akok collapsed in an exhibition against George Mason, preventing him from playing each of the first seven games.
With each of the four aforementioned transfers sidelined, it left Eilert with eight scholarship players and nine available bodies over the first month of the regular season.
The results, as could at least somewhat be expected, have been disappointing.
WVU has won 135 of 148 home non-conference games over the last 22 years, but is just 4-4 in such contests this season, including losses to Monmouth and Radford. The Mountaineers are winless in three games away from home, having lost neutral site matchups to SMU, Virginia and Massachusetts.
While Farrakhan and Kriisa each made their debut last Saturday against the Minutemen and Battle four days later in the loss to Radford, the Mountaineers are now without Edwards, a 6-foot-11 Syracuse transfer who was their most consistent performer over the first 10 games. Edwards underwent surgery Wednesday for a fractured right wrist and is out a minimum of four weeks.
That means for likely at least the team’s first 17 games, at least one scholarship player is out of action for the Mountaineers.
“Our staff will tell you this — I always knew that the challenge was great and I told coach Eilert that,” Baker said. “One of our last meetings, I said, ‘I almost feel guilty putting you in this position, because I knew how hard it was going to be.’ You have a lot of new players coming in, you have some guys that had been here. No matter if there was not a coaching change and who was coaching them, it was going to be a big coaching job when you take that many new people and a lot of them in their last year of eligibility that are coming here and most of them having aspirations to go pro. They don’t know each other and haven’t played together and you’re trying to get those guys to be a team.
“Just that would’ve been a monumental job and then you take the coaching change, transfer portal opening, some more roster fluctuations, not being able to get waivers for a couple of the kids, injuries, there was one that coach Eilert moved on from [guard Jose Perez] and it’s certainly been challenging. I go back to you can’t just judge because of all those things. When people push me wanting a number of wins for football before the season, it’s why I don’t give them a number. There are just too many things that go into all that.”
Earlier this week, before WVU’s one-point loss to Radford in the final seconds, Eilert was asked if there’s a way to fairly evaluate him in his first go-around as a head coach.
While the results are anything but favorable to this point, Eilert has faced an abundance of unordinary challenges one could argue has likely cost the Mountaineers at least a few additional victories.
“I just continue to take the approach that I’m going to make the best decisions possible for the people in this program I’m representing and continue to do the right thing,” Eilert said. “I know I’m representing a hard-working group of people in this state and 1.8 million people that go to work every day and grind. That’s the same approach I’m going to have. I’m going to represent this university the best way that I can and make good decisions. How they judge me on that, that’s totally up to someone else. I’m going to be true to my character and beliefs and the way I want to run things and do things the right way — and that’s all I can do.”