West Virginia - No Rearview Mirror

BUFFALO - Bob Huggins - as he is prone to remind you - was born and bred in West Virginia.
He understands the state. It’s love affair with West Virginia athletics. Mountaineer fans live and die with each victory and defeat.
Particularly with those celebrated - like Friday’s 77-50 NCAA Tournament victory over Morgan State - and suffered by a West Virginia basketball team now driven to excellence by Huggins, the native son, after a long soujorn at the University of Cincinnati and a brief stopover at Kansas State.
And so you knew - without seeing Huggins pulling a Frank Martin during an animated time out with the Mountaineers down 10-1 - how much the way West Virginia opened its first game of the NCAA Tournament East Regional here hurt.
“It’s West Virginia’s team,” Huggins said. “We had more people come to Morgantown to see the games than ever before in history. I think they have wrapped their arms around the team.”
Even the most faithful of the West Virginia faithful, however, had to be throwing their hands in the air and beseeching the heavens as the Mountainers missed their first 10 shots. How they fell behind this upstart No. 15 seed from Baltimore 10-0 and didn’t score a basket until only 12 minutes, 16 seconds remained in the first half.
Remember last year’s tournament, when sixth-seeded West Virginia lost in the first round to 11th-seeded Dayton 68-60? Could it happen again, with the Mountaineers a No. 2 NCAA Tournament seed and having complained as to why they were not a No. 1 seed after winning the Big East Tournament.
West Virginia star Da’Sean Butler swore it would not happen again.
“Pay attention to what’s in front of you, as opposed to looking down the road,” Butler said.
Not like last year.
“Everybody was like, oh, well, you guys, I can’t wait to see you guys play Kansas. And, I can’t wait to see you play Michigan State.”
Huggins said he didn’t need to preach the lesson of last season’s quick tournament ouster. He knew his players had been talking about it. But Bob Huggins had a folksy col’ West Virginia boyhood tale to explain why he refused to look back.
“I grew up in Midville,” Huggins said. “I got in this guy’s pick-up to go play one day. There was no rear-view mirror.
“I said, ‘You don’t have a rear-view mirror.’
“He said, ‘We ain’t going backwards, boy.’”
And perhaps that best explained why West Virginia, after trailing Morgan State 16-9 with 9:28 left in the first half, and 21-19 with 6:35 left in the first 20 minutes, then closed out the first half on a 19-6 run.
Why West Virginia merely poured it on in the second half. To advance to Sunday’s second round - against the winner of the Clemson-Missouri game set for later Saturday afternoon - with the roaring approval of more than a few quite vocal West Virginia fans at the HSBC Arena.
Kansas State fans likely would understand the mystic, the pride.
“It’s one of the reason I came,” said Butler, who with 9 points didn’t have a particularly good day. “There’s no NBA teams or any pro teams at all. There’s nothing really there except the college, the school. And everybody loves our school to death.
“We are it for them.”