Three Points: WVU vs. St. John’s

Three points is our quick recap of events here at The Mountain Top. Each point will be noted by an awesome Roman numeral, which are so much cooler than like, regular numbers.

I. Jamie Smalligan: This guy is becoming less and less of a factor for every Big East game. I never understood why coaches start a guy, then he plays less than say 20 minutes. Smalligan played 5 minutes in this game, and has absolutely no statistical line. I guess it’s nice for Huggins to give deference to the senior but he might as well not even be on the team at this point. He’s played 58 minutes in five Big East games and contributed 5 points, 12 rebounds. In fact he’s only scored 49 points all season. I knew his role might be limited under Huggins, but I had no idea it would be this limited.

II. Matchup zone:I love the matchup 1-3-1 look that WVU has gone to this year. It’s not the Beilein 1-3-1 with the point guard running the baseline, but teams really seem to have a hard time against us in this defense. Wellington Smith usually gets in the middle and is able to cut off any penetration. The only thing I didn’t like out of this set was we gave us a few offensive rebounds that we need not.

III. John Flowers: Flowers is definitely contributing to this team right now. You have to remember this guy was a Beilein recruit. For all the crap our fans gave Coach B over recruiting, I think Flowers, Joe Alexander, and Da’Sean Butler, and to some extent Alex Ruoff could play for any school in the Big East. Flowers last night in 15 minutes scores 10 points, including 2 treys, added 3 rebounds, 2 blocks and a steal. He had an offensive efficiency rating of 15, second highest for last night’s game, and for the season his rating is 7.7 which is just behind our 5 “real starters” (remove Smalligan, add Smith.) If we can get that from him every night this season then we will do great in the conference portion of the schedule.

p.s. You should probably get really familiar with Ken Pomeroy’s statistical breakdowns as I am definitely a disciple.

Pitt DC Paul Rhoads to Auburn

If that doesn’t strike fear into the hearts of Mountaineer fans, I don’t know what does. First off, if you’ve been living in a cave, WVU and Auburn will face off in a huge non-conference match-up in the second week of next season. In fact, NBC Sports’ John Walters already named this as the fourth biggest non-conference pairing of 2008.

Auburn just lost defensive coordinator Will Muschamp to Texas. Muschamp is a great, young up-and-coming coach, in fact I wanted WVU to consider him for the head coaching spot (No indications that they did such.) Now they will replace Muschamp with Rhoads, that’s right, the same Rhoads whose Pitt defense ate West Virginia’s lunch in Morgantown on December 1. I’m confident that Auburn’s defense has a lot more talent than Pitt’s, which could spell a lot more trouble than we originally thought in this matchup. At least with the game early in the season, Rhoads’ effects on the Tigers defense could be minimized somewhat. I’m not just slurping up Rhoads, he’s been at Pitt a long time and WVU put up some huge games on them in the past, but this year’s Pitt game has to be chalked up to more than just jitters from WVU’s offense…Pitt was able to shut us down for most of the game.

You have to wonder what propelled Rhoads to leave Pitt at this juncture, he has been there seven or eight years, he is basically the number two guy, he was de-facto head coach when Wanny was in press box after he blew out his knee. Pitt is clearly a program on the rise (It pains me to say that, but also realize that when you hit bottom up is the only way to go.) And now Rhoads is gone, who is going to run that Pitt defense? Just seems like bad timing for Rhoads, but we all know that timing isn’t really a consideration in the coaching carousel.