The amazing effort West Virginia put forth Tuesday night in defeating top-ranked Kansas didn’t just happen on the court.

 

It began about three hours before the game when a snow squall hit Morgantown right during rush hour. Several WVU players were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic waiting to get to the arena and Jaysean Paige, who scored a game-high 26 points against the Jayhawks, was getting worried that he might not make it in time.

 

So Paige and teammate Tarik Phillip decided to jump out of their car and make a run for it up the hill to the Coliseum.

 

“We were debating whether to sit in the car or not. Long story short, I saw big Jon (Holton) running up the hill and so I jumped out of the car and started running with him,” Paige explained. “I had my jacket, big old boots and my shoes, so people knew who we were. We were just running trying to get there.”

 

Being late was certainly understandable considering the circumstances, but Paige didn’t want to take any chances – not with what was at stake on Tuesday night.

 

“For a game like this you want to be here,” he explained. “You don’t want to miss this. You don’t want to be late and might not play, or something might happen, so we just wanted to get here on time.”

 

Tarik Phillip’s mother, who was sitting in the back seat because she doesn’t like driving in the snow, ended up taking the wheel and getting the car to the Coliseum.

 

“She had to drive when we took off,” Paige laughed.

 

Effort like that can take a basketball team a long way. No, West Virginia doesn’t have a roster full of NBA talent such as Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky or Michigan State, but the Mountaineers do have a bunch of guys willing to give everything they have for 40 minutes each night they are out on the floor.

 

Effort can sometimes trump a team’s shortcomings, and it showed on Tuesday night against Kansas. How does a team that shoots only 33.3 percent beat the No. 1 team in the country by 11 points?

 

By getting nearly every 50-50 ball and being relentless on the glass, that’s how.

 

West Virginia’s offensive rebounding led to several second-chance scoring opportunities and some critical possessions late in the game when Kansas was trying to make a comeback.

 

And that full-court press – “Press Virginia” – forced 22 Kansas turnovers, which was a contributing factor in the Jayhawks shooting 35.7 percent from inside of 3.

 

“Every man was accountable for their actions tonight,” said Holton, the point man in West Virginia’s pressure defense. “I didn’t score the ball that much but my offensive rebounds helped us get extra possessions. (Daxter Miles Jr.) didn’t score the ball that well but his effort … that offensive rebound he got and then passed the ball to Esa (Ahmad) for the and-one that put the game to where we were like, ‘OK, we’ve got a great chance to win this game.’”

 

Devin Williams, sporting a five-inch-long scratch on his shoulder that he earned during Monday's practice, concurred.

 

“That’s the way we play – ‘Press Virginia.’ They had 22 turnovers tonight. We were all over the floor,” he said. “Me and Jon Holton controlled the boards. Tarik and them were aggressive up top, just everything. We laid it out. I’m actually tired, so I can only imagine how they feel.”

 

When you beat No. 1 a lot of things have to go right. And things did go right for WVU, but a lot of that was because of West Virginia’s doing. The Mountaineers were the aggressors and they took it to Kansas from the opening tip to the final horn.

 

“The game, in a nutshell, is that they were so much more aggressive and quicker,” said KU coach Bill Self. “They were way more athletic than we were and played above the rim. We didn’t do any of that. They beat us off the bounce whenever they wanted to and exposed our perimeter defense.

 

“There were a lot of things that we didn’t do well, but if we just talk about how poorly we played it takes away from the credit that West Virginia deserves for really getting after us and causing us to play that way.”

 

That is a direct reflection on Bob Huggins for getting his team to buy in and play this way - an underdog, blue-collar style West Virginians can certainly appreciate and identify with. Huggins obviously didn’t have that in his program three years ago, so he set out to change the culture of the team, and that attitude adjustment has probably been far more important than any schematic changes he decided to make.

 

Holton explains.

 

“We’ve got a very, very, very great coach,” he said. “Our coach is like one of a kind. He’s going to keep you motivated and he’s going to make you work hard. It’s never an option to work hard. As soon as you step on the floor you’re going to work hard and you’re going to give it your all because you don’t want to let your teammates down because over time you build up like family.”

 

A family that is playing for each other, playing together, and most importantly, playing relentlessly with great passion and effort.

 

That’s been West Virginia’s formula for success the last two seasons, and it was certainly on display Tuesday night.