Box Score MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – There is some fight left in these West Virginia Mountaineers after all.
Coming off perhaps the worst performance in coach
Bob Huggins' 12-year tenure at his alma mater on Tuesday night at TCU, West Virginia scored the game's final seven points to stun seventh-ranked Kansas 65-64 here at the WVU Coliseum this afternoon.
It was the Mountaineers' first Big 12 victory of the season after dropping their first five games, including an embarrassing 31-point defeat at TCU four days ago.
This afternoon,
Jermaine Haley's driving basket with 8.5 seconds left put West Virginia ahead 65-64. At the other end of the floor, Kansas got two shot attempts to win it - one from Lagerald Vick from the corner with a second remaining and the other a follow-up try by Dedric Lawson that glanced off the front of the rim before the horn sounded.
"Dedric didn't have a chance," Kansas coach Bill Self said afterward. "He had more time, and I think he shot with about one or one-and-one-half second left so he probably could have gathered it."
The Jayhawks (15-3, 4-2) missed five straight shots down the stretch to blow a six-point lead with 2:23 remaining.
After Marcus Garrett's layup made it 64-58, a
Wesley Harris 3 from the wing sliced Kansas' lead in half. Then, a Garrett missed jumper at the other end led to
Derek Culver's basket with 1:26 left.
Two 30-second timeouts called by Self, the first coming with 1:16 remaining after the Culver score and the other occurring with 44 seconds to go, both resulted in empty possessions.
"They were awful plays," Self said. "It was my fault. I shouldn't have called timeout. I thought with the broken floor and you're down one, I thought for sure we'd drive it."
Following the first timeout, Garrett couldn't get his driving layup over Culver to go down but he stole the ball back when Culver tried to pass the ball backwards to a teammate.
Here, Self called a second timeout to draw up something better.
But what Kansas ended up getting was a wild 3-point try by Vick from the corner that ended up in Haley's hands along the baseline.
Haley got the ball back on the wing, maneuvered to his right and drove past Quentin Grimes to put in the winning shot off the glass.
"It was an isolation freeze so we tried to draw it to him close or draw help," Huggins said of Haley's winning basket. "We've been on Jermaine to just drive it at the basket. They were trying to take Derek away from the high post, so it opened a lane for him to drive."
"Honestly, coach kind of just let us go out and play," Haley said. "We could have got any kind of look. Obviously I had a smaller guy on me and I just got into the lane and got a good shot up on the rim."
Huggins said he chose not to call timeout on his team's final offensive possession because he didn't want to give Self an opportunity to organize his defense.
"I didn't want Bill to switch something," Huggins explained. "What we were doing was working, and we were getting kind of what we wanted, so there wasn't much sense to call timeout."
The Jayhawks, which have lost five of seven here at the Coliseum, stumbled through a first half that saw them shoot just 37 percent from the floor and commit 13 turnovers, resulting in a 23-23 tie at halftime.
"I didn't think we were very good offensively, and I don't want to speak for them, but we weren't very good," Huggins said. "We turned it over eight times at halftime and we ended up with 13. If you want to look at a stat sheet the 13 turnovers is why we won. We had 13 and they had 18."
Kansas began to warm up early in the second half when Devon Dotson, Grimes and Vick knocked down open 3s to give it a 38-34 lead, but back-to-back Ahmad 3s at the other end got the lead back for the Mountaineers, 40-39.
A Grimes 3, a Garrett Layup and a Dedric Lawson basket advanced the Kansas margin back to five, 47-42, before Culver, who finished with 11 points and seven rebounds, followed Harris' miss and was fouled by Garrett on the play.
The freshman's traditional three-point play pulled West Virginia to within two, and then Haley tied it at 47 when he followed Bolden's missed layup.
West Virginia (9-9, 1-5) won the game because it held on to the basketball and didn't stand around on the perimeter and jack up contested 3s that have frequently led to fast break opportunities for the opposition during the five-game losing streak.
"I've said all along we are talented enough that we shouldn't be where we are in the league standings," Huggins said. "We've stubbed our toe with some dumb things and as
Derek Culver continues to get better and better that gives us a presence in there."
The Mountaineers tried just three triples in the first half, choosing instead to pass the basketball and look for shots closer to the rim.
In the second half, when the game began to open up a little bit, West Virginia was able to convert five-of-11 from 3-point range, mostly on step-in shots.
In addition to Ahmad's two 3s (he was shooting 20 percent from 3 coming into today's game), the Mountaineers also got big second-half triples from
Chase Harler, Harris and Bolden.
"I think it was important us hitting those 3s," Huggins said.
Haley scored 13 points on five-of-five shooting to lead the Mountaineers. Bolden, suffering from the flu, came off the bench to contribute 12 while Culver added 11.
Dedric Lawson and Garrett contributed 15, while Vick added 13 for Kansas.
Kansas committed 18 turnovers and shot just 43.6 percent from the floor.
The Mountaineers shot 46.3 percent from the floor, turned it over just 13 times and outscored Kansas' bench 28-4.
"I thought both teams played hard," Huggins said. "We didn't do a very good job rebounding it for a while and they kind of took advantage of it and then we kind of started rebounding it better. We got a great effort from a lot of guys."
Today's triumph was West Virginia's first Quadrant 1 victory of the season and only its second win over a Power 5 program, the other coming against Pitt here at the Coliseum back on Dec. 8.
"I felt a different vibe before the game," Haley said. "Everybody was extremely locked in from the coaching staff down to the players and I'm just glad that we came out on top today."
A crowd of 12,657 watched today's game, with many of the WVU students rushing the floor afterward to celebrate the victory and sing "Take Me Home, Country Roads."
West Virginia has little time to enjoy this one, however, with a 9 p.m. Monday night matchup against Baylor looming.
