MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – If this was 1993, Bob Huggins and his players would have had a basketball practice without a basketball early Sunday morning following last Saturday's uninspiring 85-80 loss to Oklahoma State.
 
But the 2021 Bob Huggins opted to give his guys a couple of days off to recharge their batteries and get refocused for the postseason.
 
"I've done a lot of things that I've never done before," Huggins said Tuesday morning before his team departed for Kansas City for the 2021 Phillips 66 Big 12 Championship. "If we had played that bad and that uninspired when I was younger, I would have run them right into the ground."
 
West Virginia's outstanding 2021 season that included 18 victories ran aground last Saturday afternoon following a five-point loss to the Cowboys – one of five defeats at the WVU Coliseum this year by two-possession margins or less.
 
Had West Virginia taken care of business, it would have been a No. 2 seed in this week's Big 12 Tournament and would have remained in contention for a No. 2 seed in next week's NCAA Tournament.
 
But it's clear the 10^th-ranked Mountaineers didn't have it last Saturday and didn't have it on Thursday night when it slept-walked through a 74-66 victory over TCU, part of a four-game week for the Mountaineers.
 
Huggins could tell while watching his team warm up before the Oklahoma State game they were in trouble.
 
"I'm standing out there watching our guys shoot the ball during warmups, and we didn't make any," he said. "We can talk about our defense being bad, but our defense has been bad all year. We did not make any shots, and when you don't guard, you better make shots."
 
Huggins continued.
 
"This has to be the highest scoring team we've had here in a while, but we have to score to win. Look at our shooting numbers. We had a guy who has just shot the leather off of it, and he didn't hit the rim twice," he admitted. "And it wasn't close. He missed by 2 feet twice. I don't know how you explain that, but I think a lot of it has to do with your mental preparation and how much you are into it from a mental side.
 
"I'd like to have answers," he added. "I'd like to be able to tell you something very intelligent, but I'd be making it up if I tried."
 
So instead of having track practice on Sunday going over all of the things they didn't do on Saturday, he let them get away from each other to do some soul searching.
 
Some guys were pretty worn down from the pandemic and the long season and welcomed the time off to heal their bodies and their minds before postseason play.
 
"I'm doing a lot better," sophomore guard Miles McBride said Tuesday. "Playing four games in seven days takes its toll on everybody, not just me, but we've had some time off here, and I'm ready to get rolling."
 
McBride said he took one day just to catch up on his sleep.
 
"I tried to take anything that I didn't need and put it away," he said. "I tried to stay off social media, too, but that's hard."
 
Freshman forward Jalen Bridges admits he's the type of person who dwells on his poor performances. Hitting the erase button was cleansing for him.
 
"I'm the type of person that I get in my own head a lot," he said. "That game against Oklahoma State, I didn't play well, and it was in my head. I shot after the game, and then I shot (Monday) after study hall, and that was really it. I tried to refresh my mind and stay in a positive mindset as we get into this stretch of the season."
 
The players realize another effort like the one they put forth last Saturday against the 12^th-ranked Cowboys will result in an early exit from the tournament.
 
Oklahoma State (18-7) is expected to be bolstered by the return of Big 12 Player of the Year Cade Cunningham, who sat out last Saturday's game with an ankle injury. Cunningham averaged 19.7 points per game this season.
 
Picking up the slack was freshman guard Avery Anderson, who scored a career-high 31 points against the Mountaineers.
 
"It's one and done," Huggins said. "If you don't bring your best game every time out, then you're back home watching the rest of the tournament on TV."
 
For whatever reason, West Virginia has actually played much better this year in foreign gyms. The Mountaineers are 10-3 away from the Coliseum as opposed to 8-5 in it.
 
Huggins said he has no idea why.
 
"A couple of guys said yesterday if we were allowed to have our normal 12 to 14,000 people in there, it gives them a lift," he said. "They say the fans really tend to pick them up. They're talking about when they go from the practice facility to the Coliseum people are cheering, yelling their names and getting excited for the game. Then, they go in the Coliseum and everybody is excited in there. I think that probably has something to do with it."
 
Bridges believes the guys are a bit more focused on the road away from all of the normal distractions they have here during the daytime in Morgantown.
 
"Other than your phone, you're cut off from your normal world," he admitted. "We're more comfortable at home than we are on the road. We don't have the same connections so we're always doing something together as a team. We, literally, are together 24/7 when we're at hotels. I don't know if that has anything to do with it, but if it has anything to do with it those are the reasons right there."
 
McBride said he enjoys going into another arena and quieting the crowd.
 
"I like going on the road a little bit better going into someone else's home and beating them," he said. "I think it means so much more when you can quiet their crowd down and kind of take a road win away."
 
The crowd, what's permitted to be inside the T-Mobile Center for the Big 12 tournament, will be mostly neutral this week so the motivation to perform will have to come from within.
 
That's what Huggins is hoping his guys took out of the couple of free days that he gave them earlier this week.
 
Junior forward Derek Culver said he has gotten the message.
 
"He just told us to get our heads together because this is the time when everything we've done for the whole season is what we're doing it for," he explained. "This is what we came here to do."
 
Thursday's game will tip off at 11:30 a.m. ET and will be televised on either ESPN or ESPN2. Bob Wischusen, Fran Fraschilla and Holly Rowe will handle the telecasts from Kansas City.
 
The Mountaineer Sports Network from Learfield IMG radio coverage on affiliates throughout West Virginia and online via WVUsports.com and the popular mobile app WVU Gameday will begin at 10:30 a.m.
 
The two teams split during the regular season with West Virginia overcoming a 19-point second half deficit to clip Oklahoma State 87-84 in Stillwater back on Jan. 4.
 
The winner will likely face the tournament's top seed Baylor on Friday in the semifinals at 6:30 p.m. ET.
 
WVU has reached the Big 12 Championship finals three out of the last four times and the semifinals in four straight. Last year's tournament was canceled because of COVID-19.