Box Score Emanuel Miller's 18 points led four double-figure scorers in TCU's 77-67 victory over West Virginia Monday night at Schollmaier Arena in Fort Worth, Texas.
Mike Miles tallied 15, Chuck O'Bannon had 11 and Damion Baugh and Xavier Cork contributed 10 points each for TCU, which improves to 17-8, 6-7 and gets back on track toward Selection Sunday.
"They ran by us like we were standing on the curb," West Virginia coach
Bob Huggins said. "We need to find out who wants to finish this year and who doesn't and I think we will be way, way better off with the guys who want to finish."
The Horned Frogs built an 11-point first half lead before WVU went on a 10-0 run over the remaining 4:24 to close out the half.
But the second half was a repeat of the second halves West Virginia has had since the Kansas loss 12 games ago on Jan. 15. The Mountaineers had only four field goals over the first eight minutes and the score didn't change much once TCU got up by seven.
The only points generated during a long five-minute stretch came at the free throw line – two each from Miles and West Virginia's
Pauly Paulicap.
Seth Wilson's layup with 7:22 left ended the Mountaineers' scoring drought and reduced TCU's lead to five, but the Horned Frogs scored the next five to take a 10-point lead.
TCU's biggest lead was 13 with 2:50 remaining.
"The story of the whole season - we didn't come out and play in the second half," said West Virginia guard
Taz Sherman, who scored a game-high 23 points. "We didn't rebound and we didn't defend well in either half, in my opinion. We've just got to do better."
West Virginia shot 45.6% - 5 percentage points higher than its season shooting average – because it shot 54.8% in the first half. The second half saw the Mountaineers connect on only 9 of 26, including 1 of 5 from 3-point distance.
"I'm as frustrated as anybody and I'm wondering if we have some guys who maybe don't really want to be here," Huggins said. "If this plus-minus thing is worth anything, we've got one starter at minus-11, another starter minus-15, our first guy off the bench is minus-13 and then a minus-9, which means we were outscored by that many when they were in the game."
WVU was also nearly doubled up on the glass, 42 to 24. Thirteen of TCU's rebounds came on the offensive glass leading to 14 second chance points. The Frogs converted WVU's 11 turnovers into 18 fast-break points.
TCU also outscored the Mountaineers 40-28 in the paint despite not having 6-foot-11 center Eddie Lumpkin, who injured his knee in last Saturday's Baylor loss and was sitting on the bench in street clothes for tonight's game.
"We get absolutely slaughtered on the glass, 42 to 24, and that has never, ever happened to one of my teams," Huggins said.
Sherman scored his 1,000
th point in the first half and he now shows 1,006, which moves him past Leland Byrd (1,000) and Patrick Beilein (1,001) into 53
rd place on the school's all-time scoring list.
Sherman was 7 of 12 shooting in the first half before cooling off to 3 of 7 after intermission.
Kedrian Johnson was the only other Mountaineer player to reach double figures with 12.
"I don't like losing and I've never lost like this personally," a frustrated Sherman said afterward. "It's difficult because you want win for yourself, you want to win for the coaching staff and everybody rooting for you and your family. You've got everybody watching you constantly hoping you are going to do better and we aren't. Losing 11 out of 12 games means something's wrong and we've got to fix it right now."
Second-leading scorer
Sean McNeil did not score for the first time in a game this season.
"They went strong to the goal and we didn't," Huggins said. "It's really a sad state of affairs when our strongest guy driving at the goal is our smallest guy Keedy - but he did take it strong."
Tonight's victory was only TCU's fourth-ever against West Virginia and all four have come in Fort Worth.
The loss drops West Virginia's record to 14-13, 3-11.
The Mountaineers remain on the road to play at Iowa State on Wednesday night.
"We're going to go back to the hotel, get up, go to the bus and fly to Des Moines, take the bus from Des Moines to Ames and hopefully get into the gym before we play a must-win game (Wednesday night)," Huggins said. "Then we come home and play Texas and then after that we have Oklahoma. We still have opportunities, but we're not getting the leadership that we need to get.
"We've got to try and fight through this," Huggins concluded.