MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The younger fans and the Johnny Come Latelys were not too thrilled about West Virginia's three-game sweep at Texas to conclude the regular season and its subsequent two losses to Texas Tech and Oklahoma State in the Big 12 Tournament during its nine-day tour of the Lone Star State.
 
West Virginia fell 15 spots from a program-best No. 7 in the USA Today Coaches' Poll on May 15 to No. 22 in the latest poll out yesterday in advance of this weekend's NCAA Tournament.
 
Some of the social media chatter I read last weekend probably requires a little perspective from someone who has acquired some of that through the years, so here goes.
 
Before Randy Mazey got to Morgantown, getting ONE win against any of the teams West Virginia lost to during its recent five-game skid would have been considered a major accomplishment for the Mountaineers.
 
As Mazey said yesterday afternoon after learning his team was meeting Indiana this Friday night in an NCAA Tournament first-round game at Kentucky Proud Park in Lexington, Kentucky, "It's really hard to make a regional at West Virginia."
 
Coach, you ain't kidding!
 
Every pitch, every at bat, every out, every inning and every game are hard against the competition West Virginia is facing these days.
 
There are no more West Liberties, Slippery Rocks, Charlestons, Frostburg States, Fairmont States, A-Bs (Alderson-Broaddus) and Duquesnes on the Mountaineer baseball schedule.
 
Duquesne once had a head coach who used to come to the games wearing khaki pants and after he was done with the burden of making out his lineup card, he sat outside the dugout in a foldup lawn chair. No kidding. I saw it with my own two eyes. That's how you rack up 73 wins and just 10 losses against one team, including a 45-3 record in conference play, and have pitchers throw no-hitters and batters hit over .400 for the season.
 
One year, I watched Coppin State bring nine players to Hawley Field in a van parked outside the outfield fence and used three different pitchers, each one walking off the mound when he got tired and handing the ball to a teammate out in the field. The Mountaineers scored 34 runs, 19 in one inning alone, and won the game 34-4. The contest was mercifully euthanized after the top of the seventh inning.
 
This is not ancient history.
 
West Virginia went 21 years between regional bids from 1996 until Mazey's team ended the long drought in 2017, and this year marks just the 14^th tournament appearance in its history. Three of those have come under Mazey's leadership.
 
Connecticut, which plays in a much more challenging climate than West Virginia, has been to the tournament 23 times, including five straight appearances heading into this weekend. Boston College, in a similar situation as Connecticut, made a Super Regional in 2016.
 
West Virginia used to battle those two teams when all of them were together in the Big East, by the way.
 
Mazey loves to tell the story about sitting in the dugout and watching 11^th-ranked Texas getting off the bus and walking down to Hawley Field for the first time. Texas coach Augie Garrido, who won five national championships and nearly 2,000 games during his storied career, was forced to stand in line behind West Virginia fans waiting to use the restroom between innings. And Mountaineer fans were not about to give up their place in line for him either!
 
Longhorn legend Roger Clemens hung out behind the fence down the right-field line signing autographs for three straight days, and the Texas announcers broadcasting the game nearly had a panic attack trying to figure out how they were going to fit all their equipment in Hawley Field's tiny press box. I'm pretty sure they didn't.
 
Nine years later, West Virginia shared a Big 12 regular season title with those Longhorns.
 
There's more.
 
When it became clear that West Virginia was going to join the Big 12 back in 2012, the baseball coaches in the league were not pleased. The conference was trying to keep pace with the SEC and bringing in a program that had finished better than 100 in the RPI just once from 1999-2012 was not going to be a positive development for the league.
 
Then, of course, there was the aforementioned Hawley Field, which looked great to St. Peter's when they came in here for an NCAA Tournament play-in game in 1994. That was the year the Atlantic 10 Conference lost its automatic bid and those two victories needed to make the NCAA regional in Coral Gables, Florida, were helpful to West Virginia in securing a school-record 40 wins that season.
 
Before 1996, when West Virginia joined the Big East, the Mountaineers had never played in a conference with more than one team getting an NCAA Tournament bid. During all those years of Mountaineer success in the Southern Conference, the only ticket to the national tournament was punched by winning the league.
 
There were several times when West Virginia reached NCAA play and did not face a single team in the tournament field during the regular season. That's a big reason why the Mountaineers went two and barbeque in 1985 and 1987; they just weren't prepared during the regular season to compete against the teams they were facing.
 
That finally changed in 1994 when WVU played three teams during the regular season – Tennessee, Kent State and Virginia Tech – that reached the NCAA Tournament. Two years later, WVU faced four that made the dance, including conference member Notre Dame, which it defeated in the Big East Tournament to get in. West Virginia upset Tennessee and Georgia Southern and was 2-0 facing the Clemson Tigers for the right to go to Omaha, yet if West Virginia had lost the Big East championship game to the Irish, the Mountaineers are not even in Clemson, South Carolina, playing baseball that weekend.
 
That was the first year West Virginia ever played in a baseball league that got multiple members in the NCAA Tournament. The Big East got three teams into the tournament in 1999 and matched that in 2000, 2001, 2007, 2010 and 2011 when Louisville's program took off.
 
Three NCAA Tournament bids have been the MINIMUM for the Big 12 since West Virginia began playing in 2013. Seven Big 12 teams (out of nine) got into the NCAA Tournament in 2017, and six made it this year.
 
Mazey has now taken three West Virginia teams to the dance - and it very easily could have been four or five. When West Virginia got left out last year, the Mountaineers won 14 conference games and boasted an RPI of 49. Incidentally, Oklahoma made the NCAA Tournament this year with an 11-13 Big 12 record.
 
In 2016, West Virginia finished above .500 in conference play, won 14 of its last 17 games and fell 11-10 in 10 innings in the Big 12 championship game to TCU, which reached the College World Series before bowing out to Coastal Carolina in the national semifinals.
 
In 2014, WVU played one of the most difficult schedules in school history, and despite finishing the year 28-26, had an RPI of 38. 
 
Mazey's first Mountaineer team in 2013 surprised everyone by posting a 13-11 Big 12 record and winning its final game of the season against 14^th-ranked Oklahoma State in the conference tournament. The Big 12 then was using a pod format and West Virginia failed to qualify for the championship series, won by Oklahoma.
 
West Virginia was also in contention for an NCAA bid in 2020 with an RPI of 18 before COVID-19 shut down the season.
 
"Don't underemphasize how big a deal it is for the Mountaineers to get an at-large bid," Mazey pointed out Monday. "Getting into the tournament is super, super difficult. There are a lot of good teams that get left out."
 
Since 2015, when WVU finished with an RPI of 107, the Mountaineers have been in the RPI top 75 every year. That 2015 team was Mazey's only one at West Virginia to finish outside the top 100.
 
Mazey's Mountaineers have now won 48 times against ranked opponents, and WVU's history in the USA Today Coaches' Poll starts and ends with Randy Mazey. All 16 times West Virginia has been ranked have occurred during Mazey's watch, including this week's No. 22 rating.
 
So, yes, taking a five-game losing streak into the NCAA Tournament is by no means ideal, but it's also not unprecedented when you are playing a big-time college baseball schedule. Lose five in a row to Connecticut, Morehead State and St. John's, as West Virginia once did, then you can sound the alarm.
 
Mazey points out that West Virginia was the only team in major college baseball over the last two years to avoid a three-game losing streak until two weeks ago, and he also brought up Duke's crawl to the finish line in 2019.
 
The Blue Devils, that year, dropped eight out of their last 11 games before the NCAA Tournament, and then promptly came to Morgantown and won the regional.
 
Mazey said his players hit the reset button when they found out they were getting into the NCAA Tournament. His guys also got a couple of extra night's rest in their own beds following a nine-day trip to Texas.
 
Now, they are about to get on a bus for a trip down to Lexington, Kentucky. The 12^th-overall-seeded Wildcats are the favorites to advance, but Mazey says anyone can win the regional. He knows. He won one once when he coached at East Carolina.
 
"You try to win the first inning of the first game and to do that, you try and get your leadoff guy on," he explained. "If you are on the mound when it starts, then you try and get the first guy out.
 
"We've gotten to where we've gotten because we focus on processes and not results," Mazey concluded.
 
First pitch for Friday night's game against the Hoosiers is slated for 7 p.m. The contest will be televised on ESPN+.