Box Score West Virginia concluded its regular season on Saturday afternoon with a 92-56 loss to Cincinnati at Fifth Third Arena in Cincinnati, Ohio.
 
The Bearcats shot 70% and scored the same number of points in the second half the Mountaineers scored for the entire game.
 
Thirteen different Cincinnati players got on the floor and 11 got into the scoring column, including guard Dan Skillings Jr., whose 17 points led all scorers. John Newman III tallied 14, Jamil Reynolds 13 and Simas Lukosius added 12 for UC, which avenges a Jan. 31 loss in Morgantown and improves to 18-13, 7-11.
 
This game was within range at halftime, WVU trailing 36-29, but the wheels came off in the second half. West Virginia coach Josh Eilert used all his timeouts with 10 minutes to go, but to no avail as the Bearcats got whatever they wanted whenever they wanted.
 
"I thought we played fairly well in the first half, down 14 before cutting it to seven, and there were a lot of positives there you could hang your hat on," Eilert said. "We have the ball coming out of the half and start to make a run, but nothing went our way."
 
Cincinnati scored 48 points in the paint, tallied 27 points off West Virginia's 16 turnovers and its bench outscored West Virginia's 48 to 20.
 
After RaeQuan Battle's jumper reduced Cincinnati's lead to five, 36-31, WVU managed to keep the margin to within 12 to 14 points until the 10-minute mark. After that, West Virginia quit scoring and Cincinnati didn't.
 
"The hardest thing is our defense," Eilert explained. "Whatever isolation situation they wanted they got it right at the rim."
 
Two substitution timeouts to get seldom-used backups into the game didn't slow Cincinnati down either. Landen Long's 3-pointer with 1:08 remaining gave Cincinnati a 34-point lead, and two free throws by Chase Kirkwood with 24 seconds left concluded the scoring.
 
For the game, Cincinnati shot 59% and scored on 67% of its 63 offensive possessions.
 
"It's a little bit of everything," Eilert said of his team's defensive struggles this season. "We don't have a whole lot of natural defenders on the floor so there are a lot of gaps, and we need a lot of help. Every time we tried to change the defense on them, they got what they wanted and there was no way to stop the bleeding."
 
Guard Noah Farrakhan was the only WVU player to reach double figures with 12 points.
 
Center Jesse Edwards, coming off a career-high 36 points against TCU and scoring 25 versus the Bearcats earlier this year, finished with eight points and four rebounds in just 18 minutes of action.
 
West Virginia ends the regular season with a 9-22 overall record and a 4-14 mark in Big 12 play.
 
"We'll see how we respond," Eilert said. "If we don't have a bad taste in our mouths for three straight days and we don't compete at the highest level on Tuesday, then we've got to look at ourselves in the mirror and figure out if we really want to play the game of basketball."
 
With Kansas State's upset win against Iowa State earlier today, these two teams will meet again in Kansas City on Tuesday afternoon at 2 p.m. in the opening round of the Big 12 Tournament at the T-Mobile Center.