West Virginia finishes job against No. 15 Auburn, 80-77

There was a five-game losing streak.

But now, after beating Auburn up for the first half and then hanging on for a thrilling 80-77 victory in a sold-out Coliseum to open the last SEC/Big 12 Challenge, the Mountaineers have won three of their past four games, two of those victories against ranked opponents and, perhaps most important, have gotten Erik Stevenson back from the walking dead.

After six straight games in which he felt he had trouble hitting the backboard or the rim with his suddenly absent shooting, the Mountaineers’ high-scoring guard game to life with his best career performance to bury No. 15 Auburn under a 31-point barrage that included 10-of-17 shooting from the floor while hitting 7 of 10 3s.

For good measure he added six rebounds and three assists.

Backed by a huge game from center Jimmy Bell Jr., who rose to the occasion to score 15 points with seven rebounds, the Mountaineers are now at 13-8 and feel perched ready to make a run through the second half of the conference season.

“We need it bad. Looking at our record, we need every win we can get,” guard Keddy Johnson admitted.

The victory got the Big 12 off to a spectacular start in the Challenge, considering they had boasted all year of being America’s best conference. A victory by unranked WVU, in which it built a 16-point halftime lead, over the No. 15 team in the nation did nothing to diminish that boast.

Then when Oklahoma, unranked and like WVU 2-6 in Big 12 play, buried Alabama, the top SEC team and the nation’s No. 2-ranked school, by 93-69, few were doubting just which conference was the best.

While WVU had to hold its breath on a last-second 3-point shot from Auburn’s Wendell Green Jr. to avoid overtime, this just showed that the Mountaineers are now rolling.

The last four games have produced a 74-65 victory over No. 14 TCU, a 76-61 on the road at Texas Tech, this win over Auburn and a 71-65 loss to No. 7 Texas.

Even if you go back one game further WVU’s one-point 77-76 road loss doesn’t look so bad, considering it came at the hands of the same Oklahoma team that crushed Alabama.

“Maybe we have that feeling that our backs are against the wall a little bit,” Stevenson said of the late surge. “It’s getting to be the time of the year where if you win games, it really helps you, especially in this league.

“It doesn’t surprise me we’re beating ranked teams. We should be a ranked team. There are teams that I see ranked above us and I keep thinking there’s no way they can beat us if we play the way we can play,” Stevenson continued.

“We’ve had some inconsistency and it starts with me scoring the ball. It trickles down. They see me not performing and there’s a trickle effect, just like if you see Huggs in a mood, it is going to trickle down. That’s how it is.

“This doesn’t surprise me that we won. It does surprise me we won by three. I thought we should have won by 20.”

They might have had they played the second half as they had the first, but the instinct to put it away wasn’t there.

“When you have the opportunity to step on people’s throats, so to speak, you should do it but we didn’t do that,” coach Bob Huggins said on his radio show. “We came out and didn’t play near as hard in the second half and it caught up with us.”

After Stevenson had scored 21 in the first half, Auburn took control of a game but then never could take the lead in the game.

It finally got down to the final 3 minutes and Auburn was having its way completely, the score down to 68-67.

WVU needed a phone booth and someone to step out of it and that was Stevenson, who launched a difficult 3 while a player was on him, an off-balance shot that went through.

Auburn quickly got the three points back, so WVU went into a time out again up 1 ... but not for long.

The Mountaineers ran a play out of the time out for Stevenson and considering he felt that every shot was “like throwing the ball in the ocean” he buried seventh 3s of the game.

Now Auburn could only scratch away and foul and WVU had answers, one of them coming from the emerging sophomore big man James Okonkwo, who earlier in the game had blocked an Auburn shot four rows back into the stands. He would grab a couple of big rebounds and make two important free throws as the Mountaineers iced a memorable victory.