What Josh Eilert Said Following the Loss to UCF

West Virginia University head coach Josh Eilert UCF postgame quick hits

The West Virginia Mountaineers (7-12, 2-4) fell to the UCF Knights (12-6, 3-3) Tuesday night 72-59.

Head coach Josh Eilert sat with WVU play-by-play caller Tony Caridi courtside and discussed the loss to the nights. 

Overall thoughts

It's hard in this league, especially as good as they are defensively to get a thing going. So, when you did that big of a hole, good luck trying to get out of it. I keep telling these guys, we got to fight, fight, fight to the bitter end. We're not going to quit by any means. But we got disconnected in so many ways. Offensively, defensively, we just weren't, clicking on all cylinders and working well together out there. A lot of it's discipline, and we'll continue to look at this stuff and try and learn from it but were out there and we're pretty disconnected and we got to fix that quick.

UCF’s physical play

I was worried about it. The games like this you look back to UMass game, you look back at the Houston game and I worry so much about freedom of movement. We're not the biggest strongest dude on the block, so that's the kind of a game they play. And if you don't have a lot of freedom of movement and you can't go downhill on people when they're hip checking you and steering you, it’s a hard game to create advantages but we had plenty opportunities. I kept on saying we got to get to the paint, kick out. I mean, he's got those two guys in there that can erase about anything down there low. So, let’s get him up in the air, let’s go up through him but let's dribble drive, lets kick and let's hit the open guy and keep that ball movement. And we didn't have that ball moment and we need to attack the defense like that.

Early turnovers

The biggest thing that stands out to me is those fast breakpoints. I mean, 24 to six, that's the difference in the game. They're getting easy buckets are going downhill and they're going downhill at a different pace and we're trying to go downhill. Credit to them.

I tell them all the time, ‘advantage goes to the aggressor,’ and by no means we we’re the aggressor. This is a really good environment they got going on here and they fed off their energy and they played down lay down, and we're going side to side. That was probably a difference in the game. They found a way to get easy buckets and we didn't come up with many.

Team + Individual Stats vs. UCF

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