Box Score By Jerry Hill
Baylor Bear Foundation
MORGANTOWN, W. Va. - Winning any Big 12 road game - not to even mention beating a top-15 team before a raucous crowd of 14,069 at their place - "you've got to have your whole `A' game."
Clearly, the 15th-ranked Baylor Bears didn't.
West Virginia held Baylor's senior trio of Lester Medford, Rico Gathers and Taurean Prince to a dismal 21.7 percent shooting from the field and got a season-high 20 points from Daxter Miles Jr., as the 14th-ranked Mountaineers took over sole possession of first place in the Big 12 with an 80-69 win Wednesday night before a packed house at WVU Coliseum.
"We've got to defend when we're not scoring well enough," said Baylor coach Scott Drew, whose team fell to 17-6 overall and tied for fifth in the Big 12 at 6-4, losing back-to-back games for the first time this season. "But you're not going to win many games in the Big 12 (with your seniors) going 8-for-37."
Gathers, in particular, struggled. The 6-8 senior forward averaged 16 points and 12 rebounds in last year's three-game sweep of West Virginia, but was just 1-of-9 from the field and finished with five points and seven boards in 25 minutes. WVU's 6-9 junior forward Devin Williams dominated inside with 16 points and seven rebounds and also had a nice pair of assists.
"When those two collide, that's Richter-scale stuff. That's two grown men going at it," Drew said. "We didn't do a good enough job getting Rico the ball. A lot of his shots came off offensive rebounds, so now you've got two or three guys around you. Some of that was West Virginia's pressure didn't allow us to get him the ball. But we've got to do a better job of that as coaches."
In a back-and-forth game early, the lead changed hands six times in the first 10 minutes, and neither team led by more than five until Miles drained a 3-pointer and Tarik Phillip banked one in from outside the arc.
Nathan Adrian, who had 11 points and nine rebounds filling in for suspended starter Jonathan Holton, followed that up with a pair of free throws to give the Mountaineers (19-4, 8-2) a 38-29 lead at the break.
"We've just got to come out from the beginning and do what we do," said junior wing Ishmail Wainright, who was 4-of-5 from the field and scored 11 points for his career high in a Big 12 game. "We've got the crazy zone, and it wasn't crazy in the first half. The second half, we picked it up thanks to King (McClure), Jake (Lindsey), TJ (Maston) and (Johnathan Motley). We just didn't start fast."
With the Bears hitting just one of their first 10 shots in the first five minutes of the second half, West Virginia extended its lead to 51-36 on a Miles trey. The Mountaineers reeled off another seven straight points, going up 62-43 on a Williams jumper and prompting Drew to burn a timeout with 9:21 left.
Much like the 74-67 loss at Oregon earlier this season, the bench sparked an inspired comeback that just came up short.
Trailing by 19, Drew sat both Gathers and Prince and "got a great lift" from McClure, Lindsey, Motley and Maston, who had 10 points and five rebounds in just eight minutes.
"Geez," Drew said of Maston, "you can't do much better than that."
Medford hit a floater, sandwiched around inside buckets by Motley and Maston, cutting the deficit back to 15. In a bizarre exchange that saw Maston hit with a technical foul after getting fouled by Jevon Carter, who was slung to the ground as the two battled for the ball, the Bears traded two-for-one, then got within 12 on a Lindsey layup off a steal by McClure.
Adrian's 3-pointer from the corner put a huge dent in Baylor's comeback hopes, but layups by Al Freeman and Maston and a McClure 3-pointer trimmed it to a single-digit deficit, 68-60, with 3:03 still to play.
"In the huddle, Coach just told us to keep fighting," said McClure, who tied his career high and matched Wainright's game-high with 11 points. "It's a game of runs, so we're going to go on a run and they're going to go on a run. It just came down to getting stops. The first half, we didn't get stops. The second half, we started getting stops and we were able to get the lead down, little by little.
Miles came up big again with a shot clock-beating jumper that pushed it back to a 10-point lead with 2 ½ minutes left. McClure blamed himself for a pair of quick fouls late in the game, but the Bears also missed six of their last seven shots after getting within 74-67 on a Wainright 3-pointer.
"We wanted to get it to single digits to give ourselves a chance to win, and that's what we did," Drew said. "Credit them for executing down the stretch, not turning it over and giving us a chance to get a four- or six-point run."
While the seniors struggled, Baylor's bench was an efficient 9-of-12 shooting from the field and finished with 28 points, five assists and only two turnovers. The Bears turned it over just 10 times against "Press Virginia" and also won the rebounding battle, 41-34, but it still wasn't enough.
Baylor goes back to the road to face Kansas State (14-9, 3-7) at 7:15 p.m. Wednesday in Manhattan. The Wildcats, who had lost four of their last six, knocked off top-ranked Oklahoma, 80-69, Saturday night at Bramlage Coliseum.
"I'll call (K-State coach Bruce Weber) and see if he wants to come to our place, but I doubt he will," Drew said. "Anybody you play on the road in the Big 12 is tough, but you definitely don't want to be on a losing streak and try to snap it on the road. That's hard to do."
