Josh Eilert addresses West Virginia's toughness vs. Iowa State

West Virginia head men’s basketball coach Josh Eilert wants his team to be tough. And he didn’t think they were tough enough against Iowa State in a 71-64 loss on Saturday.

Specifically, Eilert lamented how his team crumbled against ball pressure from the Cyclones. It was something he knew they needed to be ready for, and didn’t love how many turnovers and other issues it caused.

“Part of toughness is being able to face adversity and face that ball pressure,” Eilert said. “I didn’t think we did a very good job in that regard. The critical stat going into the game was, ‘OK, how are we going to handle their pressure?’ And would we turn it over? We went through a three-game span there, prior to UCF — Texas, TCU and Baylor — where we gave up almost 75 points in those three games combined off turnovers.”

On Saturday against the Cyclones, West Virginia gave up 23 turnovers and Iowa State generated 29 points from them.

It’s the type of thing that Eilert knows can’t happen, and feels a bit more toughness and poise could be the answer for.

“And that was going to be critical tonight and we didn’t take care of the ball and kind of lost our poise in some situations which led to the end result,” Eilert said. “So lost by seven, but they got 14 more shots than we did, 14 more field goals, and that’s hard to overcome on the road, especially as good a team as Iowa State is.”

In West Virginia’s most recent win vs. UCF, Eilert promised a different offensive plan

In West Virginia’s previous matchup against UCF in January, they found themselves getting dominated down low early, which resulted in a 72-59 road loss. But the second time around, Eilert anticipated things going differently for his Mountaineers — and they did.

“Well, Jesse (Edwards) didn’t play in the first game,” Eilert said. “So we’ll be playing with our full roster and playing at home, so that certainly should help. And it should help from the rebounding perspective [and] it should help from the physicality perspective, which they play.”

It’s not just having the full roster at his disposal that had Eilert’s confidence riding high. He also believed that his team has learned from their mistakes from the last matchup and knew how to attack the UCF defense properly.

“I mean, more than anything, you look back to all our sets and execution, that might have been the worst executed offensive production we ever had; the pressure bothered us,” he said. “Their pressure bothered us (and) sped us up. So we need to clean up what we clean up. And it can’t be us against us; it’s gotta be us against them.

“Sometimes, that game, I felt like we were disjointed in a lot of ways and we were on the same page. And that was a credit to how they were playing us defensively. So, our mindsets gotta be different going into this game and understand that we’re not gonna drive it into those [guys]… we need to drive a kick, rather than drive trying to go up through these guys.”