WVU coach Josh Eilert makes sure players feel 'passion' generated by Backyard Brawl with Pitt

Josh Eilert’s plans to prepare his Mountaineers for Pitt’s intrusion into the West Virginia Coliseum on Wednesday night didn’t start with the first day of basketball practice in October.

Go back another month.

Eilert, the WVU interim head coach, demanded that every player attend the Pitt football game at Milan Puskar Stadium. Eilert wants his players to understand what the Backyard Brawl — football or basketball — means to WVU students and fans who live within the confines of the state.

“They knew, even the new guys, they were well aware of the difference that game was, compared to every other game they attended,” Eilert said Tuesday during his chat with reporters. “They can feel the energy. They can feel the passion from our fan base. Yes, they’ve been educated.”

Fast forward to this week, and Eilert noticed an increase in attentiveness when players started preparing for Pitt.

“When you put Pitt up on the board, you can see everybody sit up in their chair with full attention,” he said. “The heat in practice has been turned up a notch by the way I structured it. The way we went at each other the past two days has been turned up a notch.”

The last of Pitt’s five consecutive games against power conference opponents offers both teams an opportunity to reverse recent failures. Pitt (5-3) lost two consecutive home games to Missouri and Clemson. Like Pitt, WVU (3-4) has lost three of its past four games.

“They’re coming in with a terrible taste in their mouth, too,” Eilert said. “We lost three of four, and each one of them was an absolute battle.”

He was referencing a 56-54 setback against Virginia, the first team among others receiving votes in the Associated Press Top 25, and 70-58 and 79-73 losses to SMU and St. John’s.

“It’s going to probably come down to who wants it worst, and that better be West Virginia,” he said.

After 16 seasons as a Bob Huggins assistant, Eilert knows about the history of the rivalry, which has been contested 189 times since 1904. He called Pitt’s triple-overtime, 98-95 victory in 2010 at Petersen Events Center “an instant classic.”

“One of the most iconic games probably played here,” he said. “Such a battle. Almost every Pitt-West Virginia game is a complete battle, knock-down-drag-out.”

But Eilert said he doesn’t want a repeat of that game, either in the ultimate victor or the length of the game.

“If we played a 20-minute game, I’ll sign up for that right now,” he said.

The Mountaineers, who own a five-game winning streak against Pitt, are in a serious personnel crunch after losing four players they were planning to include in their rotation.

• Two 6-foot-5 guards, Jose Perez and Raquan Battle, are missing. After some academic issues, Perez transferred to Arizona State, where he is averaging 12 points. Battle, a transfer from Washington and Montana State, had his waiver request for immediate eligibility denied by the NCAA. WVU athletic director Wren Baker and Eilert issued a joint statement last month, calling the NCAA’s ruling “a grave mistake and misjudgement.”

• Akok Akok, a 6-10 forward formerly of UConn and Georgetown, is out indefinitely after collapsing on the court in October during a charity exhibition.

• Point guard Kerr Kriisa is serving a nine-game suspension after taking impermissible benefits while at Arizona.

As a result, West Virginia has a 22-point edge on opponents in the first half of its seven games and a 25-point deficit after halftime.

“It’s pretty indicative of what we got going on with our roster,” Eilert said. “It goes through my mind 24/7. It keeps me up at night trying to manage it.

“I’d love to get easy buckets in transition, but we’re not there right now. Our margin of error is so slim. It’s a game of inches in a lot of ways.”

Eilert prefers to see aggressive defense from his players, but his players must be aware of getting into foul trouble.

He said he has no problem with his players’ compete level, but he is constantly reminding them, “You can’t take plays off and can’t ever rest when you’re on the floor.”

“I certainly wish I had a full deck of cards to work with. But I don’t.”

For Pitt’s players, the game will be the first time this season playing on an opponent’s home court.

Coach Jeff Capel said the atmosphere at the West Virginia Coliseum will require “unbelievable communication.”

“It requires a level of toughness. It requires you being unbelievably connected, and it requires you to fight,” he said. “We have to make sure we bring those things right at the beginning.”

He said he hasn’t talked to his team about the history of the Brawl.

“I have great respect for the rivalry,” he said. “I have great respect for their program. But we need to win a basketball game. I don’t want to cloud their heads too much with anything else.”