It's incredible the difference that just a few days can make.
Around this time Tuesday night -- or Wednesday morning, if you'd rather -- West Virginia men's basketball was feeling good about themselves and their postseason prospects. The Mountaineers had looked every inch of the superior team from whistle-to-whistle against TCU in a 73-55 win, and it appeared that WVU was riding a wave of momentum that could easily carry them into a strong position for their NCAA Tournament hopes.
Now, just four days later, the Mountaineers have left the fanbase wondering if they're able to pull off a strong enough close to the regular season to feel comfortable headed into the Big 12 Tournament, which is now just a week and a half away. The concerns stem from an embarrassing 77-56 loss on the road to No. 25 BYU, which somehow wasn't even as close as the 21-point margin of victory indicates.
WVU was completely outdone on the offensive end of the floor -- shooting just 33 percent from the field to BYU's 53 percent -- and was also heavily outrebounded by a total of 43-32. The Mountaineers managed just one double-digit scorer in the loss -- senior Javon Small with 15 points -- and were outscored 43-16 off the bench in the loss.
The biggest takeaway from the loss might just be how it drives home the point of how their are two different versions of this Mountaineers men's basketball team, and how drastically they can differ from one another. Within less than a week, they can go from looking like a Sweet 16 contender to looking like a fringe NIT program.
That type of inconsistency is normally a problem for any basketball team, but with the Mountaineers on the bubble for the NCAA Tournament and the margin for error so thin, it adds another level of uncertainty.
WVU is a team which certainly has the skillset to earn an NCAA Tournament bid and perhaps make a March Madness run Darian DeVries' first season leading the program. But they're also a team that can easily stumble and get blown out of water by competition they might otherwise be competitive against on a different night.
But which of those two teams will show up during this ever-crucial final stretch of the season is yet to be determined -- and Saturday's loss to BYU leaves more questions than answers on that front.