MORGANTOWN - Even if you'd given West Virginia coach Bob Huggins a Snickers bar, it's unlikely he'd have been satisfied after Wednesday night's 68-39 victory against Duquesne at the WVU Coliseum.
Too many guys who go in and bring the offense to a screeching halt like Fred Flinestone's bare feet, too many guys showing all the things they can't do, and too many guys who whiff on rebounds, pass on good shots, and shoot on bad passes.
Geez, imagine if this was a bad team? Huggins is the coach of the No. 6 team in the country. His team had just won by nine 3-pointers and a slam dunk.
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West Virginia’s Devin Ebanks (3) and Da’Sean Butler (1) block the shot of Duquesne’s Sean Johnson, back left, Wednesday night in Morgantown.
''It's probably been the burden that I've carried for 27 years,'' Huggins said. ''I could come in here and smile and lie to you all (the media) like some guys do, and then go in there and tell them what I really think. Some guys do that; I have never done that. When we're not good, I'm going to tell you we're not very good. And we're going to have to do a better job.''
OK, so what, exactly, was wrong with this game? The Mountaineers outshot, outrebounded, out-assisted, outplayed, out-points-off-turnovered, and most importantly, outscored the Dukes, who were without two starters and were held to their lowest point total of the season, probably a couple of them.
Somewhere in there, West Virginia's coach found some good.
''We are playing better defense,'' he said. ''Well, we've played better defense the last two games, actually. We're helping each other better; we didn't help at first.''
But the rest of his comments, and the end of that one, really, were aimed at pointing out the bad.
Some of the hits:
DaSean Butler has been around Huggins as long as any player on the roster. And it shows. Butler was almost apologetic on behalf of the athletic department for making people pay to watch their favorite team dominate a game from start to finish - at one point, Duquesne was held without a basket for 9:27 covering the last 6 minutes of the first half and the first 3-plus of the second.
''I don't think we've really played to our potential yet,'' Butler said. ''We've got a lot of guys that are very talented and are still trying to figure out the system and things like that. We've got a lot of older guys that are not playing the way they played last year, not playing with the intensity they played with last year, offensively and defensively. We've still got a lot to fix.''
If you're wondering which of the older guys Butler was talking about, try this on for size:
''I know I shot like 40 shots in the first half, and I know none of them went in except for like two or three,'' Butler said. ''So I was like, 'I just need to relax and try to get the team involved. And honestly just take care of my defensive responsibility.''
Butler was 3 of 11 in the first half and had 10 points. He shot only twice in the second half and missed both.
All of this makes you wonder what's going on at Kansas, Texas, Villanova, Kentucky and Purdue - the five teams the Associated Press thinks are better than West Virginia.
Wonder how many future cheerleaders are on the bench on those teams.
Jim Elliott can be reached via e-mail at elliott@theintelligencer.net.