Photo courtesy of BlueGoldNews.com Javon Small drives to the basket during Tuesday night’s game against Arizona. The Mountaineers visit Colorado on Sunday.

MORGANTOWN — There is an eternal question in sports that leaves coaches forever in the film room and that is when will your ‘A’ game pop up and when will your ‘F’ game pop up?

Case in point, Darian DeVries and his West Virginia Mountaineers.

He has a team that went into Kansas and won, his team going on the road into the toughest place to play in the Big 12 while offering up its ‘A’ game yet playing at home against a good Arizona team but showing up without that ‘A’ game.

Now they head on the road for two games in four days, starting with Colorado at 3 p.m. Sunday, and they have to find the ‘A’ game again.

DeVries believes they will.

“The guys have been great. They have responded well after the couple of losses we’ve had this year. They are a pretty focused group. We didn’t necessarily have our ‘A’ game the other night. We focused on what went wrong, but we did plenty of things right in that game, too, he said during a Friday Zoom call.”

They did do a lot well, but not enough and not for a long enough time.

As DeVries noted after struggling through most of the first three quarters of the game, WVU got it down to five points and had a shot a loose ball that, had they gotten and scored off of, would have turned it into a one possession game.

At home, with the crowd — what there was of it on a snowy, cold night — might have got them over the hump. But Arizona got the ball and went on a run to put it away.

Things happen in games. Everywhere, not just with West Virginia. They beat Gonzaga on a neutral court and Arizona on that same court but in between, they lost to Louisville in the Bahamas. All three games went to overtime, which says they could have won all three or lost all three.

How do you stop one loss from leading to two or three in a row and, instead, maybe turn it into an on switch to get your team going into a win streak?

“It’s like we talked about all year. We have to make sure we have that very narrow focus of turning the page after wins and losses,” DeVries said. “After Kansas, it might have been easy to come out and not be as focused after that big win.”

But they turned the juice up against Oklahoma State.

“I thought we were focused after that win. We thought we prepared well for Arizona, but we didn’t get it done that night. All we can do is learn from wins, learn from losses and go for that next scout and right now that’s Colorado,” DeVries said.

So much goes into each game that one is not like the next. One night you may be hitting 3s, the next you might have to find another way to attack. Some teams use a press against you, next night you are looking at a zone, maybe.

Arizona, for example, is built to take advantage of a problem WVU has, especially without the injured Tucker DeVries. They are big and like to attack, not throwing up a lot of 3s. That has been a vulnerability with WVU.

“Arizona has really good guards who have great size and they were able to get in there at times and just score over us,” DeVries pointed out. “We had to change up some of our ball screen defenses to try and eliminate some of those paint touches off the dribble.

“But when you do some of that, it exposes some other area. It comes down to what are you willing to give up. Arizona is really good and scoring in the paint is where they score the bulk of their points. They are one of the best in the country at it.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t do a good enough job of keeping them out of there and that was the game plan going in.”

One would expect that Colorado, which has good overall size, would try to use a similar plan, but Colorado is 0-3 in the conference, not nearly as talented as Arizona, and goes about matters a different way.

That’s always part of it. WVU is a different team with DeVries, for example, who can stretch the offense out deep with his 3-point shooting than they are when so much more reliance must be put on Javon Small, who has performed like an All-American but is being asked so much of night after night.

Philosophies and matchups dictate more how a game will be played than strengths and weaknesses.

“For the most part, teams kind of play to their strengths,” DeVries acknowledged. “They’ll try to attack some weaknesses along the way, but I don’t think they will wholesale everything to try and be something they are not.

“I think every game plan and every game prep is unique and different in their own way. Colorado and Arizona are two different teams. They are both good at what they do.”

The thing DeVries has to be most careful of is pigeonholing teams as good or bad and maybe overlook an opponent. To him, each game is against the best opponent they are facing that night. That WVU is 11-3 and Colorado 9-5 doesn’t enter into the mix.

“From our standpoint, every team is a good team and they are in this league,” DeVries said. “As a coach, our job is to try and get up for all 31 regular season games. I don’t care who the opponent is. We need to play a certain way every night and those habits need to be the same regardless of who we are playing.”