Bearcats Beat: If ‘Disgusted’ Wes Miller Can’t Get His Team To Play With Effort, Then It’s Time To Bite An Expensive Bullet And Move On

CINCINNATI — Whenever a head coach admits he can’t get his team to play with effort, that’s often a deathknell of his time on the job.

The tolling of that bell is ringing louder and louder for Wes Miller.

The Cincinnati head coach didn’t hold back on his team’s effort in a 63-50 loss Sunday at Fifth Third Arena to a West Virginia team that had lost three straight and was there for the taking with just a modicum of urgency and desperation. A team that opened 10-1 is now 12-9 and an atrocious 2-8 in the Big 12.

“I’m disgusted with our play,” Miller said in his opening statement. “I’m very disappointed and disgusted with how we’re playing. At the end of the day, I’m in charge here. I’m the leader of our program, and it falls on me.”

The Bearcats played with no energy, committed sloppy turnover after sloppy turnover in the first half then couldn’t run an offensive set to save their season in the second half.

They allowed yet another star player – Big 12 leading scorer Javon Small – to run roughshod over their lethargic defense, and allowed a second guard – Joseph Yesufu – to get wide-open 3-point looks off simple ball screens, a dagger to end the first half and then a pair of back-to-back triples in the second half to build the visitors’ lead up to 22 and send the angry droves to the exits with still nine minutes left in the game.

Not exactly what the crowd or Miller – booed in the intros Sunday – needed to see after they no-showed in the second half at BYU on Jan. 25 or fell apart in the second half to the lowly Utah Utes three days later. They didn’t bother to boo Sunday. They let their feet do the talking after watching Cincinnati sleepwalk through their eighth Big 12 loss in 10 tries.

“If I’m somebody that supports this program, I’d be frustrated,” Miller acknowledged. “I’d be pissed at what I was watching. You should be. I am too, and I take full responsibility. It’s on me, and we got a lot of basketball left. We need to figure out a way to play a style, and a level of basketball that makes people proud about the way that we wear the jersey. And right now we’re not doing that. And again, that’s all on me and I there’s nothing I could say that hurts more to say. But it is the truth.”

The players certainly own a big part of the failure this season so far. Simas Lukosius was the best 3-point sharpshooter in the pre-conference slate. He was firing them in at a rate north of 45 percent. Then the Big 12 hit and his percentage has dropped to 37 percent. He was 1-for-7 Sunday and 1-for-4 from beyond the arc. The Bearcats don’t have a single scorer in the Top 25 of Big 12 scoring and Lukosius leads the Bearcats at a measly 12.0 points per game. And defensively they’re allowing opposing players like Javon Small and Joseph Yesufu to go off like Sunday.

“I think mainly it’s just us not doing our part and knowing the personnel,” Lukosius said. “There are things and plays that we’re supposed to know how to guard, and we have lapses of concentration. We end up giving up easy threes like that, and that’s been a theme for us in this past month where we’ve taken a dip on how we guard three-point shooters.”

But more than anything, the school can’t afford to lose the support of the alumni who are growing tired of being promised a competitive product and being delivered an underachieving product. Athletic donors give based on their expectation of excellence in the program. The basketball product is grossly underperforming. They lost by three at Kansas State, not bad. They lost by five at home to Arizona, blown opportunity. Then they were blown out by 20 at Baylor and scored just 40 in a home loss to Kansas and the boo birds and alarms really started to ring out at Fifth Third.

That is simply unacceptable by any standard. And the standard at Cincinnati has fallen drastically in the Wes Miller era. It’s going the wrong way, and fast. Miller is keenly aware of this, given the expectation after back-to-back NIT quarterfinal appearances. With the likes of Lukosius, Jizzle James, Dan Skillings Jr. and Texas transfer Dillon Mitchell, this Bearcats team was expected to get to the NCAAs this year. And after an 8-0 start, all systems were go.

They had a hiccup in a loss at Villanova but rebounded quickly to improve to 10-1. They had finally vanquished rivals Xavier and Dayton and it looked like for all the world this Bearcats team – ranked as high as 14th nationally – was ready to break out. They the conference schedule began and the Bearcats fell apart like paper mache.

“It’s my 14th year as a head coach. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a team at this point in the year where I felt the lack of effort collectively, that I feel right now,” Miller told me. “That’s probably new for me, but that college basketball coaching has challenges, and what you do is you just, you keep fighting, you keep trying to figure it out. There’s no stop here. But this group’s got fight, it’s got heart, it’s got, like I said, they’ve got character. We got to get it out of them, like we got to get out of them. And that starts with me. And so whatever possible thing that you could ever think of to do or don’t try to do.”

Does Miller still think he’s the right guy for the job, I asked.

“I have no doubt about that, not even the least bit of doubt,” he replied. “I’m extremely, extremely frustrated about the way that we’re playing over the last month. And I understand how people can feel watching this, I get it. But the big picture, zero doubt.”

And if you’re wondering why Cincinnati would move on from Miller at a monumental pricetag of a $13 million buyout before March 31 this year (per Justin Williams of The Athletic) or $9.9 million before March 31, 2026, it’s this: You need to show 3, 4 and 5-star talent in the NIL era of portal transfers that you’re serious about winning and playing deep into March in the Big Dance, not the NIT.

Miller’s program showed real promise in the 2022-23 season, when in their final year in the AAC, they finished 23-13 and reached the NIT quarterfinals, but only 11-7 in the conference. When Miller was hired after the John Brannen experiment went up in flames, there was great hope and expectation after what Miller – the youngest head coach in Division I at North Carolina-Greensboro – was able to accomplish in his first 10 seasons.

What’s interesting about that is that Miller was 60-92 in his first five seasons at Greensboro. But he was given a chance to turn it around and in his sixth season, the mid-major Spartans went 25-10 and made it to the NIT. In the next four seasons he was 27-8, 29-7, 23-9 and 21-9. His first four seasons in Clifton have actually been much better than that. But it’s not the overall mark that matters in Cincinnati with an easy pre-conference schedule. It’s the conference mark.

The Bearcats are 9-19 in 28 games of Big 12 play. That’s more than a small sample. That’s a siren going off in Clifton that the basketball program is no where close to competing in the conference.

Cincinnati is at the bottom of the Big 12 and while there was certainly going to be some growing pains, the Cincinnati fan base and more importantly, alumni, had the reasonable expectation that there was enough history in the program to go from the American Athletic Conference to the basketball crazy Big 12 and at least compete.

What the Bearcats have shown in their first two seasons in the Big 12 is that they are woefully short in the competition category. The Bearcats are 2-8 in the Big 12 and are 15th out of 16 teams. They are ahead of only Colorado, which is 0-10 in the conference, a team they barely beat on the road for one of their two wins. Their other win came at home over Arizona State, a 3-7 group. This follows a season in which UC was 7-11 in their first year in the conference.

This Bearcats team was expected to – at the very least – compete in basketball’s deepest conference this season. They haven’t even been close. That’s on the head coach. And he acknowledged as much on Sunday after the latest abomination.

Usually, a coach knows when the grim reaper is calling when his team fractures and doesn’t put forth an honest effort, as was evident in Sunday’s showing. When the coach himself says in all his 14 years of coaching, he’s never had a team that has struggled to play with effort, that’s as much of an admission of the real problem.

Miller still has time to turn around his fortunes like he did in Greensboro. But Cincinnati of the Big 12 is not Greensboro of the Southern Conference. And that clock will – and should – strike midnight by the time this season comes to a close.