Road warrior West Virginia readies for four game close at home

West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins has made it no secret he isn’t the biggest fan of the road trips that come with being a member of the Big 12 Conference.

Fortunately for the Mountaineers, they wont hit the road again for the remainder of the regular season.

West Virginia beat TCU 74-66 in Fort Worth to win their sixth consecutive road contest in the Big 12, a first for the Mountaineers. The total road wins also matches the most that the program has won in conference play since Huggins assumed the head coaching role in Morgantown prior to the 2007-08 season.

But due to adjustments to the Big 12 schedule in wake of the various postponements across the league landscape, West Virginia is now set to close the season by hosting four consecutive home games.

Those games will be Feb. 27 against Kansas State, March 2 against Baylor, March 4 against TCU and March 6 against Oklahoma State. Currently, the Mountaineers are 3-0 against those teams although they did not play Baylor yet due to pauses in both programs at various times this season.

“I think they’re happy to go home. I don’t think there’s any doubt they’re happy to go home. They’re happy to be able to play in the Coliseum in front of some people, some home people,” Huggins said.

As part of that the final road contest of the season at Baylor was canceled which took an opportunity for a major win away from the Mountaineers but it was a necessary adjustment.

“Of course, we wanted to play out here, we would have had something to gain playing that game but going home and playing four straight is definitely a win for us,” senior guard Taz Sherman said.

West Virginia will have a lot to play for over this stretch as the team currently sits in second place in the conference and could potentially seal that seed up for the league tournament if they could win all four.

That will be a tall task considering Baylor has yet to lose this season and Oklahoma State is ascending at the right time. That doesn’t even factor in Kansas State, who has won two straight, and a TCU team that has proven capable of winning games in this league throughout the year.

That’s basically four games over a seven-day period to help decide not only the fate of the Mountaineers in terms of the league standings but in regard to NCAA Tournament seeding. West Virginia currently sits at 16-6 overall and is seeded on the three line in almost all major projections.

“We win out those four games we’re looking at a three seed right now, but we’re a two seed if we win those four games. But we control our own destiny. Win these four games and we’re in good shape,” Sherman said.

The Mountaineers should have no issues playing four games over that week-long window, but Huggins admits that the cumulative effect of doing that and then turning around and competing in the Big 12 Tournament starting March 10 is something that makes him wonder.

Especially with the NCAA Tournament set to begin the week after that.

“Can we play four games in a six days? Yeah, we can. But how does that affect us the next week and even more important probably, the week after that?” Huggins said.

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