The West Virginia basketball team has made strides since June but is still going to need to make a lot more given the difficulty of the schedule in front of them.
The Mountaineers will play 11 non-conference games with some of those being a road trip to Pittsburgh, home games against Georgetown and Massachusetts and then the Battle 4 Atlantis games against Gonzaga and then either Indiana or Louisville or one of Arizona, Davidson, Oklahoma or Providence.
That doesn’t even account for the 20 Big 12 Conference matchups on the slate, so the Mountaineers are going to be able to find out rather quickly where they sit in the totem pole in the league.
“We made sure we challenged ourselves right away, first year here. It’s a good schedule, it’s a good non-conference schedule and we know what the league schedule is and now going up to 20 games,” head coach Darian DeVries said. “We understand that. We understand in order to be successful we have to be really good in certain areas and those are the things we will continue to focus on.”
In terms of the Big 12 games, West Virginia is set for home and home matchups with Cincinnati, Houston, TCU, Utah and BYU. Meanwhile, they will host Arizona, Arizona State, Oklahoma State, Iowa State and UCF and the road-only games will consist of Kansas, Kansas State, Baylor, Texas Tech and Colorado.
The full schedule is as follows: Dec. 31 @ Kansas, Jan. 4 Oklahoma State, Jan. 7 Arizona, Jan. 12 @ Colorado, Jan. 15 @ Houston, Jan. 18 Iowa State, Jan. 21 Arizona State, Jan. 25 @ Kansas State, Jan. 29 Houston, Feb. 2 @ Cincinnati, Feb. 5 @ TCU, Feb. 8 Utah, Feb. 11 BYU, Feb. 15 @ Baylor, Feb. 19 Cincinnati, Feb. 22 @ Texas Tech, Feb. 25 TCU, March 1 @ BYU, March 4 @ Utah and finally March 8 UCF.
“It’s a good league, we all know that,” DeVries said.
The goal for West Virginia is to compete every night with the focus on winning every game on the schedule. The objective has been to prepare the Mountaineers for the rigors of that slate but first the focus has been primarily on themselves and getting better in every way possible.
That’s something DeVries has certainly seen occur as the Mountaineers have a much better understanding of their offensive concepts, identity and ball movement than they did in June. The same can be said for the defensive end, where players are learning the concepts and understanding positioning.
The defensive end has been the one area where DeVries wants to see more consistency, but those habits take longer to create. The head coach believes that this team is equipped to be a strong, connected defensive team collectively as a group which is what you want to be on that end of the floor.
“We’ve shown flashes,” he said.
Still, the Mountaineers are excited for the challenges ahead and with an almost entirely new roster to go along with the new coaching staff there will certainly be opportunities for them to showcase their program.
“Our guys are excited about that, they’re excited about the challenges and opportunities that are in front of us. But we also know every single night you’re going to be playing one of the best teams in the country,” DeVries said.
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