West Virginia played Oklahoma Saturday and currently isn’t scheduled to play again for a full week.
It's the second pause of at least a week since Big 12 Conference play resumed in January after the Mountaineers previously had 14-days off.
That’s because the two scheduled matchups with Baylor set for Feb. 15 in Morgantown and then Feb. 18 in Waco were postponed due to COVID-19 concerns in the Bears basketball program.
It’s the second time that trip to Waco has been wiped out after the Jan. 12 game was postponed due to COVID-19 concerns in the West Virginia basketball program. Those issues in Morgantown also postponed home dates with Oklahoma State and TCU meaning that there are four games to make up on the schedule and little time to do it with the Big 12 Conference tournament on the horizon.
So, it would make sense to attempt to re-schedule one of those games during this open week, right?
“It’s not up to us obviously It’s like everybody else. We just kind of sit here, wait and wonder,” head coach Bob Huggins said. “That would be nice instead of having everything jammed up at the end but there is a lot of factors involved.”
That is a true statement as those games with Baylor couldn’t be made up considering they are currently on a pause due to coronavirus issues and TCU already has three games scheduled from Feb. 15-20. Oklahoma State only has two during that span Feb. 16 at home against Iowa State and Feb. 20 at Baylor, but the window is closing in order to try to attempt to get anything set.
This isn’t an issue unique to West Virginia either, as Baylor has six games that needs rescheduled and a host of other teams in the league have multiple games that need filled. There will be a week to squeeze in some of those with the conference schedule ending Feb. 27, but in the case of West Virginia and Baylor it seems difficult to imagine that four or more games could be fit into that window.
“We don’t have any control, no control whatsoever,” Huggins said.
West Virginia was able to assert some control in this situation earlier in the year to replace games in the non-conference slate when the opposing team did not meet COVID-19 protocols. It happened when Robert Morris couldn’t participate, and they scheduled North Texas instead for example.
But the conference portion of that is a different animal.
“It’s been going on since the beginning of the season. We had more control at the beginning of the season than what we do in the conference season,” Huggins said.
It remains to be seen how the league will determine which games are made up because Baylor has already gone on record stating that it is likely they won’t complete the 18-game conference slate. Other teams could be in similar issues which also brings up questions about determining seeding for the conference tournament and even the regular season league champion if every team doesn’t play.
But with four games left to play, the clock is ticking to see if the Mountaineers can squeeze one in or it’ll be a full week off down the stretch run of the season.
“That’s for the conference to decide,” Huggins said.
West Virginia is set to resume play Feb. 20 at Texas and then will travel to TCU Feb. 23 before closing things out at home against Kansas State Feb. 27. Then of course, there are the four games to make up if time allows it before the start of the league tournament March 10.
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