WVU Men Set To Battle Texas Tech in Top 25 Matchup
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MORGANTOWN -- West Virginia basketball coach Bob Huggins gets frustrated with a handful of things, and late road tip offs are one of them.
Freshly minted as the No. 14 team in the country, the Mountaineers will tip off against No. 7 Texas Tech on Tuesday night at 9 p.m. -- the third time since the beginning of conference play that a road WVU game begins at 8 p.m. or later. Tuesday's game will be broadcast on ESPN.
Being located in a different time zone than its other Big 12 counterparts, West Virginia is obviously at a disadvantage -- one that aggravates Huggins due to its impact on student-athletes.
"I don't know how in the world (it happens) with all the rhetoric that we get about 'We want to do the best for student-athletes, the betterment of student-athletes,'" Huggins said.
"We're just starting a new term here. Those guys, man, that puts those guys behind the eight ball, and nobody seems to think about it or care about it."
When the ball finally goes up on Tuesday night, the Mountaineers' true challenge will be on the floor with them. Two of the nation's top teams, they'll meet for the second time this season after West Virginia eked out an 88-87 win over the Red Raiders on Jan. 25.
Texas Tech enters the matchup ranking among the Big 12's top teams, seeing plenty of success on both sides of the ball.
Led by the team's top defender in forward Marcus Santos-Silva, the Red Raiders currently possess the conference's top defense by allowing just shy of 62 points per game.
"They're going to try to fortify the paint (and) not give you easy baskets," Huggins said.
"Try to make you shoot shots on the perimeter and really pick out who they want to shoot those shots -- not necessarily who we want, but who they want to leave open to shoot shots -- and try to really cover up the people that they feel are our shot makers."
Offensively, Mac McClung, who scored 30 points against the Mountaineers earlier this season, ranks second in the Big 12 with an average of 17.2 points per game.
Behind McClung's efforts, as well as two others who average 10 or more points per game, Texas Tech holds the second-best scoring margin in the conference, winning games by an average of nearly 13 points per game.
Yet, coming off of two wins in their last three games, West Virginia is making strides, leaving Huggins much more optimistic as the Mountaineers head to Lubbock.
"I think we're better now than the first game," Huggins said.
"I think we're better defensively than we were the first game. I kind of like where we were the last game. I thought our intensity was better, our rotations were better. We were sending people where we wanted them to go. That's what we've got to do; we just gotta maintain some consistency in that regard."
Two men's hoops games postponed
COVID-19 has affected West Virginia's schedule once again.
The Mountaineers' upcoming games against Baylor (at home on Feb. 15 and on the road on Feb. 18) have been postponed.
In an email sent on Monday, the WVU athletic department announced that Baylor was unable to meet the Big 12 Conference's COVID-19 thresholds. The two schools will work to reschedule the two games.
West Virginia now has four games that have yet to be rescheduled, following the postponement of games against Oklahoma State and TCU from earlier in the season.