MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — The brackets to next week’s Crossover Classic have officially become more newsworthy on the teams who have been crossed out.
That is the challenge, as well as a source of frustration, that has been put in front of West Virginia men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins.
The 15th-ranked Mountaineers are now just one of three teams remaining from the original Battle 4 Atlantis field that transformed itself into the Crossover Classic after concerns over COVID-19.
Since the first field was announced in the summer, the tournament changed locations from the Bahamas to Sioux Falls, S.D. and four teams from Power Five Conferences, as well as 11th-ranked Creighton have opted out of the tournament.
That’s created last-minute cram sessions in terms of preparations, and in Huggins’ opinion, an unequal bracket.
The latest Power Five team to leave was Texas A&M on Tuesday, who was scheduled to be the Mountaineers’ first-round opponent. Creighton announced late Thursday that it was withdrawing from the field after several positive COVID-19 tests from members of its program.
On Thursday’s Big 12 media call, Huggins obviously wasn’t happy with the Aggies pulling out late and hinted there may be a number of teams around the country not looking forward to playing the Mountaineers early in the season.
“In that we thought we were playing Texas A&M for the longest time and we had watched film on Texas A&M and had broken them down, it’s not like everyone else in the tournament has had to do,” Huggins said. “The one spot that always seemed to be open was ours. I understand that a lot of people don’t want to play us. They don’t want to play against our size or against our perceived great half-court defense.
“At the same time, we have been at a tremendous disadvantage to everybody else, other than the people who have just been added to the field, because we never knew from day-to-day who we were going to play.”
Northern Iowa, which finished 25-6 last season and fell to WVU, 60-55, in the first round of the 2019 Cancun Challenge, was brought in to replace Texas A&M. The Panthers and Mountaineers will tip-off the tournament at 2 p.m. Wednesday, at the Sanford Pentagon.
Duke, Ohio State and Utah earlier opted out of the tournament. Dayton was brought in to replace Duke and then also opted out of the field.
Smaller mid-major schools South Dakota State and Utah State were brought in as replacements for Utah and Dayton and were placed in the opposite bracket from WVU, which also has a Wichita State team undergoing a coaching change in the same bracket.
Ohio State was replaced by Saint Mary’s, a perennial top 25 mid-major school and WVU’s bracket also features Memphis and Northern Iowa, which both received votes in the AP Top 25 in the preseason poll.
“You look at the path that everybody has from game one to championship game three, and obviously it’s far less than equal,” Huggins said. “We just have to do what we do, and hopefully this is good preparation for us for March when you play a game, you win and you sit there waiting to see who you’re going to play next.”
As for Northern Iowa, the Panthers return their top three scorers from last season, including guards A.J. Green and Trae Berhow, who combined for 161 3-pointers.
“Well, we’re going to try and get real familiar, obviously,” Huggins said. “They’re good. They’re a team, we need to win, because they’re going to be ranked in the top 50 probably (in the NCAA NET rankings) for seeding purposes. It’s a quality game from that standpoint and it’s a hard game.”
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