MORGANTOWN — It will not exactly be a venture into the unknown, at least that’s how Mark Kellogg is selling it to his 14th-ranked WVU women’s basketball team.
“You have to dig a little deeper, because you just don’t know them quite as well,” Kellogg said.
The Mountaineers (10-1) are hitting the road for their Big 12 opener, which is nothing out of the ordinary.
Traveling to Boulder, Colo. is the unique part. Colorado (9-2) is in its first season as a member of the Big 12 and has absolutely no history with the Mountaineers. WVU tips off at Colorado at 8 p.m. Saturday.
What we do know is the Buffaloes are coming off back-to-back Sweet 16 runs in the NCAA tournament under head coach J.R. Payne.
It was Iowa and star Caitlin Clark who eliminated both programs from the tournament last season; WVU in the second round and Colorado in the Sweet 16.
“I’ve never coached against J.R. Payne before,” Kellogg continued. “She does a great job. This will be a first for both of us. I guess there is a bit of unfamiliarity there, a little.”
Payne had to retool the Buffaloes’ roster after last season’s run to the Sweet 16, signing 10 new players.
“Some of them came from Big 12 backgrounds, so we’ll have some familiarity there,” Kellogg said.
That includes senior forward Lior Garzon, who played at Oklahoma State the last two seasons. She is Colorado’s second leading scorer, averaging 12.6 points.
The top threat is senior guard Frida Formann, who missed the first four games of the season with an injury, but she is the school’s all-time 3-point shooter with 278 of them for her career.
She enters the matchup averaging 14.1 points, while shooting 44% from behind the arc.
“She is one of the premiere 3-point shooters in the country,” Kellogg said.
Senior guard Kindyll Wetta is second in the Big 12 in assists, averaging 6.8 per game, but she’s missed the last two games after colliding with a teammate in practice.
The only common ground the two programs have is one comparable opponent in Boise State.
WVU beat the Broncos by 35 points on a neutral court in Florida. Colorado lost a true road game against Boise State, 50-47.
“They run some Princeton-type stuff,” Kellogg said of Colorado. “They can pass. They can move the ball and shoot it.”
Meanwhile, the Mountaineers are coming off their first true road victory of the season last week with a 68-46 victory against Temple.
It was WVU’s lowest-scoring game of the season, but the Mountaineers also held the Owls to their lowest point total of the season.
“We didn’t have our best offensive night. The numbers would suggest it was our worst offensive performance of the year,” Kellogg said. “We were still pretty good on the defensive end and forced Temple into taking a lot of shots that we wanted them to take.”
