No. 8 West Virginia opens Big 12 play, as Iowa State travels to WVU Coliseum

MORGANTOWN, W. Va. — In his next to last game as a freshman, Deuce McBride gave the Big 12 one of his best performances.

He scored 17 points off the bench and didn’t miss in six attempts from the free-throw line. He added three rebounds, two assists, a block and a steal in what may have been one of his best overall games.

The opponent that day? Iowa State, which travels to the WVU Coliseum at 9 p.m. Friday in what will serve as the conference opener for No. 8 West Virginia (6-1).

If any team in the Big 12 knows the potential McBride has to offer, it just may be the Cyclones (1-3, 0-1 Big 12).

And that, McBride said, is what makes the Big 12 unique. The 10-team league offers up a round-robin schedule in which every team plays a road and home game against all the other teams in the league.

“The preparation part of it, playing teams twice like we do, you kind of got to prepare for teams in a different way,” McBride said. “They know you better and you’re going to know them better. The scouting report is huge.”

The thought of conference play can conjure up many different memories to WVU players.

For Taz Sherman, he had spent much of last season looking for that signature moment that showed him he belonged at this level.

It came in a road loss at Baylor, in which he ht five 3-pointers and scored 20 points in just 22 minutes of action.

“We lost that Baylor game, but it really gave me confidence in a way to know that I can play at a high level,” said Sherman, who came to WVU last season after two years in junior college. “Right after that game, everything just turned up for me. I felt comfortable and I felt like I belonged.”

The Mountaineers are out to prove this season they belong among the nation’s elite.

To do it means running a gauntlet of 18 Big 12 games, some of them in places such as Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse, where WVU has never won, or playing eight featured games against four other league schools ranked in the AP Top 25 or simply trying to defend home court, which WVU will try to do against the Cyclones.

It’s never easy. It’s not meant to be.

“We’re going to reinforce to our guys today that the road teams in our league are 3-0,” WVU head coach Bob Huggins said. “We haven’t had a road team lose yet. I think that means the home team better be ready to play. We’ll have to emphasize to our guys how important it will be to be ready to play.”

The Cyclones lost to Kansas State, 74-65, in Ames, Iowa on Tuesday.

Iowa State is led by junior point guard Rasir Bolton, who is third in the league in assists at six per game. He’s shooting nearly 60% from the field and scoring 15.8 points per game.

It will certainly be a solid match-up for McBride at point guard.

“Definitely, I look at what I can do to disrupt the player I’m going up against mostly,” said McBride, who leads WVU in scoring at 14.6 points per game, while averaging 4.6 assists per game. “In the Big 12, guard play is very important. The more I can disrupt the guards, the more their offense is going to have trouble. That’s always one of the main things I’m looking at.”

Iowa State also features two Division I transfers in its starting lineup.

Guard Jalen Coleman-Lands (13.5 ppg) is a graduate transfer from DePaul and junior forward Javon Johnson (11.3 ppg) sat out last season after transferring from Troy.

Junior guard Tyler Harris, who comes off the bench, was granted immediate eligibility by the NCAA this season after transferring from Memphis. He’s playing nearly 30 minutes per game and averages just under 10 points.

Senior forward Solomon Young is probably the most familiar to the Mountaineers. He was granted a fifth season of eligibility this season by the NCAA and has scored 31 points and grabbed 27 rebounds in six career games against the Mountaineers.

“They’re talented,” Huggins said of Iowa State. “They’ve got some transfers that had some success in other programs. They can score the ball.”

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