Frank Lorenzo
(20) West Virginia Mountaineers at (19) Baylor Bears
Two Big 12 contenders will meet this afternoon as the No. 20 West Virginia Mountaineers (22-6, 10-5 Big 12) travel to Waco to face the No. 19 Baylor Bears (21-7, 9-6 Big 12) at the Ferrell Center (4:00 p.m. Eastern).
West Virginia has won its last three games (over Kansas, Oklahoma State, and Texas) to move within one game of the Big 12 lead. The Mountaineers still trail the Jayhawks in the standings and are part of a three-way tie for second with Iowa State and Oklahoma.
Their most recent outing saw the team pile up 17 assists and four players score in double-figures as WVU downed the Longhorns 71-64.
“We had a lot of patience,” said West Virginia coach Bob Huggins after the win. “Devin [Williams] played really well. He rebounded and scored in traffic. We got it to him in the middle of the floor, and he collapsed on them. He made a lot of good passes in the post.”
Baylor also comes into today’s game on a three-game win streak. Most recently, the Bears upset Iowa State, 79-70, as six-point road dogs, keeping its hopes of a Big 12 regular season title alive.
Taurean Prince led the way for Baylor, scoring 20 points off the bench.
“He hit shots. They had open shots and missed the shots and momentum swung,” Baylor coach Scott Drew said of Prince. “You’re not going to do that a lot on the road. We made a lot of shots. The other thing is we continued to compete.”
With the win, Baylor moved within two games of Kansas.
Today’s game will be the second meeting of the year between West Virginia and Baylor. On February 7, Baylor routed WVU 87-69 in Morgantown. Unfortunately for the Mountaineers, Baylor is 5-1 SU in the last six head-to-head.
(Photo credit: GoIowaState dotcom (Flickr: NM0A0186-X2) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Photo has been cropped.)
