MORGANTOWN - The silly thing right now would be to count West Virginia out and say it cannot win its first regular-season conference championship since the 1988-89 season.
This is, after all, the team that won three road games in six days and survived double overtime along the way. These Mountaineers beat a No. 1-ranked team for the first time in 33 seasons and spent a few weeks inside the top 10 after standing on the outside for more than five years. They beat Iowa State at Hilton Coliseum for the first time and snapped an ugly three-game losing streak against Baylor.
"We've always got tricks," WVU guard Tarik Phillip said. "Tricks for days."
But the honest thing is to say the championship that's eluded No. 10 WVU since its Atlantic 10 days might be out of reach after Tuesday's loss to No. 24 Texas knocked the Mountaineers out of first place in the Big 12 for the first time since Jan. 23.
No. 2 Kansas, which has won or shared the last 11 titles, is in first, a game ahead of WVU. No. 3 Oklahoma was 1 ½ games back before Wednesday's game at Texas Tech and plays Saturday at the Coliseum in Morgantown.
The Mountaineers (20-6, 9-4 Big 12) are limping to the finish with starting guard Daxter Miles out Tuesday with a strained right hamstring and reserve guard and leading scorer Jaysean Paige nursing the right ankle he sprained against the Longhorns.
They won without Esa Ahmad and won back-to-back games against top-15 teams for the first time since 1957 without fellow forward Jon Holton. They cannot go without two guards.
"We're not as deep on the perimeter as we are on the front line," West Virginia coach Bob Huggins said after the loss before reminding the audience that losing freshman point guard Beetle Bolden to a torn ACL in the summer hurts more than most realize.
Miles stayed on campus while the team traveled so he could get as much treatment as possible, and Huggins is hopeful Miles can practice and then play against Oklahoma Saturday. Paige told Huggins after Tuesday's game he'll play, and Paige did return in the second half, but he didn't last long.
But Kansas has to lose one more game than WVU does the rest of the way, and the Mountaineers have to beat the Sooners if their title hopes are to remain realistic. If something goes wrong, then seeding for the conference tournament is vital.
WVU still hasn't won a Big 12 tournament game since joining the league in 2012. The Mountaineers could use the event to make up for momentum lost of late, with three wins in the last six games. Dicey games remain at home against Oklahoma, Iowa State and surging Texas Tech and on the road against Oklahoma State, where Kansas lost by 20 points, and Baylor.
Predicting final standings in the volatile Big 12 isn't time well-spent, but it's reasonable to project the Mountaineers against the Longhorns (17-9, 8-5) in their first game in the conference tournament.
It's not fair to the Mountaineers to say Texas is a bad draw, because they haven't lost to anyone outside the top 30 or so in the RPI and have five wins inside the top 50, but Texas went 2-0 against WVU in the regular season and had the least amount of trouble with the press, thanks to guards Isaiah Taylor and Javan Felix.
"Two of the best guards in the conference, two of the top 10 guards in the country," WVU forward Devin Williams offered Tuesday night.
Texas had just seven turnovers Tuesday, and though the results are skewed because Miles didn't play, Paige wasn't himself and the Mountaineers couldn't press much, Texas only had eight turnovers against full-strength WVU when it won in the Coliseum last month.
Those are the lowest two totals since WVU started pressing last season. Taylor and Felix had five turnovers in the two wins. Four came Tuesday. One came after Texas coach Shaka Smart called a timeout with 15:40 left in the first half. Zero came after halftime.
"They still trap the first pass, and what that means is they're leaving the inbounder open," said Smart, a Big 12 coach of the year candidate in his first season after six years at VCU. "We had Isaiah or Javan take it out, which means the ball was going to come back to them. If [the Mountaineers] trap, those are the guys we want the ball in the hands of.
"At VCU, we pressed, and the hardest thing we faced was when other teams used their two best ball-handlers to attack us. It was one of those things where we could still find a way to turn them over, but if that team had two really good ball-handlers, they got everyone else out of the play. That was hard."
This is their strength. The Longhorns average just 10.5 turnovers per game and have 16 games with 10 or fewer. Taylor is a perfect fit for the drive-and-dish style, and he's a proper foe for WVU and its press.
"He is so fast that even if you defend him with two guys," Smart said, "he can beat those two guys if he can get outside of the trap."
Taylor skated through and around tiring defenders on the way to 23 points, including 13 free throws in 13 attempts. Four of his five baskets were in the paint and five of his seven assists were inside-outside plays for 3-pointers.
"I don't want to sit here and say it was one individual," Williams said. "It's all of us as a team. We've got to guard as a team, we've got to help each other, we've got to figure it out as a team, and some guys have got to say, 'That's enough,' and take a little bit of pride and challenge themselves."