MORGANTOWN - This hasn't been the best month for the Big 12 and its basketball coaches. This March and the three Marches before it.
Three gentlemen can change it this weekend as Bill Self, Lon Kruger and Steve Prohm lead Kansas, Oklahoma and Iowa State into Sweet Sixteen games. The Big 12, which for three years running has had seven of its 10 teams in the NCAA Tournament, hasn't won a Sweet Sixteen game since 2012.
That's a lot of dribbles. WVU didn't press back then. The Mountaineers weren't in the Big 12 back then. Juwan Staten wasn't even on the court back then, but Kevin Jones was. The Big 12 had two Elite Eight teams in 2012, and Kansas beat North Carolina while Baylor lost to Kentucky, and Kentucky later beat Kansas for the national championship.
From 2013-15, the Big 12 had 19 tournament teams. Five made the Sweet Sixteen, and each of them lost. This year, when the Big 12 was again rated as the best by the RPI, the league had seven teams in the field, and each was the better seed in its first-round game.
Texas Tech was a No. 8 and lost to Butler, a No. 9. Texas was a No. 6 and lost to Northern Iowa, a No. 11, on a halfcourt shot. Baylor was a No. 5 and the perfect fit because the Bears, armed with the talent to win three games, lost to Yale, a No. 12 from the Ivy League that hadn't been to the NCAA Tournament since 1962.
And then there was West Virginia, which had its worst NCAA Tournament moment and lost as a No. 3 seed to the No. 14, the Southland Conference champion Stephen F. Austin.
The teams that beat their Big 12 opposition all lost their second-round games, and Kansas, Oklahoma and Iowa State, the top three teams in the preseason poll, are left standing, The Jayhawks are favored against Maryland and the Sooners are favored against Texas A&M on Thursday night while the Cyclones are underdogs Friday against Virginia.
If Iowa State beats the Cavaliers - and Iowa State can score against a top defense that held WVU to its second-lowest point total in December - then the 10-team Big 12 will boast nine coaches who have led a team to the Elite Eight. The Pac-12 has two. The Big Ten and SEC have four. Combined, that's 10 among 41 schools.
If Prohm wins two games this weekend, he'll join Self, Kruger, Kansas State's Bruce Weber, Texas Tech's Tubby Smith, Texas' Shaka Smart and WVU's Bob Huggins in the Big 12's Final Four club. No other conference has more than the ACC's five, and the ACC leads the way with four coaches with a national title - Duke's Mike Krzyzewski, Louisville's Rick Pitino, North Carolina's Roy Williams and Syracuse's Jim Boeheim.
Maybe this is all connected for the Big 12. Kansas, Oklahoma and Iowa State, in its first season with Prohm, all dipped during the season. The Jayhawks won the regular-season title with a two-game gap between themselves and WVU, but they were also 5-3 in the conference at one point. The Sooners were ranked No. 1 for a while and finished third in the standings. Iowa State lost eight Big 12 games, its most since 2011.
They all found relief in the NCAA field. The others did not, but the Big 12 affects different teams in different ways.
It's possible Texas Tech received more credit than it deserved. The Red Raiders went 6-9 against the RPI top 100, and three of those wins were in the Big 12. Smith, the conference coach of the year, went 9-9 in the Big 12 and 4-8 against the teams above him in the standings before a terrible loss to TCU in the Big 12 tournament.
No one who watched Baylor in the final weeks of the season could be surprised a team that went 5-7 before NCAA play resorted to infighting against Yale. Texas was 5-5 before NCAA play and couldn't effectively blend center Cam Ridley back into the lineup upon his return from a three-month absence.
Texas and Baylor, by the way, ranked Nos. 3 and 5 nationally in strength of schedule, that despite non-conference schedules ranking Nos. 23 and 64. The Big 12 is that hard, and it's getting harder to navigate.
TCU was as close to an assumed W as there's been in the league with an 8-64 record in Big 12 play the past four seasons. It fired Trent Johnson and replaced him with Pitt's Jamie Dixon, who won 73 percent of his games and reached the Sweet Sixteen twice and the Elite Eight once with the Panthers.
Oklahoma State fired Travis Ford and replaced him with Stephen F. Austin's Brad Underwood, and the man who engineered last week's upset against WVU was 89-14 in three seasons with the Lumberjacks.
Seeing as Underwood is a Kansas State graduate, consider Weber, who played for the 2005 national title once, to be on the hot seat. He missed the past two NCAA tournaments, lost in the first round the two years before that and is 2-6 in the 11 years since he took Illinois to the title game.
And feel for him, too, because two of the Big 12's bottom three teams just traded up in coaches, and the best league in the country just got better.