They being the 14th-ranked Mountaineers of West Virginia University, and they are not to be confused with me, who is still in Texas.

Anyhow, WVU is 14-1 with the loss coming at home against LSU, which is probably WVU’s best opponent to date. Yet WVU is also 2-0 in conference play, which is the very same situation the Mountaineers were in last season.

You have the right to remain suspicious.

“I would say this is a new year and a lot of things happened last year that we’ve turned around this year,” point guard Juwan Staten said. “We’ve been winning a lot more games and we’re more and more comfortable every game, but I still think we’ve yet to play our best.”

If the Mountaineers are peaking, there are explanations. They’ve been out of school and dedicated to workouts, practice, scouting reports and the like without academic obligations for a long time. That’s helped many of the seven first-year players settle in and start to surge, though at different rates.

WVU has also traveled a lot. In this winning streak, only two of the seven games were at home. The Mountaineers traveled to Charleston, Highland Heights, Ky., New York, Dallas and Lubbock, Texas, and rather enjoyed the time they spent together.

“We’re goofy,” Staten said. “It’s jokes all day, laughing all day. Sometimes coach gets a little mad at us when we don’t know when to cut it off. But we enjoy each other’s company. There’s never a dull moment. We always have fun talking about each other and picking on each other and hanging out together.”

These next three games are quite interesting. WVU and Iowa State do not like one another. The Cyclones and Oklahoma are both terribly effective and efficient on offense — Iowa State has had some struggles of late — and both have guards to really challenge WVU’s press. Then comes Texas, which dominated WVU last season. The Longhorns are still big. The Mountaineers are bigger than they were, but are still susceptibly smaller…which has worked fine so far.

That’s a heady stretch and only takes WVU through less than a third of the crazy conference schedule.

The Big 12 is a 10-team league, so 90 percent of the league has received top 25 votes this season and 70 percent are projected as NCAA tournament teams.

“Top to bottom there’s not a better conference in college basketball,” Iowa State coach Fred Hoiberg said.

The league’s setup, an 18-game round-robin conference schedule, makes the final three months grueling for the Big 12. In leagues like the ACC and Big Ten, there is an unbalanced schedule. In the Big 12, coaches know they’ll get each team at home and on the road.

But unlike a league like the ACC, where five teams are ranked No. 136 or lower in the RPI, there are no easy outs.

“We don’t have one win like that in our league,” Kansas coach Bill Self said. “Even teams that win at home are relieved. It’s very competitive and it’s very good and I don’t see it going anywhere.”