Life has not been easy without Statsheet.com, and I just wonder what we’d be up to if that site were still alive and we had a better idea about the officials calling these games. Fortunately, TeamRankings.com has steadied by shakes and given me my fix. I started tracking its track record with WVU at the start of the season, and it’s been really reliable. (Had WVU as a four-point favorite Saturday … and that worked out.) So here tonight, as we arrive at an interesting intersection of the season that I may have fabricated for the purpose of this exercise, I want to point out a few graphics, beginning with the one above.

WVU is past the midpoint of the schedule and isn’t at the halfway point of Big 12 play, but this is a curious game. The Mountaineers have better than a 50-50 win probability in 10 of the remaining 12 games, which is healthy, but only three are what you’d call easy games. One is tonight. The other two are at home, which ought to be easy, against TCU and Texas Tech.

But the four hardest remaining games are the next four games after this one against Kansas State, which, mind you, took WVU to two overtimes three weeks ago. So it’s certainly important to sweep this one into the dustpan. Anyhow, the site has the Mountaineers going 3-2 in the next give games, winning tonight and splitting those next four.

If that’s the outcome — and again, they’ve been about spot-on so far — then WVU’s projected to go 7-1 in the final eight games (a loss at Baylor to end the regular-season schedule) and finish either second or third in the Big 12 standings. That would help the Mountaineers a lot in the conference tournament, and let’s not forget they still haven’t won a Big 12 Tournament game.

But looks who’s the favorite to win the event!

Oklahoma is the (heavy) favorite to win the league, but WVU is a slight favorite to win the tournament title. The Big 12 tourney winner is, in all likelihood, going to get a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and that’s the projected path for the Mountaineers.

There’s something about this team that the computers and the algorithms truly admire — that’s probably a story by itself — and that something has WVU grouped among the handful of teams considered capable of cutting down the nets at the end of it all.

Feel free to pick away at that all you want, but you know you want it to be true.