As you know, WVU is either the No. 2 or the No. 3 seed in next week’s Big 12 tournament. The 10th-ranked Mountaineers, who have never been better than a No. 5 in the event and haven’t won a conference tournament game since winning the 2010 Big East tournament, don’t have much to fret. A win secures the No. 2, and a loss with an Oklahoma win delivers the No. 3. The Sooners are the No. 2 if they win and WVU loses. The Mountaineers are No. 2 if they and Oklahoma both lose.

The No. 2 plays the winner of the 7-10 Texas Tech-TCU game. WVU’s two biggest margins of victory in Big 12 play are (at home) against TCU and Texas Tech, respectively.

The No. 3 is where things are murky, but I’ve got you covered — and you might like to know a 3-6 against Texas isn’t all too likely. In fact, WVU as the No. 3 is more likely to face Iowa State.

Remember, this assumes Oklahoma wins at TCU. I’d be astonished if that doesn’t happen, because I’m not certain the Horned Frogs are all there right now, but I also don’t need to consider a Sooners loss, because if that happens, WVU would be the No. 2.

So, if Oklahoma wins and …

• if Texas wins at Oklahoma State, the Longhorns are in the 4-5 game. If Texas loses and Baylor wins at home against the Mountaineers, it’s WVU and the Longhorns in the 3-6. That’s the only way those two play.
• if Kansas wins at home against Iowa State and Baylor and Texas win, it’s WVU-Iowa State in the 3-6.

Now, some will argue the Longhorns have WVU’s number, and I have to think Texas will make and/or has made that argument.

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.”

The argument to counter: WVU lost at Texas without Dax Miles and without much of Jaysean Paige and lost at home to Texas in the only no-show game of the season. Those are two outlier situations, and it’s not dangerous to presume neither happens again on a neutral court.

Another counter: The Mountaineers harassed a heretofore secure Texas Tech team Wednesday, which hasn’t happened to the Red Raiders often this season but happened as WVU nears postseason play and, who knows, maybe another date with Texas.

WVU forced 19. The Red Raiders hadn’t committed more than 17 in a game. They committed 19 combined the previous two games and ranked third in the Big 12 in all games and in league games in fewest turnovers per game.

Texas Tech was averaging just 11.6. WVU stole the ball 11 times.

“Obviously, we learned a valuable lesson about toughness and about being physical,” Smith said. “We had a lot of one-handed passes and bounce passes we don’t even teach, but all of a sudden they show up [Wednesday]. Those are slow passes that can be intercepted. We worked on pass fakes, but I guess it’s a different animal going up against a team so focused and ready to play.”

That was indeed WVU on senior night as it stalks a second-place finish in the Big 12 and the No. 2 seed in next week’s conference tournament. The Mountaineers can secure that with a win Saturday at No. 19 Baylor or if No. 6 Oklahoma loses at TCU or if WVU and Oklahoma both lose.

At the start, though, the WVU team that is No. 2 nationally with 18 forced turnovers per game and No. 2 with 10 steals per game was behind schedule.

“We didn’t do a very good job closing traps early,” coach Bob Huggins said. “It seemed like every basket they got was because we didn’t close traps.”

Texas Tech was able to get the ball out of the double teams, sometimes with the help of a ball-handler stepping through to find the open teammate, other times with a teammate screening and then cutting freely toward the basket.

The Mountaineers (23-7, 12-5 Big 12) didn’t need long to fix that, and players started to jump out higher and crowd the opponent tighter so there was no escape to find the open teammate.

“We had a chance early in the game, and I thought we were doing some good things, but we started turning the ball over, which is uncharacteristic of us, at least lately,” Smith said.

That’s all for me today. I’m off to central Texas, but I’ll see you tomorrow, live from Waco.