The early tip time didn’t stop the Mountaineer Maniacs from dispersing their propaganda for today’s game. They’re clearly ready for Dean Wade, aren’t they?

We’ll see if 13th-ranked West Virginia is ready for Kansas State. So far, the Mountaineers are 1-0 in games against teams that beat them in conference play. They can’t get back at Oklahoma State until maybe the Big 12 tournament, but they can get K-State today and Texas Tech a week from today the same way they got Oklahoma Wednesday. Imagine a world in which WVU doesn’t get swept in Big 12 play! Hasn’t happened yet.

Preparations for this one are dicey, though Bob Huggins likes having this one here as opposed to there.

“When I was when at Cincinnati, all those years we played all the teams twice, I always wanted to play good teams away first,” he said. “If you play them at home and beat them good, it was seemingly really difficult to beat them on the road. It was that way at Memphis and Louisville and the really good teams. I wanted to play them on the road first.”

Yeah, WVU plays at Kansas and Baylor still, but, hey, let’s call this a rare favor afforded by the schedule! The Mountaineers can apply that theory to the Wildcats, who haven’t played since Monday, flew here Thursday and practiced at the Coliseum yesterday morning. WVU is a little more weary, because this schedule is so screwy and complicated by bad weather and the travel trouble that comes with it.

The Mountaineers didn’t settle in until after 2 a.m. Wednesday, won that night and then got to their homes after 5 a.m. Thursday. Practice that afternoon was really light, and that’ll be the case again tomorrow before playing on the road against Kansas. This is not ideal.

“You try to talk to them, you try to show them film, you try to do everything you can think to do,” Huggins said. “You read them what other people are saying. If it had an effect, it maybe wasn’t enough.”

Huggins admitted that his team wouldn’t — and probably couldn’t — have done its normal thing during this stretch of games just for self-preservation, so it’s not a disaster. But consider the schedule and the travel as well as the injury to Dax Miles, the emerging freshmen and the tinkering with defensive approaches — “We were a little more conservative with the pressure. We were trying to make them catch it in front of us and kind of make them work a little harder and not give them the run-outs,” he said. — and you can see the problem.

It’d be nice to have all answers, but even absent those, you’d really like to have time to search for them. WVU’s practice time has been curtailed, and that’s a bummer for someone like Sagaba Konate, who can’t play as much as he maybe deserves because he’s behind on offense … and he can’t really catch up with mental reps. There’s a lot for Huggins to juggle, and he’d really like to have his team pushing the pedal toward the floor board here soon. Two losses to K-State won’t help the momentum.

“I just like to win, that’s all,” he said. “We’re at a point where we need to make a serious run here. Whatever it takes to win.”