Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but Gonzaga is big. Like, this big. The Bulldogs go 7-foot-1 and 6-9 in the starting lineup. The reserves are a 7-footer, who’s expected to be the next, uh, big thing in Spokane, and a 6-10 Frenchman who does a little bit of everything. The guards? Not small.

West Virginia – and stop me if you’ve heard this – is not intimidated. Impressed? That’s relative. Certainly, the fact that the Bulldogs are so tall and so long and also here is to be respected, but the feeling is the Mountaineers are not stunned and therefore not scared. “Playing in the Big 12, I would say we’ve been through worse the last three years,” Elijah Macon said.

But WVU is also a team that maybe was supposed to have Devin Williams this season, and a 6-9, 260-pound body would be nice to have around the rim tonight. Williams is instead gone, lost to professional basketball, but the Mountaineers went wire to wire in the top 25 for the first time in seven years and quietly pieced together an acceptable Williams impression while finishing with more points than any team in school history.

WVU is big. Better? Well, the Mountaineers hit the same marks this season that they did in the prior regular season, and then they again went to the final game of the Big 12 tournament. Today, they’re two games deeper into the NCAA tournament than they were last year. That seems to answer a lot of questions.

A year ago, Williams, Macon and Brandon Watkins averaged 17.2 points and 12.5 rebounds per 40 minutes and shot 48 percent collectively. This year, Macon, Watkins and Sagaba Konate average 15.2 points and 10.4 rebounds per 40 minutes and shoot 56 percent collectively.

Without Williams, this team has scored more points than any other in school history, and without Jaysean Paige, last year’s leading scorer, this team is better from the perimeter and gets more reliable scoring from the backcourt. Having less produced more, and we’ll find out exactly how much more in a few hours.

Certainly Jevon Carter and Tarik Phillip embraced that challenge in the offseason. The same is no doubt true of Esa Ahmad and Nathan Adrian. That made the challenge that fell at the feet of Macon, Watkins and Konate a good bit easier.

“Those three guys all bring something different to the table,” Huggins said.

Macon is the starter, the top rebounder and the best scorer of the three. He’s nearing the four-star potential with the low-post moves, the bank shot and the increasingly consistent free-throw shooting. Watkins, who nabbed Macon’s starting spot for a while early in the season, knows the offense and can move and pass to keep the ball and his teammates in motion. Konate is the best defender — in a while — and can change or charge momentum with a blocked shot or a dunk.

“If you have Devin, you don’t get to see what Sags can do,” Huggins said. “I think Sags has a world of ability and a great future ahead of him. To be able to get him into not just some games, but some hard games that really meant something, that’s going to benefit him greatly.”