No. (Sorry!) But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth discussing or that we can’t figure out what has to happen in the next seven months to change that to a “Yes.”

Your thoughts to that end are welcome.

If you ever wonder what sportswriters do between games and practices in the postseason, I’ll have you know this: I sat with a peer one night last week, and we kicked around this very question: Is WVU the 2018 favorite? We agreed the Mountaineers are not, but we also agreed it was close. It wasn’t a ridiculous question to ask, and certainly things could happen to change our answer. So we then tilted it. What would make WVU the favorite? We ticked off a few things which all happened, but we couldn’t get past one: Bill Self at Kansas.

So then we — and in his defense, because this is sort of crazy, it was more me than him– came up with this scenario. Try and follow me, because it really does attempt to go somewhere:

First, suppose Lawrence is just the name of a guy in Kansas and not a town with a campus that houses one of the NCAA’s premier programs. Forget all the bad experiences your West Virginia teams experienced in that town, whether playing 5-on-5 or 5-on-8, and allow for a moment that you could root for the Jayhawks to win the 2017 NCAA tournament.

Then pretend Oklahoma State didn’t spend money last year on a search firm to find and hire a coach who would stay for one year, oddly enough because Oklahoma State may be the sort of place that commits money to coaching searches and not coaches. And also pretend Oklahoma State didn’t again spend money on a search firm to find and hire an assistant coach who was on campus the past 11 months.

Now, remember that Kansas coach Bill Self is an Oklahoma State graduate, and Oklahoma State has some well-off boosters and backers.

What if your cheering worked and Self won a second national title at Kansas after winning or sharing 13 straight Big 12 regular-season titles? What if all the stories that happened off the court at Kansas this year had pecked at Self? What if the Cowboys could cobble together $10 million a year and offer Self a new challenge at a place and within a league he knows so very well? Say Self is on the sidelines in Stillwater, Oklahoma next season.

So, what then?

Well, maybe, after all of that, West Virginia is the preseason favorite in the conference next season. Maybe. But understand, it would take all of the above to loosen the talons the Jayhawks have wrapped around the league. The Mountaineers ought to again be very good next season — say, preseason top 20 — but this is still Kansas’ league.

That sort of jolted me. Something seismic was going to have to happen for something reasonable — WVU being merely named the favorite … not crowned the winner — to occur. And it isn’t even a guarantee that if the seismic thing did happen the reasonable occurrence would follow. We know this, but this is what WVU got itself into in the Big 12.

But the fact remains this is still Kansas’ conference, and the Jayhawks are probably going to be favored to win the Big 12’s regular-season title for the 14th straight season, which would set the NCAA record. And I suspect the Mountaineers would be just fine with that. The people around the Jayhawks seem to think Deonte’ Graham and Svi Mykhailiuk return next season. If so, Kansas, can add two players to the recruiting class. Guess who’s after the top unsigned high school and junior college players? It’s a little easier to get them to join if they’re immediate title contenders. Whether one or both or neither picks the Jayhawks, Self’s still going to have a pretty good bunch next season.