We’re live and mostly alone at the Sprint Center. Kansas State, Oklahoma State, Iowa State, Baylor, West Virginia and Kansas have shootarounds and media obligations here today. The 11th-ranked Mountaineers speak at 3:25 p.m. EST and have their public workout at 4 p.m. Set your social media accordingly.

Of course, the Big 12 tournament begins tonight with two games: No. 8 seed TCU against No. 9 Oklahoma at 7 p.m. and No. 7 Texas Tech against No. 10 Texas at 9 p.m. Each is on ESPNU. WVU, which arrived in the city yesterday afternoon, plays the 7 p.m. tomorrow, also on ESPNU. History suggests it will not be a close game and that the Mountaineers will win.

The Big 12 has had a 10-team field and made the No. 7 seed play the No. 10 and the No. 8 play the No. 9 since the 2012 tournament. The winners on the first day are 1-9 on the second day, and the nine losses have come by an average of 14 points. Six were decided by more than 15 points and three were decided by seven or less.

But history also defies that and suggests we should not treat WVU as a given. There were 90 conference games in the regular season, and 63 were decided by 10 points or less, including 45 of the final 63. The Mountaineers were actively involved. They played four of the Big 12’s seven overtime games — and went 1-3 — and 10 of the games decided by 10 or fewer points — and went 4-6, splitting two games with Texas Tech and winning one against Texas.

Plus, the Mountaineers don’t go away and won’t be blown out. The largest of the seven losses this season — six in Big 12 play, you’ll remember — was the last one, and it was by nine points on the road at Baylor, which was No. 1 in the poll for a while and No. 1 in the RPI for longer. The last time a WVU team went through the regular season without losing a game by 10 or more points was the 1960-61 season, when the Mountaineers lost by 12 in the second game of the Southern Conference tournament. WVU lost seven total games the two years before that, and each was by fewer than 10 points.

This is pretty special stuff, but it can be tough on your nerves. I’ve been keeping track of what’s gone wrong for the length of the conference season — What happened at Texas Tech, at home against Oklahoma, at Kansas, at home against Texas Tech, at TCU? — and brought it all together for a story today. You can expect a close game at some point with WVU, but not much else can be expected from the Mountaineers.

“We just go to sleep sometimes,” Huggins said. “You sit there and say, ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this.’ It’s hard to understand why they do some of the things they do, why they even think to try that.”