By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — It comes around about as often as Haley’s Comet, what will transpire at noon on Saturday in the Coliseum.
West Virginia University, ranked No. 9 in the country, will host Syracuse, ranked No. 5, in a Big East game of cosmic proportions.
This matchup of Top 10 teams in Morgantown is so rare that occurs only every half century.
Honest.
Last time was — now sit down because you aren’t going to believe this — was on Jan. 16, 1960, exactly 50 years ago to the day when No. 9 Villanova came to Morgantown to face Jerry West’s No. 3-ranked Mountaineers.
The final score that day was West Virginia 89, Villanova 81.
How far back was that?
Well, there was no Coliseum then, only Stansbury Hall.
Heck, it was so long ago that Jim Boeheim, who it seems has coached at Syracuse since Jim Brown was a freshman there, was still three years away from enrolling at the school as a freshman.
As for Bob Huggins, the West Virginia coach who has been around so long that he possesses more than 600 victories, he was all of 7 years old at the time.
“I was very fortune to play against (Boeheim’s) teams,” Huggins reminded anyone who would listen on Thursday’s Big East Conference coaches call. “That says how old he is and how young I am.”
Half right, Hugs.
The truth is this is what West Virginia had in mind when it entered the Big East back in 1996. The school was looking for a higher profile, for a chance to play at the top level of college basketball.
It was also what West Virginia had in mind when it hired Huggins, who taken Cincinnati and rebuilt it into a team that could play at that level, in many ways much as he had done here. At Cincinnati, the shadow of Oscar Robertson laid over the basketball program, Robertson and West having been the greatest players of their era.
While WVU went to the 1959 NCAA title game, losing to California, Cincinnati won the national title the next year. What people forget is that Robertson was not a part of those teams, having graduated and moved on to the Olympics and NBA with West the previous year.
But this is exactly what the WVU administration had in mind when it jumped to the Big East and when it hired Huggins.
It certainly is what Huggins had in mind.
“We hoped we could get to where we were a Top 10 team,” Huggins said. “I felt like if we could get there it would set up a lot of matchups like this because this league is full of Top 10 teams.”
It should be an interesting showdown, a contrast in styles and in wills. WVU is an in-your-face man-to-man team, Syracuse a 2-3 zone team. Syracuse is big in the front court, West Virginia more athletic. Syracuse likes to play in the 80s, WVU is all right with that if it is the team that is in the 80s.
Huggins doesn’t like to give up more than 70 points in any game, and not that many if possible.
Rutgers has played both teams, giving coach Fred Hill a unique view at the showdown.
“Syracuse can pound inside,” Hill said. “They try to play inside out and that will create a problem for West Virginia.”
But West Virginia has some problems in store for Syracuse, too, according to Hill.
“West Virginia has so many weapons offensively, they will spread the floor. They can put playmakers at the 4 and 5 spots. A lot of teams can’t do that. Devin Ebanks can knock down that 15- to 17-foot jumper and put it on the floor. They have people who can get open looks.”
And so what you have is contrasting styles, each successful for a veteran coach, coming head to head.
West Virginia could be playing better than it has recently, showing up only for a half against Notre Dame in a game it lost and a half against South Florida in a game it won.
“We have not put it together on defense,” Huggins said.
And, when asked what’s wrong, he answered:
“How much time you got?”
The question would be better put to Huggins, who now has a little more than 24 hours to get it right before worlds collide at the Coliseum.
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
