Halfway through its first Big 12 road swing, Arizona has already experienced how different such trips are compared to those in the Pac-12. For starters, there’s a lot more sitting around and waiting.

When the Wildcats play No. 21 West Virginia on Tuesday night it will have been away from home for six days, having left Tucson on Thursday afternoon. They spent three nights in Cincinnati, including Saturday after upsetting the then-No. 16 Bearcats, before flying to Morgantown on Sunday afternoon and spending two nights there ahead of the tail end of their debut Big 12 road swing.

This is one of three 2-game trips for Arizona (8-5, 2-0 Big 12) in its new conference, by far the lengthiest, and one of only two that will keep it out on the road in between games. The Wildcats are also scheduled to stay away from home in between games at Texas Tech on Jan. 18 and Oklahoma State on Jan. 21, while they’ll bus back to Tucson following a Feb. 1 game at ASU before flying to Provo to face BYU on Feb. 4.

All of this is a stark contrast from life on the road in the Pac-12, where other than the games against ASU the road trips were always double dips but against teams fairly close to each other. The days of having “travel partners” are over, as ASU was home on Saturday and visits Kansas on Wednesday.

Same goes for the common two-in-three-days format of the Pac-12, as the only times in Big 12 play Arizona will have just a day between games will be a pair of Saturday/Monday scenarios where three of the four contests will be at McKale Center.

Asked last week about having the longest of the road trips first, UA coach Tommy Lloyd said “I’ll let you know after.” It’s looking like it will be the most difficult of those three road swings, too, as both teams will have been ranked when the Wildcats face them.

Lloyd picked up his 15^th win (in 24 tries) against a ranked opponent at Cincinnati, now comes another chance. Here’s what to watch for when the Wildcats face the Mountaineers on Tuesday, a 5 p.m. MT tip that will stream on ESPN+:

A fairly familiar foe

Arizona is one of four former Pac-12 schools that joined the Big 12 this year, but it won’t face ASU, Colorado or Utah until later this month. Yet it has already played West Virginia, the teams meeting in the 4^th place game at the Battle4Atlantis on Nov. 29 with the Mountaineers pulling out an 83-76 win in overtime.

That was the first of seven consecutive wins for West Virginia, which jumped into the AP Top 25 this week for the first time in more than two years. For Arizona, that loss dropped it to 3-4 to mark the first time it was below .500 since 2010.

Quite a bit has changed for both teams since then. Arizona has won five of six and actually got votes in the latest AP poll, and while the Mountaineers have continued to win they’ve had to do so without senior Tucker DeVries. The son of first-year coach Darian DeVries has been out with an “upper body injury” since early December.

Assuming DeVries doesn’t play Tuesday that means the UA won’t have to contend with a 6-foot-8 wing who was shooting 47.3 percent from 3-point range and torched the Wildcats for eight 3s on 12 attempts and had 26 points.

West Virginia still has senior guard Javon Small, who had 14 points and eight assists against Arizona and leads the Big 12 in scoring (19.5 points per game) and minutes (35.7). He was named Big 12 Player of the Year on Monday after averaging 18.5 points, 11 rebounds and 5 assists in wins over Kansas (in Lawrence) and Oklahoma State.

Yet another defensive juggernaut

In Lloyd’s first three seasons at Arizona his teams faced opponents that ranked in the Top 25 of KenPom.com’s adjusted deficiency metric 15 times, no more than six in a season, and only three in 2023-24. West Virginia will be the sixth Top 25 defensive team faced already in 2024-25, third in a row, as TCU is 25^th and Cincinnati 7^th in that metric.

The Mountaineers are 15^th in adjusted defense, sitting fourth in effective field goal percentage (42.1). From a raw numbers standpoint they’re 7^th in field goal defense (37.1 percent), 9^th in defending the 2 (42.7 percent) and 9^th against the 3 (27.4 percent).

The UA shot 45.3 percent against West Virginia last time, second-best of any opponent against the Mountaineers this season, and had a 104.4 offensive efficiency compared to the 93.9 West Virginia has allowed in 2024-25. And that was when the Wildcats were still figuring out their offensive identity.

During its 4-game win streak, Arizona is shooting 53.5 percent and its efficiencies against TCU (137.9) and Cincinnati (103.8) were the worst and second-worst, respectively, allowed by those teams this season.

A chance to make an early mark

Arizona is one of four 2-0 teams in the Big 12, along with Houston, Iowa State and West Virginia. The Cougars and Cyclones are heavily favored in their next games, both at home, and while KenPom.com projects a 72-71 Mountaineers win it’s the UA that’s favored by 2.5 according to FanDuel Sportsbook.

The Wildcats and Texas Tech, which plays at BYU on Tuesday night after winning at Utah on Saturday, both have a chance to start out 2-0 on the road in Big 12 play and do so with 2-game road sweeps. Those aren’t very common in this conference.

Last season there were 36 instances of back-to-back road games, with only three sweeps. Fourteen resulted in splits and 18 had the road team going 0-2. All told, in 2023-24 Big 12 games were won by the home team 66.7 percent of the time, third-highest of any Division I conference, and only Houston had a winning road record.

Compare that to the Pac-12, where in its final season six of 48 trips were swept by the road team with 23 splits and 19 winless journeys. Arizona swept the ultra-tough Rocky Mountain trip to Utah and Colorado and split the other three, going 6-4 on the road.

Rich Rodriguez is putting the finishing touches to his coaching staff at West Virginia and he was able to reel in one member of the Trickett family. According to Matt Zenitz of 247 Sports, the Mountaineers are expected to hire Travis Trickett. Details of the role have not been announced at this moment.

Trickett was a student assistant on Rodriguez’s staff at WVU from 2003-06 before becoming a grad assistant at Alabama. From 2008-10, he served as a grad assistant on the same staff as his father, Rick, at Florida State under Bobby Bowden and Jimbo Fisher. He landed his first full-time coaching gig as the tight ends coach at Samford which he parlayed into a promotion, earning the offensive coordinator title there. Trickett then spent time at Florida Atlantic (2016) and Georgia State (2017-18) as a quarterbacks coach/offensive coordinator before making his return to Morgantown.

In 2019, Trickett was hired as a part of Neal Brown’s initial staff, coaching the inside receivers and tight ends for three seasons. During his time in Morgantown, Trickett was one of the team’s top recruiters, specifically in Florida and Georgia. He left WVU to become the offensive coordinator at South Florida in 2022 and has spent the last two seasons as the offensive coordinator at Coastal Carolina.

MORE STORIES FROM WEST VIRGINIA ON SI

Rich Rodriguez Announces Jeff Casteel as Bandits Coach

Javon Small Collects Big 12 Player of the Week

Former West Virginia DB Ayden Garnes Transfers to Big 12 Foe

West Virginia Lands Tulane Kicker Transfer Ethan Head

A winter storm that barreled into West Virginia dropped snow and ice across the state, making travel treacherous and knocking out power to thousands of residents in southern counties.

“Mother nature pretty well threw the kitchen sink at us last night,” state Transportation Secretary Jimmy Wriston said.

Forecasters predicted another wave of one to three inches of accumulation in the hours ahead and extremely cold temperatures at midweek.

“There’s a low behind this system that’s going to ride right behind it — wrap around; we’re going to get colder air injection and all the rain or whatever wintry mix precipitation that we have leftover is going to pretty much turn into all snow from west to east,” said National Weather Service meteorologist James Zvolensky.

Then, Zvolensky told MetroNews, “We’re going to get really cold Wednesday night, Thursday night, even Friday night — down to single digits most of the areas.”

As of 9 a.m., Appalachian Power reported outages to43,000 West Virginia customers. The power company described complications from heavy accumulations of ice and snow coupled with low temperatures that can bring down utility poles, trees and limbs, resulting in a multi-day restoration event.

The power company also said extreme cold temperatures can cause line overload problems when trying to restore a large number of customers.

“In many cases, we must restore large outages in smaller groups, letting the electric load settle before restoring additional customers. Customers with outages can assist by turning off large electric users, such as heaters and water heaters until 15 or more minutes after power has been restored,” according to the power company.

Aside from emergency services, government activities were canceled everywhere. For example, legislative interim meetings that were supposed to start today were backed up until Tuesday. And Charleston Mayor Amy Goodwin’s State of the City address that had been set for tonight was instead put off until Thursday.

“We keep our eye to the sky,” Goodwin said on “The Dave Allen Show” on WCHS Radio. “We’ve got 17 salt trucks that have been working around the clock. When I say around the clock, I mean around the clock.”

Goodwin continued by saying, “We planned for this, but it’s Mother Nature and we live in Appalachia. So snow is always an issue, but it is the ice that snarls traffic and causes most of our accidents and the power outages that you see.

“We are getting ready for another system to come through.”

City of Charleston Public Works Director Brent Webster described “incredible challenges” because of the weather that has already hit.

“Last night was a pretty incredible snowstorm, and then of course it did exactly what was forecast: it turned over to ice around 10 or 11 p.m. and then it ran through early this morning and that has created some incredible challenges above and beyond just salting and plowing,” Webster told MetroNews.

“Now we have a lot of trees that went down. Many of them we’re clearing, but that’s taken away from our salting and plowing. Many others are in power lines, and of course AEP is a great partner, but of course we can’t work on downed, live lines.”

Webster continued, “It’s going to be a slow process. We’ve got more snow coming, I think one to three inches. It’s a bigger snowstorm than we’ve had for a while.”