Pitt, Villanova, Louisville will visit Coliseum
By DAVE POE, dpoe@newsandsentinel.comMORGANTOWN -West Virginia University's home basketball schedule for the 2009-10 season will feature three of the nation's top six teams from a year ago.
On Thursday, the Big East Conference announced the 18 league games each of its member teams will play this winter. Each conference team will play all the other 15 members and will play three teams twice.
WVU will play home-and-home with Villanova, which finished the year ranked No. 4, arch-rival Pittsburgh, which came in at No. 6, and Seton Hall.
The Mountaineers were selected to play league home games against Cincinnati, No. 5 Louisville, No. 12 Syracuse and No. 21 Marquette, as well Rutgers and Georgetown.
That means the Mountaineers will travel to No. 3 Connecticut, DePaul, Notre Dame, Providence, St. John's and South Florida.
The Big East is expected to be just as dominant this winter as it was a year ago.
This time around, however, one of the league powers is expected to be West Virginia, which is getting mentioned in virtually every preseason top 10 list thanks to the return of Devin Ebanks Da'Sean Butler and Truck Bryant, who will be joined by members of coach Bob Huggins' highly-successful recruiting class, including Casey Mitchell of Chipola Junior College in Florida, the National Junior College Basketball Player of the Year.
Mitchell selected West Virginia over Kansas, Florida, Oklahoma State and Tennessee. The 6-foot-4 Mitchell, a former standout as Savannah High School in Georgia, averaged 20 points per game as Chipola finished 34-2.
While Mitchell has the highest profile of WVU's recruits, he isn't the only one with impressive credentials.
There's also 6-foot-8 Dan Jennings of highly-regarded Oak Hill Academy in Virginia. He turned down offers from DePaul, Louisville, Memphis, Pittsburgh, Rutgers, Seton Hall, South Florida and St. John's.
Other newcomers are Dalton Pepper, a 6-foot-5 product of Fairless High School in Pennsylvania, a prolific shooting guard who turned down Miami and Villanova, and 6-foot-9 Deniz Kilici of Mountain State Academy in Beckley, who had offers from virtually every national power, including Kentucky, Connecticut, LSU, Oklahoma and UCLA.
West Virginia is listed as a No. 3 seed for the season-ending NCAA Tournament by ESPN analyst Joe Lunardi, best known for being the all-sports network's bracketology guru. Several other national sources have WVU in their preseason top 10 lists.
WVU hasn't announced its non-conference games for the upcoming season.
