Morgantown, West Virginia – The West Virginia Mountaineers, losers of five consecutive games, are in Waco, Texas to play the #8 ranked Baylor Bears tonight.
Baylor is 18-3 and 10-2 at home and the Mountaineers are 13-7 overall and 1-4 on the road this season. The two teams met on January 18th in Morgantown and the Bears won that game 77-68 without their best player, point guard James Akinjo, who averages 12.9 points and 5.7 assists per game.
Baylor, who is 14 point favorites to beat the Mountaineers tonight, are coming off an 87-78 loss at Alabama this weekend in the Big 12/SEC Challenge.
According to ESPN’s Basketball Power Index, West Virginia has almost no chance of pulling the upset and handing Baylor its second straight loss. ESPN’s BPI gives the Mountaineers only a 7% chance and Baylor a 93% chance of winning tonight.
ESPN’s Basketball Power Index (BPI) is “a measure of team strength developed by the ESPN Analytics team. BPI is meant to be the best predictor of a team’s performance for the rest of the season. BPI represents how many points above or below average a team is. BPI accounts for game-by-game efficiency, strength of schedule, pace, days of rest, game location and preseason expectations.”
Unfortunately for West Virginia, the BPI is incredibly accurate at predicting outcomes of college basketball games. The game starts at 9:00PM and will be shown live on ESPN.
