West Virginia head men’s basketball coach Darian DeVries demonstrates a drill during practice. (Photo courtesy of WVU Athletics)

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Pass the Rolaids, please.

After spending a day ingesting West Virginia men’s basketball schedule one is left with a bad case of indigestion.

You might even wonder if they have bitten off more than they can chew, although coach Darian DeVries is quite sure they haven’t.

He understands that he has moved up from Drake to the big show.

One might relate the challenge he and his new Mountaineers team face as an 18-year-old pitching prospect just out of high school debuting in the major leagues and finding Shohei Otani standing there as the first batter he faces.

That’s life in the Big 12.

It’s one thing to be bombarded from all sides with endless propaganda about just how good the Big 12 is. It’s quite another to have to go out and face them game after game, night after night.

The 2024-25 Big 12 schedule came out on Thursday and when you look into it, you realize just how difficult the task is that DeVries has inherited from Josh Eilert.

Recently ESPN put out its annual Way Too Early Top 25 and, even with the admission that it certainly is way too early, look at this way.

The Big 12 possesses five of the top nine teams and during the course of the non-conference schedule also plays a sixth Top 9 team.

Here’s the top 10 teams on the list. The Big 12 teams carry an asterisk”

1. Kansas*

2. Alabama

3. UConn

4. Houston*

5. Gonzaga

6. Baylor*

7. Iowa State*

8. Duke

9. Arizona*

10. North Carolina

The non-conference opponent WVU has scheduled is Gonzaga at No. 5.

That’s three of the Top 5, four of the Top 6.

In addition, WVU can play Indiana, Louisville and Arizona in the Paradise Island Challenge in the preseason and there’s a matter of Pitt and UMass also on the schedule.

DeVries takes the challenge calmly, but honestly.

“We all know preseason rankings don’t mean a lot, especially now in the portal era but it also says a lot about some of those teams and what they have returning,” he said. “Our guys are excited about that. They are excited about the challenges and opportunities that are in front of us, but they also know every single night you are going to be playing one of the best teams in the country.

“Our goal is to come out and compete every night and try to win that game,” he said. “That will continue to be our goal moving forward. The wins and losses, those will play out as we get into the season.”

The way the Big 12 is set up in the regular season has WVU playing twice against Houston and Cincinnati, which is No. 19 in the Way Too Early rankings while also playing Kansas, Arizona, Iowa State and Baylor. That’s all five of the Big 12 teams in the Top 9, plus Gonzaga and Cincinnati.

As a “welcome to our league” gift, the conference has set up DeVries’ first conference game to be at Kansas in Allen Fieldhouse.

The date? New Year’s Eve.

If they can pull that one out it will be a very Happy New Year, indeed, especially if they get through the non-conference part of the schedule.

“Yeah, we made sure we challenged ourselves right away in our first year here,” DeVries said. “It’s a good schedule. It’s a good non-conference schedule and we know what the league is. We understand that. We understand to be successful we are going to have to be really good in certain areas.

“We got a lot to do and we feel we made a lot of progress from June to now.”