BATON ROUGE – The LSU men’s basketball team will play at West Virginia on Thursday, Dec. 4, in the Tigers first appearance in the two-year-old SEC/Big 12 Challenge.
A total of 10 games over four nights will be played in the event that will be televised on the ESPN Family of Networks.
LSU at West Virginia will be one of four games scheduled for Dec. 4 along with Arkansas at Iowa State, TCU at Ole Miss and Baylor at Vanderbilt.
LSU and West Virginia split a pair of games in 2004 and 2005 with each winning on the other’s home court. West Virginia was an 84-69 winner on Nov. 27, 2004, in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, while LSU in its Final Four season of 2005-06 was a 71-68 winner on Nov. 26, 2005, in Morgantown.
West Virginia was 17-16 a year ago (9-9 in the Big 12), losing at Georgetown in the first round of the NIT. The Mountaineers are coached by Bob Huggins, who will be in his eighth season as the head coach at West Virginia.
LSU was 20-14 in the 2013-14 season, tying for sixth in the SEC with a 9-9 record under second-year head coach Johnny Jones. Jones was just the second head coach in LSU history to take a team to post-season play in his first two seasons as head coach at LSU as the Tigers advanced to the second round of the NIT. LSU won at San Francisco before losing at eventual tournament runnerup SMU.
The other games in the ESPN-sponsored event have Auburn traveling to Texas Tech on Dec. 3; Florida at Kansas, Texas at Kentucky and Missouri at Oklahoma on Dec. 5; and, Oklahoma State at South Carolina and Kansas State at Tennessee.
Mississippi State, Georgia, Alabama and Texas A&M are not participating from the SEC in this year’s event. SEC teams with home games are Kentucky, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vanderbilt while Arkansas, Auburn, Florida, LSU and Missouri will play on the road.