SAN DIEGO - "Take Me Home, Country Roads" will be taking a 2,300-mile detour west when fifth-seeded West Virginia faces 13^th-seeded Marshall tomorrow in an NCAA Tournament second-round game at Viejas Arena in San Diego, California.
 
The winner will earn the right to face No. 1-seeded Villanova on Friday at TD Garden in Boston. The Wildcats advanced to the Sweet 16 with a 23-point victory over Alabama earlier today.
 
A West Virginia-Marshall matchup may not carry that much national appeal, based on the 9:40 p.m. EDT tip time assigned for Sunday night's game, but it will carry a great deal of significance in the Mountain State.
 
"You want to make it out to be Duke-North Carolina?" was West Virginia coach Bob Huggins' response to a question about the series earlier today. "It's not that. It's not that at all."
 
For those not that familiar with the history of West Virginia-Marshall basketball, after a couple of Great Depression-era meetings in 1929, 1930 and 1931, the series took a 47-year hiatus until the late Stu Aberdeen, seeking to give his Thundering Herd program a boost, called up new Mountaineer coach Gale Catlett in 1978 to see if he was interested in playing.
 
Catlett was - as long as the games were in Morgantown - so Aberdeen played there three times during the 1978 calendar year alone!
 
Eventually, Marshall got the Mountaineers to come to Huntington in 1981, and when the series became too combustible on the two campuses for the fans, a compromise was made to move it to Charleston in 1990, where it remained until the title sponsorship ran out in 2015.
 
In between, there were a number of memorable encounters between the state's only two Division I-playing basketball programs - one located in the northern portion of the state and the other in the south.
 
And while West Virginia (25-10) has been an NCAA Tournament staple under Huggins, the Mountaineers seeking their eighth Sweet 16 trip in their last 11 appearances dating back to 1998, Marshall is new to all of this.
 
The Thundering Herd (25-10) is making its first tournament trip in 31 years since it last won the Southern Conference tournament in 1987 under the late Rick Huckaby, whose unique personality was very similar to current Marshall coach Dan D'Antoni's.
 
Huckaby was known to wear tuxedos to West Virginia-Marshall games to help spice things up, while D'Antoni's gameday attire is a little less formal with his white t-shirt, khaki pants and blue-blazer ensemble.
 
In reality, that's not too different from Huggins, who exchanged the designer suits he once wore at Cincinnati years ago for the more comfortable navy West Virginia pullover he now sports during games.
 
Two old country guys taking their brand of basketball to the big city. Huggins, a name synonymous with Ohio basketball in the early 1970s and D'Antoni, a name well-known in Southern West Virginia basketball circles right around the same period of time.
 
But that's where their similarities end.
 
Huggins' "Press Virginia" style is based on 40 minutes of relentless defensive pressure, the cumulative effect of which has translated into a sparkling 104-38 record since its creation in 2015.
 
West Virginia's approach is to take away what the other team does well and force it to do things it is uncomfortable doing.
 
Marshall calls its system "Hillbilly Ball" - a motion, passing, ball-movement style geared toward getting its players open shots.
 
"Instead of a player creating a scoring opportunity, you move the ball quickly so that the ball creates the opportunity. That way, a player who isn't as athletic but is skilled can play against anybody. As long as the ball is free flowing, it'll get to the place where they guy is capable of making that shot," D'Antoni once explained.
 
"They do a terrific job with spacing," Huggins said. "I think Danny probably does as good of a job of spacing as anybody we have in coaching."
 
West Virginia basketball fans who remember John Beilein are well-familiar with the concept.
 
Marshall's improvement under D'Antoni has been incremental as he's recruited players more suited for the way he wants to play.
 
Based on how effectively the Herd is playing this year, particularly in the Conference USA tournament and here on Friday morning against third-seeded Wichita State, it looks like the guys he's got have turned it into a well-oiled machine.
 
Eight of them come from West Virginia, including Charleston's Jon Elmore and Martinsburg's C.J. Burks, the team's two leading scorers.
 
Elmore poured in 27 against the Shockers and is averaging a team-best 22.9 points per game. He scored a season-high 38 in the season-opener against Tennessee-Martin and later in the season against Charlotte, and also topped 30 against William & Mary (32) and Louisiana Tech (32).
 
He's reached double figures in all 35 games this season and rarely comes off the court, logging more than 40 minutes 17 times this season.
 
Burks also plays a lot and scores a lot with averages of 20.3 points in 36.5 minutes of court time per game. Burks shoots it a little better than Elmore, and both have the green light to shoot it whenever they're open and from anywhere on the floor.
 
In charge of getting them the basketball is a familiar name to Mountaineer basketball fans, 5-foot-11-inch freshman guard Jarrod West from nearby Clarksburg.
 
His father, Jarrod West Sr., led West Virginia to its first trip to the NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 in 35 years when his bank-shot 3 near the end of the game knocked off ninth-ranked Cincinnati in Boise, Idaho, 20 years ago in 1998.
 
Of course, the man coaching the Bearcats that afternoon was the guy sitting on the dais in San Diego earlier today.
 
That one was brought up, too.
 
"You won't let things die, will you?" Huggins joked with the reporter who asked it. "They show it before every game, which I can't believe they would do. Every game they show Jarrod West banking in that shot and the Mountaineer running out on the floor and shooting the gun and the cheerleaders, too, and it was supposed to have been a technical, but we passed on it.
 
"Ruben (Patterson) got a piece of it. If he wouldn't have gotten a piece of it, it probably wouldn't have banked in. It was a great win for West Virginia. I just happened to be on the other side at that time."
 
The younger West shows averages of 7.9 points and 3.0 assists per game.
 
It will be interesting to see how Huggins chooses to match up his perimeter regulars Jevon Carter, Daxter Miles Jr. and athletic, 6-foot-8-inch sophomore Wesley Harris against Elmore, Burks and West.
 
Sophomores James Bolden and Chase Harler and freshman Teddy Allen are his other perimeter guarding options.
 
Marshall's other key contributor didn't arrive to Huntington by way of automobile - 6-foot-9-inch, 220-pound junior forward Ajdin Penava from Sarajevo, Bosnia.
 
He is the nation's leading shot-blocker with 133 entering Sunday's action while also averaging 15.5 points and 8.5 rebounds per game, which makes for an interesting matchup against college basketball's other top shot blocker - West Virginia's Sagaba Konate from Bamako, Mali.
 
Konate has 112 rejections, including three against Murray State on Friday.
 
Penava played a significant role in Marshall's upset victory over Wichita State by scoring 16 points, grabbing eight rebounds and blocking a pair of shots before fouling out. He is really Marshall's only inside scoring presence on a team that used just seven players against the Shockers on Friday.
 
If the Herd has to go deeper than that on Sunday, it probably means "Press Virginia" has affected "Hillbilly Ball."
 
If not, then it's because D'Antoni's guys are making shots, getting the Mountaineers spread out and moving the basketball around.
 
Every television set from Weirton to Welch, Martinsburg to Matewan and all points in between, including Huntington and even some parts beyond, will be tuned into TBS for Sunday night's game.
 
"People rally around West Virginia," Huggins said. "It's not just the people of the state. It's also the people who unfortunately had to leave the state to get a job and do other things, so it will be people in Texas. It will be people in New Jersey, Georgia, a ton of people in Florida, and they're going to tune in and watch it."
 
For those of you going to work late on Monday morning, you're on your own for permission slips. 

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