MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The most appropriate surname in college basketball this year has to be Mark Vital's because in Bob Huggins' eyes, Vital has been exactly that to Baylor's emergence as the No. 1 team in the country so far in 2020.
 
Why? 
 
What makes Vital so vital to the Bears? From strictly a statistical perspective it's not readily apparent. 
 
Your eyes immediately jump over Vital's line on Baylor's stat sheet and go directly to Jared Butler's 15 points-per-game scoring average and his 69 assists, or MaCio Teague's 14.4 points, or Freddie Gillespie's 8.9 rebound average and his 52 blocked shots.
 
Unlike Butler, Teague, Gillespie and Davion Mitchell, Vital hasn't even started all 23 games this year, but what he does for Baylor is virtually irreplaceable in Huggins' eyes.
 
"He's the key to their team," the veteran coach said Friday morning. "He's so unselfish. I think his unselfishness spreads throughout the rest of the team. I don't know this for a fact, but I'd guess when he talks they listen to him."
 
And Vital's vitals?
 
The 6-5, 229-pound junior forward is sixth on the team in scoring, averaging 6.2 points per game. He's second to Gillespie in rebounding, pulling down 6.3 boards per contest, and he's shooting an acceptable 45 percent from the floor despite making just 11.8 percent of his 17 threes.
 
None of that really blows you away.
 
But then you see the 41 steals, the 43 assists and the 17 blocked shots and you start to get a better understanding what Huggins is talking about. 
 
With Vital, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – sort of the way Nate Adrian once was to West Virginia a few years ago.
 
I recall TCU's Jamie Dixon once discussing Adrian's value to West Virginia's team in a similar fashion. He talked about how Adrian was the key to West Virginia's press and what an effective playmaker he was offensively and what a disrupter he was defensively.
 
Absorbing this takes more of an understanding of basketball than just simply looking at the stat sheet.
 
Scoring and rebounding are certainly important, for sure, but sometimes those things happen as a result of what others around them are doing.
 
That's what Huggins sees in Vital when he studies Baylor tape.
 
"He gets the hard rebounds. He sets the screens. He penetrates and pitches, and he gets every single loose ball; that doesn't happen very often," Huggins said.
 
Before the season began, former Mississippi State transfer Mario Kegler was the guy everyone had pegged as Baylor's top player, but he got suspended before the start of the season and has since left school to pursue a professional career.
 
Preseason All-Big 12 pick Tristian Clark was supposed to be Baylor's other go-to guy, but he is still recovering from last year's knee injury and is averaging 10 fewer points and four fewer rebounds per game than he did before he got hurt.
 
Yet Baylor hasn't batted an eye, and coupled with the surprising emergence of transfers Teague (UNC Asheville) and Mitchell (Auburn), all eyes are now on Waco, Texas, as we near March.
 
"From the outside looking in, sometimes less is more," Huggins explained. "It's happened to all of us at some point in our careers when you lose a couple of guys and you think 'oh my goodness' and then you have other guys step up.
 
"You see it happen when teams lose star players and the whole becomes better," Huggins added.
 
There is no whole in college basketball playing better than Baylor's whole right now.
 
The Bears have blown teams out and they have also won tough, hard-fought games, especially lately. Baylor's last three wins - at Kansas State, at home against Oklahoma State and at Texas - have been by single-digit margins.
 
Nearly half of Baylor's 22 victories so far this year (10) have been by nine points or less – but it continues to win games since suffering a three-point setback to Washington out in Anchorage, Alaska, back on Nov. 8 – a span of more than three months!
 
The Bears are 11-0 at the Ferrell Center this year, defeating teams by an average of 15.6 points per game. In Big 12 play, Baylor's average margin of victory at home has been 11.
 
Oklahoma State, tied with Kansas State at the bottom of the Big 12 standings, lost by only eight in Waco last Saturday.
 
With the game of the year in college basketball against No. 3 Kansas just one week away, perhaps 14^th-ranked West Virginia (18-6, 6-5) can sneak into the Ferrell Center and spring a Saturday surprise?
 
The Mountaineers, losers of two straight, have won there before and have generally played pretty well in Waco. Last year, West Virginia had a seven-point lead in the second half and trailed by only a point with two minutes to go when the Mountaineers were assessed an unusual technical foul for having six players return to the floor following a timeout.
 
Once that happened, Baylor pulled away for an 82-75 victory. Two years ago, West Virginia was able to put the Bears back in their cage, defeating them 71-60.
 
Maybe Vital will have a rare off-game or cold-shooting West Virginia will finally get some shots to drop?
 
Perhaps the pressure of having a long winning streak and a No. 1 ranking will finally reveal itself on Saturday afternoon?
 
The last time West Virginia played Baylor when it was No. 1 in the country three years ago the unexpected happened – the Mountaineers won easily by 21 points in Morgantown.
 
Huggins would gladly see his team score one more point than Baylor scores on Saturday. That would stop a two-game conference losing streak in its tracks and put the Mountaineers in a much better place as we inch closer toward March.
 
Tip time is 4 p.m. and the game can be viewed via Big 12 Now on ESPN+ streaming service. Mountaineer Sports Network from Learfield IMG College radio coverage begins at 3 p.m. on affiliates throughout the Mountain State and online via WVUsports.com and the mobile app WVU Gameday.
 
Baylor has won the last two against West Virginia and boasts an 10-7 overall record in series play.