MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – While a good deal of the country will spend Super Tuesday paying attention to what's going on in the Democratic presidential primaries, in West Virginia, all eyes will be glued to their television sets to see what's happening in Iowa - specifically, Ames, Iowa.
 
That's where West Virginia will be playing Iowa State in a Big 12 game that has far more meaning to the Mountaineers than it does the Cyclones.
 
Iowa State (12-17, 5-11) is pretty much locked into a bottom-four finish in the Big 12 Conference standings, which means the Cyclones will be playing in one of the two Wednesday night games in the opening round of the conference tournament beginning on March 11.
 
And West Virginia could be right there with them that Wednesday night if it doesn't figure out how to take the lid off the basket.
 
The Mountaineers' recent offensive struggles really started against these Cyclones late in the second half of a 76-61 victory in Morgantown back on Feb. 5.
 
WVU had a 24-point lead with 4:16 to go and watched the Cyclones score 12 of the game's final 15 points.
 
Veteran West Virginia coach Bob Huggins was disturbed with the way his team finished that game, and his postgame comments foreshadowed what was to come for his team for the remainder of the month.
 
"We didn't play," he said then. "We had 19 turnovers again, so we're heading in the wrong direction there. We were 12-for-24 from the foul line and that's the wrong direction. Those are two telltale signs of guys who are just not ready to play."
 
In the seven ensuing games, six of those defeats, field goal shooting, 3-point field goal shooting, free throw shooting and turnovers have been the biggest problem areas.
 
West Virginia (19-10, 7-9) is shooting 36.5 percent overall as a team, and just 22.7 percent from 3-point range. WVU has missed 50 free throws in its last seven games and is also turning the ball over 14 times a game, although it only had 10 miscues in its most recent loss against Oklahoma this past Saturday.
 
According to Huggins, poor shooting affects everything, including the team's confidence. 
 
This was an extremely confident basketball team back in mid-January when it was sitting at 16-3, ranked 12^th in the country and regarded as a possible two-seed in the NCAA Tournament.
 
Now, a month later, these guys are in desperate need of something good to happen to it - anything.
 
"Confidence is just the way you feel about yourself, I guess," Huggins said this morning. "We are wishing shots to go in rather than knowing shots are going to go in. When you're playing with a lot of confidence you let it go with the idea that you know it's going to go in."
 
Huggins believes the considerable reshuffling that has taken place in the Big 12 standings the last couple of weeks really boils down to one thing – shot making.
 
Teams moving up are making shots and the teams moving down aren't.
 
"You look around this league and Texas struggled to make shots and now they are making shots. Oklahoma struggled making shots and now Oklahoma is making shots," he explained. "This is a league where seemingly when you get hot everybody makes shots. We just need a couple of guys to get hot, and I think we'll be fine."
 
Despite its late-season woes, West Virginia has built up a lot of collateral. WVU is still considered a seven-seed in Joe Lunardi's latest NCAA Tournament bracket revealed this morning, and it still has a  strong NET ranking of 21.
 
"We need to win some games, obviously, and we need to win some games probably more for our psyche than anything," Huggins said. "But you can't just isolate a certain section of what's going on at this time of the year. As (the selection committee) is fond of saying, 'It's your full body of work.' I was on the committee when we went from what we were doing to the system that is in place now, and the words I kept hearing coming out constantly were 'your full body of work.'"
 
Indeed, West Virginia's total body of work is extremely solid.
 
"If you look at our nonconference schedule, we have five teams, maybe, that are going to win their league. That does nothing but help you," Huggins said. "You have to look at the overall picture because that's what you are judged by. You can't just look at we've struggled here of late – we have, there is no doubt about that, and we've fallen from a potential two-seed to a seven, but seven is a long, long way from not being in the tournament."
 
Still, this is the time of year that you want to be jelling and peaking as a team, and West Virginia is clearly not.
 
"I don't think anybody in that locker room is feeling comfortable," Huggins said.
 
"Home or road it doesn't really matter, we just need a win," he concluded.
 
Tuesday night's game will tip off at 9 p.m. and will be televised nationally on ESPNU (Rich Hollenberg and Chris Spatola). The Mountaineer Sports Network from Learfield IMG radio coverage on affiliates throughout West Virginia and online via WVUsports.com and the popular mobile app WVU Gameday begins at 8.
Fans can also access the radio broadcast in Sirius channel 84 and XM channel 84 on satellite radio.
 
West Virginia wraps up the regular season in Morgantown on Saturday against fourth-ranked Baylor at 1 p.m. The Bears dropped two spots in the polls following Saturday's upset loss at TCU.