MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The gauntlet begins on Saturday afternoon for the 17^th-ranked West Virginia University men's basketball team.
 
The Mountaineers' next six games, beginning with 23^rd-ranked Kansas, will be against Top 25 opponents. After the Jayhawks comes 13^th-ranked Texas Tech in Lubbock, ninth-ranked Oklahoma in Morgantown and back-to-back games against No. 2 Baylor with the chaser at sixth-ranked Texas in Austin.
 
The Baylor-Texas trilogy in the Lone Star State will take place in a span of only five days!
 
Of course, this is the most brutal stretch of games in school history, but it's not unfamiliar to Bob Huggins, who once went through something similar when he coached at Cincinnati.
 
The Bearcats, in 1994, played six straight games against ranked teams that year versus 17^th-ranked UAB, 22^nd-ranked Marquette in back-to-back meetings, against 18^th-ranked Saint Louis, against 19^th-ranked California outside of league play and then Saint Louis once more.
 
Huggins admitted Friday morning he remembers little about them.
 
"I guess if I looked at who it was I'd remember some bits and pieces of whether we won or lost, but I don't remember much else," he said. "I know Cal was in there and they had Jason Kidd and he was really good – a guy we couldn't handle."
 
Playing six straight games against ranked teams is pretty rare these days. According to sports information director Bryan Messerly's research, it's only happened nine times in men's college basketball since 1996.
 
It occurred just once in the Big 12 in 2015 when TCU did it.
 
At West Virginia, there have been far more instances when the Mountaineers didn't play six ranked teams in an entire season.
 
Fifty-one times since 1949, when the Associated Press first began ranking teams, West Virginia has played fewer than six ranked teams in a year. The first time it happened was in 1965 when WVU upset its way through the Southern Conference tournament to meet fourth-ranked Providence in the NCAA Tournament.
 
The Friars whacked West Virginia by 24, and the Mountaineers finished the season with a losing 14-15 record. A couple of weeks later, George King packed his bags and left for Purdue.
 
In 1949, 1951, 1968, 1977 and 1981, West Virginia played its entire basketball schedule without facing a single nationally ranked team.
 
Two of Gale Catlett's better teams in 1982 and 1983 only met three nationally ranked teams – once in 1982 when it lost to 11^th-ranked Fresno State in the second round of the NCAA Tournament and twice in 1983 when it split regular-season games against 17^th-ranked N.C. State and top-ranked UNLV.
 
Things changed in 1996 when West Virginia got into the Big East and began playing much more difficult schedules. WVU's first season in the Big East in 1996 saw the Mountaineers face nine nationally ranked teams. 
 
Since then, the number has never fallen below six.
 
When Huggins took over in 2008, he made it a point to add quality teams to the nonconference schedule, adding to the total of ranked opponents.
 
Since his arrival, his Mountaineer teams have averaged 10 nationally ranked opponents per season, with a high of 14 in 2015. This year's team will have faced 11 ranked teams before tournament play begins in March.
 
Huggins has done this for nearly his entire coaching career, particularly since his days at Cincinnati.
 
This begs the question, why?
 
Why play so many good opponents and run the risk of losing games?
 
"I think it makes you better," Huggins explained. "My goal has always been to win a national championship and we haven't achieved that yet, but I think it makes you understand how much better you've got to get to be able to compete on that level.
 
"Why would we run from anybody?" he added. "I said when I got here, 'I want the people of West Virginia to be proud and come to the Coliseum and root like hell for their team.' We don't have any NBA teams here. We don't have professional teams at all. We are it. Why would they want to come in and watch us play Sisters of the Poor and win by 55?
 
"That's not hardly worth the price of a ticket. I think it's the right thing to do for a lot of reasons," he said.
 
When Sonny Moran took over from Bucky Waters in 1969, West Virginia had just exited the Southern Conference and was scheduling more intersectional games.
 
Waters went from winning 19 games in 1968 playing no ranked teams to a 12-14 record in 1969 when WVU faced five ranked teams, including a trip to UCLA to play the No. 1-ranked Bruins.
 
Moran won 11 games during his first year in 1970 facing a schedule that included No. 2 Kentucky, No. 8 Davidson twice and No. 11 Notre Dame twice.
 
"George King and I were teammates in college, and certainly nothing against Fred Schaus because they enjoyed tremendous success and they deserved all of the credit they got, but playing that schedule in the Southern Conference was not that difficult," the late Moran once explained. "You figure you are going to have a winning year from those games alone, then a couple of games against Pitt, Penn State or Syracuse … you win your fair share of those and you can have a great year. 
 
"We just didn't have that to go with," Moran added.
 
But what Moran encountered in the early 1970s pales in comparison to the schedules Huggins' teams are playing today in the Big 12.
 
Yet despite playing the most difficult schedules in school history - quite often against teams more talented than his - Huggins has still managed to win better than 65% of his games at WVU and take nine of his teams to the NCAA Tournament.
 
"I've been fortunate to have really good assistants, and for the most part, we've been competitive because we try to figure out ways to win," he explained. "And hopefully, because we do things right."
 
His teams have held their own against Kansas in Morgantown but remain unsuccessful at Allen Fieldhouse, losing all nine times they have played there, including Dec. 14-point defeat.
 
Friday, Huggins resorted to some humor to try and explain his team's struggles at Allen Fieldhouse.
 
"It's like that fat guy going to the swimming pool and taking his shirt off and all of the mosquitoes yelling, 'buffet, buffet, buffet!' and them attacking him," he said. "That's kind of how I feel when we walk in and it says 'West Virginia' across our chest. Everybody in the eastern part of Kansas yells, 'buffet, buffet, buffet' and kind of comes after us. That's the way it seems.
 
"We haven't finished what we've started there … unlike mosquitoes who get full and leave," he said.
 
West Virginia's plate is certainly full, its first course beginning on Saturday with Kansas.
 
The game will tip at 2 p.m. and will be televised nationally on CBS. A reduced crowd of 1,500 will be permitted to attend. Mountaineer Sports Network from Learfield IMG radio coverage on affiliates throughout West Virginia will begin at 1 p.m.
 
Kansas is now 12-6, 6-4, following Tuesday night's 74-51 win against Kansas State.